pantherwagner

Indeed. It's somewhat funny that there will be a GWF episode uploaded next week before there's any AWA on the network.

It looks like they are creating one of those categories like the Christmas or ECW ones where they dump random stuff in there but never gets used again after a week or two.

This may actually warrant a thread but what the hell. I didn't know WTF was I supposed to be watching yet I was glued to it the entire time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54xb9V80LGA

They edited out a midget match and Muraco vs Santana even though they refer to the latter in the show description. However Tony Garea vs Jose Luis Rivera was left there in its entirety. That was an odd edit. There's some other show where one of the devices (Android, I think) mentions a Mil Mascaras vs Moondog King match that isn't there either. Not a big deal but it looks like they are recycling descriptions from 24/7 or something.

You guys gave me the perfect excuse to share again the video below. An oldie but still as good as it was on day one. Oh yeah NSFW I guess.

The match was taped but never shown on TV as they decided against debuting Magee at that point. It's possible that Dave got a copy of the raw unedited show straight from somebody in Titan. He's talked several times in shows over the years about the match clearly stating that he has actually watched it. If it was somebody else I'd say he probably got his brain mixed up but it's Dave who, to quote Konnan, "he's like Rainman" (and he means that as a compliment). If he says he's seen it then I'm pretty sure he has actually seen it.

Yeah. His skills deteriorated a lot after his comeback. Odd to think that out of the Cota/Fiera/Chicana trio the latter was the most decent human being (decent in relative terms compared to the other two I guess).

Jim Herd should have hired Yolanka.

FWIW a lot of footage has made it out there in the past decade, although not pristine in quality. There were several Montreal commercial tapes put out back in the day and a guy found a shitload of TV from the early 80's he released a few years back as well. The older content on that tape is Grand Prix TV footage that was rescued from an Ontario TV studio back in the late 90's. It floated around for some time and the quality was quite nice, depending on who you got it from. I would be curious to know if the footage they have, while seemingly the same, is closer to the actual source tapes. Anything remarkable from those commercial tapes and early 80s TV's?

I have continuously missed this post for weeks so let me say that this is a tremendous feature that has become a must-read for me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaQhq42CU00

In the mid 90s I got my hands on an original copy of a tape called Butchermania, one of the new non-WWF/WCW tapes that were released in Europe in PAL video format. It was mostly Bravo and Abdullah matches, with some Sheik Ali, Steve Strong and oddly enough, a midget match. Montreal, along with SWS/WAR and WWC became one of those territories I obsessively tried to gather tapes from (even in the early internet era that was quite a task in Europe). It would be nice to see an organised release of whatever is still floating around.

Rick Martel said that Bravo's uncle was part of the mob. Not sure how to read this but I have heard several people defending Bravo as "a good guy caught in the wrong world" who had to resort to smuggling because, after WWF let him go and there was no interest in him in WCW, he had to resort to that trade as there was no other way for him to keep up with his expensive lifestyle. Apparently he was not good with his money.

Speaking of bad-ass line-ups... http://youtu.be/b6wVTLgPaPs?t=20m55s

October 1st 1984 - San Antonio, Texas 1. Killer Brooks, Al Madril & Voodoo Mulumba beat Sheepherders & Mongolian Stomper 2. Tommy Rich beat Abdullah the Butcher by DQ 3. Brett Sawyer, Chicky Starr & El Canek beat Eric Embry, Dan Greer & The Medic Just wanted to say that the team in bold looks like something out of a WAR six man tournament from 1994.

Reading WON's update I saw a story about a new DVD on Montreal Wrestling: http://slam.canoe.ca/Slam/Wrestling/Reviews/2014/05/26/21696036.html Nothing that will shock hardened tape traders like most of the people here, except maybe the young Jean Ferre match (it used to be on youtube even though it seems to have vanished) but I was wondering... who owns this footage? Interesting that this is coming out a few months after WWE showed interest in acquiring Canadian libraries so it looks like a last cash-in before handing over whatever masters are left to WWE. I'd assume they'd love to have young Andre tapes and the rest of the 80s stuff has got a lot of familiar names. I thought this stuff was owned by the guy that used to run the PWS PPV's a decade or so ago. His name escapes me at the moment but he always claimed to have legal ownership of these libraries. Some of the Montreal stuff on those PPV's came from TV recordings from a regular poster on this forum so I always assumed that he just gave Gino Brito a hundred bucks and a couple cheeseburgers so he'd scribble in a paper that he owns the stuff. Or is this one of those DVD's in legal limbo like the Maclin Memphis DVD's?

This is spot on. This is a community of people that will watch grainy 70s Memphis films on youtube and 3rd generation copies of rare footage. We'll find a way to put it on TV as we are early technology adopters just to get our hands in more wrestling. This is also a place where some people don't have the network because there's no value for them unless they start releasing cool/rare content from their archives. We are in no way representative of the target customer for this service. I have a fair amount of friends who like wrestling but don't visit news sites regularly, never mind message boards, and most don't have the WWE Network because they don't have the equipment to put it on a real TV. Some know how to do it but they don't have a tablet, game console or a player and hooking up a computer via HDMI is a hassle they don't want to go through. Others didn't get it because all the DNS masking stuff was way over their head, they won't watch the events live, and they know they can stream them or get a download easily the next morning. And then there's the people who will never pay for anything however cheap it may be as long as it's there for free.

I have a similar set up (though my computer is not hooked up to a TV) and I use an ipad to stream from the Macbook to the Apple TV, and also use the ipad to stream from NJPW World's website to the TV sharing the screen. I have a friend who has got a Time Capsule with a hacked Apple TV and that's a wonderful set up, the problem is that it's costly and my Apple TV is one of the new ones that can't be hacked apparently (I have not done any research).

During the Fedor/Chuck (and Hughes/Randy) years of dominance there just about every Spanish neo-nazi message board and many got into the sport. Some became professionals. Now a lot of these men have "matured" and covered up their tattoos ... or more likely some have had a heads up about it when competing internationally.

A combination of people relying on their memories, secondary magazines not being as trustworthy and people failing to properly read between the lines. Box y Lucha, Lucha Libre or El Halcon never broke kayfabe (at least until the 90s) but they had their ways to tell you when a match was bad or when a worker's performance wasn't up to par. Some magazines ran their own angles or stories much like Apter mags. A lot of Mexican fans aren't as sophisticated in filtering out the bullshit as American or Japanese fans (mostly because the business has been more open for longer) and still may be taking some of those stories as fact. A random Blue Demon Jr. story: back in the late 90s/early 00's we used to exchange emails in a semi-regular basis and he'd always write from an account using his real name. I don't know if he didn't give a shit or it was a "Herb Meltzer" type issue.

To be fair to them if USA is giving them money it would be silly to reject it, and it's not like a season of Tough Enough is going to move the numbers up enough to justify that. As for Main Event - similar deal - I know they have tried to revamp it but it's a C show at best only catering to the hardest of the hardcores who still have energy to watch more WWE after watching Raw and Smackdown (and Superstars, if you want to). If anything this only shows you that they clearly have no idea of what they are doing with this network. As soon as they made it a Barrios/Wilson project instead of a Steph project or a Vince project it became an "orphan project". By the way I forgot Wilson's name (Geddes would pop up but I know that wasn't it) so I went here: http://corporate.wwe.com/company/executive-officers and Kevin Dunn doesn't have his photo up, probably because he's a "Bugs Bunny looking motherfucker".

Just a quick stop to thank you for doing this - as you mention several times, lucha history is poorly recorded, so many people are unaware of how difficult it is to put all the pieces together. You should check out the G*Spirits magazines from Japan as in the last few pages they have great lucha libre features with tons of really cool pictures and posters. The articles by Dr. Lucha (the original Japanese one, Shimizu) look great too and I imagine that you should be able to read them.

I don't know what's the cost of putting up that old footage and I imagine that the returns may be minimal, but they don't even promote their own old footage on their own shows so I don't expect them to promote "other people's" footage outside of their shows. It would be a cool touch if they welcome the UK to the network by uploading the UK Rampage/European Rampage Tour shows from the early 90s. Silver Vision was a saviour to many of us back in the 90s.

New Koyo is 30 bucks? Price has tripled in a decade! It's just a bit far from things out there in Minowa. I'd rather pay a bit more and stay at a cheap hotel or hostel in Ueno or Nippori where there's a lot more life. I have been to Japan about ten times and never been to a wrestling show so I'm not the best person to answer this but I know that people buy tickets for everything at convenience stores just as others have said. There's a great pro wrestling magazine shop in Jinbocho called Shosen Grande. It looks like a regular magazine shop like many others you see everywhere in Japan but it has got an underground floor full of mags, books, DVD's and trading cards for wrestling, fighting and Japanese idols (basically either very young girls or girls that are 21 but look like they are 14) so you get a weird mix of odd people there sometimes. Nothing groundbreaking but they keep past numbers and special numbers of things that you won't find anywhere else. The entire neighbourhood is worth visiting for an evening if you want to find old magazines. Anything from Rikidozan times magazines, Inoki/Baba heyday magazines, 80s All Japan Women programs, 90s golden era NJPW/AJPW/UWFi/WAR/FMW stuff... if you have a favourite show from the 90s you may be able to find the original program there. I have the Dreamslam program and it's gorgeous. I don't even go there anymore or I'll end up with an overweight bag and a very poor man. Some of the magazines with Mil Mascaras and El Solitario in the cover cost hundreds of dollars.

That's tremendous