pantherwagner

They have replaced most (if not all) of the "Jimmy Hart versions" of songs where Jimmy would rearrange the beats enough to where they were legally different to the original. I don't know if the law has changed or what. I'm assuming that WWE run a Shazam style software that automatically detects songs that need to be changed.

It is but you have to search in Japanese https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6VUQfT8q30

He was entertaining and he could have been a bigger star than he was but it's no different to Wrath in WCW. Giant athletic charismatic dude squashing jobbers is a formula that usually works. He did way too many silly WWE video game style mannerisms to start a chant and/or a Pavlovian reaction and the little walk before the finisher was really annoying. This is more an indictment of the style than him as a wrestler to be fair.

fakeplastictrees - So, I was reading your post and you said that Gorgeous George did a porn and I was thinking about the old dude four about three seconds. Then I read "Chastity" and all clicked. There's really no porn industry in Mexico, I believe that filming and distribution is outlawed. Speaking of that, a good friend of many of us, Vandal Drummond/Kurt Brown was also in a porn movie: "Sex Mex" filmed by Incredibly Strange Wrestling promoter Johnny Legend. Highlights include lesbians in Cien Caras masks and a chick blowing La Momia. I think that he re-released that movie years later with a different name. And for those wondering, Kurt's role was not a performing one. :)

If somebody dubs Jim Ross' commentary on some highlights of the film I will watch for sure.

I'm curious. Do you have a link? I was watching the Memphis squash before seeing your comment and I thought exactly the same. The clothesline on that squash is brutal. Speaking of brutal squash matches, there's the Moondogs USWA run...

Alberto was great in what I have seen of Lucha Underground and he looked like a legit major superstar in AAA. His promo work there and his aura were something else when he was in full Patron mode being interviewed outside of the wrestling shows. The reason why THE LATIN AUDIENCE (this magical WWE group where they put anybody who speaks Spanish) hasn't come to him is because he's been booked like a geek by a majority of white writers that don't understand how to book him.

Funny that a lot of people mention GLOW. That was the only promotion that I had on Spanish TV that I didn't care to watch. For a few months we had the LPWA and another ladies promotion called FLAIR (Fabulous Ladies in International Rings... yep) and I liked those.

Manny Fernandez and Ron Garvin are my favourites from mid 80s Crockett. If I was a jobber my favourite would probably be Ivan Koloff. He always seemed to give them a lot of ring time. And of course early 90s WCW Sid when he'd destroy jobbers with the same style of moves that I'd "invent" while playing with Hasbro toys and then wonder why nobody in wrestling is using them.

Lawler was the one for me. I had read a lot about him at the Napolitano mags and seen great bloody brawl pictures of him vs Funk, Gilbert... I knew he was this great legend, then I saw him on WWF TV and he looked like an absolute geek. I was into WORKRATE so Lawler was the antithesis of what I was looking for in wrestling. Plus the pedo stories didn't help... he still looks like a creep, so even seeing his face would make my stomach sick. It took me until the mid 00's and the Smarkschoice GWE poll to actually being able to appreciate Lawler's work. I reconsidered my stance due to Goodhelmet talking about him all the time as the best ever and Phil Schneider and Dean Rasmussen praising his punches. I also thought Garvin was the lamest man ever for a very long time. I'm currently going through a lot of 1986 NWA and he's my favourite guy to watch. He's still quite awkward, though.

From 1993 to 1999 I watched: weekly and religiously WWF WCW AAA CMLL UWFI (for the short period of time when it was on European TV) Herb Abrams UWF (we continuously got runs and re-runs of old episodes and I'd watch them all) buying tapes every 4-6 weeks: AJPW NJPW (and also weekly TV for a couple of years when they were on Eurosport) all big events but no TV: ECW (from 1996 on) I was not all that hot on the promotion but these were my most valuable tapes to set up trades in Europe most big events, but not all of them, and most TV: AJW FMW For a while I also watched a Florida indy called IWF from an Israeli TV channel I'd sometimes (but not always) get on satellite and I'd try to get my hands on tons of random Japanese or territory tapes while trading. I could easily say that there were points in time where I'd watch at least 4 hours of wrestling every day, and sometimes 8 or 10 hours on Saturday. A lot of these were tapes I'd rewatch time and time again, of course. Then I went to college and I HAD A GIRLFRIEND so that was that.

Konnan was a boxer in the army. My memory is terrible so I don't remember if Vampiro wanted to box or if he actually boxed. This would have been during one of his many retirements from lucha to become an actor/singler/something else before failing and returning to wrestling.

Here's a screen of one of them (well, not really, but I have been waiting FOREVER to have an excuse to post this photo)

Last week while reading about something unrelated on a tech website I learned what Mindgeek was. Read their wikipedia entry, it's quite the enterprise. These guys own almost everything including free and pay sites.

Yeah, same as Eduardo, I find this criticism amusing. He hit the nail on the head when he said that Mexican wrestling until fairly recently has been seen as an inferior style to Japanese wrestling or the classic NWA style. The criticisms are the usual suspects: it feels predictable, too choreographed, brawling is weak, there is no psychology... Who are exactly these lucha loving people who praise everything? OJ, the segunda caida team or Fredo Esparza shit on bad lucha all the time. There are tons of good lucha and tons of bad lucha. If anything bad lucha is more tedious to watch than almost any other bad wrestling because the matches tend to be longer.

Yeah it was either AWS or WPW.

The Rick Rude appearance needs to be a part of the Regis induction.

Hulk Hogan? Of course Chyna and X-Pac. Quite a few from Japan: Yoshiaki Fujiwara, of course Ryuma Go, a few of the FMW guys were extras in one of those fake Great Sasuke porn movies, Rumi Kazama from LLPW, made a couple, a few minor women wrestlers and I read on this board that Manami Toyota starred on an S&M film. I'd have laughed in your face if you had told me in 1995 that Toyota and Sunny have starred/are going to be in porn movies and I won't even look at screenshots or a sample out of curiosity. There's an 80s movie with Misty Blue Simms and I believe either Linda Dallas or Kat LeRoux.

Are you sure it wasn't Felino? I keep debating whether to buy a best of Caras comp just to get that Panther match. I haven't seen any of these matches in years but unless I my brain is making things up there was a Lizmark match. There was also a Felino match, though. I only have very vague memories of these.

I'd probably appreciate Atlantis more if I made a concerted effort to look at his work in trios over the years. He's been a tecnico glue guy in so many and that might be his best calling card, even if he's more famous for his run of recent apuestas matches. But I haven't really done that, so to me, he's a technically skilled worker with tremendous longevity who has rarely blown my hair back in singles matches. I don't blame Atlantis for my qualms with the recent mask matches; I just have trouble getting into them because of the lack of blood and grit. The Ultimo Guerrero and Sombra matches would probably be significant feathers in his cap for some voters. For me, they mostly just help his longevity case. Did you see the Silver Fox match that dropped last week? Was that out there previously? I haven't seen anyone talk about it. It's not a blow-away match by any means, but if you haven't seen it, you should. I'm far from a lucha footage expert these days, but I was surprised when I saw that match popping up. I knew about the match but had no idea it was out there.

Blue Panther vs Dos Caras and Blue Panther vs Lizmark from So Cal. I don't have the tapes anymore and I have never seen these matches online.

I was specifically thinking about Strong when writing that but also speaking in general terms. It seems that the Malenko vs Guerrero popularity changed the overall matwork style in the US to be more flashy and fluid and less rough and uncooperative looking, for lack of a better description. Malenko was (at least in the US) in a league of his own back then when it came to making moves look fluid while nowadays he probably wouldn't stand out as much if he was working exactly the same style on the indy circuit. To bring the context comparison full circle, I am also not sure if Malenko would have stood out as much if he was working World of Sport in the 80s alongside Steve Grey, Marty Jones, Johnny Saint or Clive Myers.

I wanted to isolate this one because this is something that happens a lot in here (we are all guilty of it sometimes). A good example is Taue revisionism. He was indeed underrated but I can't buy into the concept that everybody in Japan (and those of us who watched the tapes back in the day) got him wrong and it has taken us two decades to realise that. (FWIW - I have not reviewed this footage myself. Maybe I'm getting old but the idea of watching 30+ min AJPW matches from the 90s makes me tired.) I think that Dave Meltzer's points on reviewing footage sometimes get misconstructed (is this even a word?). To me context is really important on measuring a wrestler. The yearbooks seem like the best possible way to try to reconstruct that, but even so, you are still cherry picking what you see, and you can never truly transport yourself to 1990 or 1995 or 2000. On the other hand I believe that truly great wrestling always stands the test of time while the fad of the year type matches don't. Also every year we have access to more wrestling than ever before, so there's a lot of value in going back to see what we missed. Anyway, it's a complicated subject and I'm just rambling.

"For his size": I put it in quotes because I try to judge everybody using the same parameters, as sometimes we fall into these traps like "agile big man" and "good lucha brawler" which can be unfair. At the same time, it is also fair to compare Tenta's agility and athleticism with Bigelow, Vader, Tugboat, Henry, Yokozuna and other similar sized guys. Comparing athletes is sometimes apples and oranges because you look for different things in different body types. With big guys you look for agility, power and explosiveness, not necessarily gymnastics. Malenko is somebody who has developed a bad reputation because a lot of the matwork he did sometimes did not seem to lead anywhere in terms of body part work. I also tend to think people sometimes focus too much on body part work. Malenko's gimmick, which was very well established, was that he was the best technical wrestler who knew more holds than anyone else, so it makes sense that he'd use that unique expertise to dominate opponents. It's part of his character and his personality. But, again, we have seen so many other Malenko copycats with maybe the same mat skill, grace and fluidity but without the established character, so it doesn't work. I'd personally not say that Tenta was better than Malenko, but I can see why somebody looking back at the footage in a vacuum would think like that.

Completely agree with you 100% on the general points but Tenta is an interesting case. He was actually an excellent athlete, not just an excellent athlete "for his size". Besides being a college wrestler, being a sumo pro requires a lot of dexterity, balance and explosiveness. Also interesting that he got bad as a wrestler when he started losing his athleticism. I'm far from a Tenta timeline expert but he was looking pretty good up to maybe 93 or 94 during WAR tours but one day he just showed up looking facially old and much slower. So having the ability to execute that knowledge and understanding of timing and making the crowd react and making things have meaning is important too. That's something I don't get across well, that knowing what to do is half of the equation. Doing it is the other half. Both are important but knowing is the prerequisite. If you don't get past knowing, then doing isn't going to get you very far in my mind. Indeed - a young Earthquake could have done a lot more athletic moves than he did but they mostly wouldn't have accomplished all that much. Bam Bam Bigelow was more agile and mobile than Tenta but he wasn't nearly as smart a worker. In general terms fat wrestlers have a shorter workrate career span anyway because their knees and back are usually gone in 10 years or less, plus they are more likely to develop other issues like diabetes or heart problems. All things being said I'm glad that Tenta gets a lot of recognition at least on this little corner of the web. Most people speak about him like he is Typhoon.