pantherwagner

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. His dropkick was amazing and he used it very well. 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.

Let's see if the WWE Network keeps uploading that stuff but I'd like to get through the entire Saturday Night/WCW run until at least 1990. I also want to go through the entire SMW TV and commercial tape run. Let's see if that stuff stays on youtube long enough for me to go through it. I want to watch more Memphis but I find the TV incredibly frustrating to watch because the "payoff" matches and feuds the TV builds to are all over the place. Also need to watch and rewatch more old lucha.

Interesting that you are making these two points together because to me Malenko is a perfect example of what you express in your first paragraph. Unless you were really into Blue Panther type workers, or you had seen a lot of World of Sport (back when it was far less available than today), Malenko initially seemed to be on a completely different level than almost anyone else when it came to matwork speed, creativity and fluidity. He's instantly forgettable today in 2016 because we have seen the Malenko-Guerrero exchanges done approximately three million times by indy guys with a fraction of their talent to the point that they seem a cliche.

Real music is why CMLL and AAA have had the overall best entrances in the world for the last two and a half decades, with only very few exceptions being better, such as NJPW Tokyo Dome shows and Wrestlemania type shows with large entrance budgets. This is also why ECW had some iconic entrances that got lost when those same wrestlers were in WWF or WCW. A lot of the WWE music sounds generic and blends together. The themes for Rollins, Ambrose or Cesaro aren't much more than slightly modern versions of random WCW Pro wrestler themes.

My guess is that match is in some collection that they own (AWA or Mid South, I guess) and it's part of their digital fingerprint so it gets auto-flagged. WWE Classics on Demand once showed the famous Funk vs Lawler empty arena match and they didn't (and still don't) own the rights to Memphis. This is a good article on digital fingerprints if anyone is interested. It's interesting to see what is and what isn't part of the fingerprint. Some MSG shows are automatically blocked and others aren't. Perhaps the fingerprint only includes matches that are on any of their commercial DVD's. http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Articles/YouTubes-Digital-Fingerprints-How-Content-ID-Protects-Videos-78358.aspx

I have gone to Japan too much because I thought exactly the same thing.

The old British guy from SWS was Roy Wood, who was a Billy Riley / Wigan catch wrestler. Kazuo Sakurada (the Japanese Kendo Nagasaki) and KY Wakamatsu went down to the old gym to learn the style and were trained by Wood. He was later brought to Japan as a guest teacher in the dojo. This is an awesome story: http://www.snakepitwigan.com/history/ Other visitors, included Mr. Watamatzu and Mr Sakurada from SWS company who visited the original Riley’s gym. They were so passionate about the club and its value that they saw the disrepair, one of them in fact cried, and pictures were taken of them holding up the gym roof. They even offered money to renew the building. It would seem that recognition for Wigan Catch wrestling was more recognised in Japan than England. Roy then took them to Aspull and they watched how, with ease, Roy naturally switched from freestyle back to his roots and the sport of his preference, Catch. SWS watched in awe and three weeks later they returned with a contract for Roy to go to Japan teaching this almost forgotten art. The coaching then led to an ultimate bout in Yokohama arena with Roy wrestling his opponent. SWS valued Roy’s skill and knowledge so much that they offered him further work but as a family man and the owner of a local business Roy chose to return to Wigan.

I hated them almost as much as Parv does. I knew Shawn was a great wrestler but I hated him (I hated him before DX because he always looked like a gay stripper). I also thought the rest were all a waste of space. I couldn't recognise X-Pac's talent because he had go away heat with me. Back then I watched all of my WWF wrestling on tape (I'd get the shows from German TV and they were late at night) so I'd fast forward through most of their matches, interviews, "comedy skits" and what not. I don't know if it's me being older or losing most emotional connection with wrestling when I quit watching for years, but I do not HATE any wrestlers anymore because they are annoying or bad workers or politicians or whatever. The only wrestlers I hate are people who deserve to be thrown into a hungry crocodile pit, like Buck Zumhofe.

There are a few MMA fighters, especially lighter weights (Eddie Alvarez comes to mind) that have said that they rarely ever go to bars anymore because people want to challenge them when they find out that they are a fighter.

I had only heard the Orton Jr. story, actually two versions, one that he was too drunk and he was jumped by several guys in a bar, and another one that he and Buddy Landell backed out of a fight in a bar and were fired. There's also speculation because Orndorff disappeared out of nowhere one day and Watts bashed him on TV. However, unlike Orton, Orndorff wasn't known to be an embarrassing drunk. Some googling led me to Kayfabe Memories where somebody asked Micah and Ene Watts and they said nobody had ever been fired for losing a fight.

It has been well documented that Bill Watts told his wrestlers that they would get fired if they ever got their ass kicked in a bar fight or any other type of street fight, and that "I was drunk" was not a valid excuse. That being said, did he ever have to fire anyone because of that?

If you want to do it quickly you can also download a program called jdownloader. You can actually copy and paste the Youtube channel URL and it will let you download every video or a selection of them.

Without spoiling too much, the youtube lifestyle wrestling discussion at the end was the funniest thing you guys have ever done. I had to stop the podcast several times to avoid cracking up at work.

Until after his death I had forgotten about the rumours of Lizmark considering losing his mask for a big payoff, so perhaps Lizmark vs Atlantis.

I guess posting MMA promos here is kind of cheating but Nate Diaz can do a better money promo than anything I have seen on WWE TV in a million years. https://streamable.com/xn2t

We may have a winner here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJkxo8XKLUc

Glad that you enjoyed El Androide. It's one of the wackier Titanes gimmicks, imagine what that covers.

The first time that I watched Tiger Mask vs Mr. Saito I thought it was JIP as it looked like a potentially amazing match... then I read this: WWF Jr. Heavyweight Champion Tiger Mask pinned Mr. Saito in a non-title match at around 3:44 with a crossbody off the middle turnbuckle into a sunset flip

No, this is not a spam topic. This was published a couple of weeks ago but I haven't seen it in here. That's today's exchange rate for 1 million pesos, which is the price of the entire Box y Lucha collection starting in 1963 (missing roughly the first 500 magazines). 2 beautifully bound old school looking books per year that would not look out of place on any classic book collection: http://boxylucha.com/coleccion-de-box-y-lucha-en-venta/ Box y Lucha has been struggling for a long time and this probably is a last minute resort to raise funds. I thought 1000000 pesos was the "Gringo price" but Mexicans I know have been quoted that same price... this is the type of price that the Japanese collectors would have paid in the early 90s when the yen was really strong and they bought almost everything that they found in Mexico at ridiculously inflated prices. If you have a crazy rich wrestling friend tell them to buy this! Hopefully somebody who may put this to good use (I wish Steve Sims was that crazy rich friend) and get the mileage out of it rather than a rich lucha collector who just wants to own this for bragging rights and will let it accumulate dust on a shelf until he dies and the children sell it on ebay, or simply bin the books. (I'm not joking. Some of the most prized Santo collection items were found in one of his wives' rubbish bins)

John, I have no good answer for that. I'd have guessed they were focusing on Atlantis instead, but Mexican promotions don't work like that. I'll ask Steve Sims.

Good, she was terrible. She always had to get her shit in, and even though nobody listens the shows because of her she never got the message. MLW has got some pretty good shows (Kevin Sullivan's memory is amazing in its detail) but they have some terrible hosts and guests in others.

Shame on you for making fun of god of all things Yolanka. Awesome outfit. Just like El Androide's.

Definitely not his finest hour (by this point he was quite washed up) but Herodes was an awesome worker as any 80s lucha fans here can attest to.

Even today they are surprisingly easy to watch. The matches are often too short to amount to anything but when you start listing them there is a surprisingly high number of very good matches coming from that show. I started watching in 1990 so Obsession doesn't mean all that much to me, but I love the synth theme they used at the time.

What a shame. Fantastic worker and great man. I was also shocked at the news - he'd had heart problems for almost a couple of decades but he was a health nut who (as far as I know) lived a fairly clean lifestyle. One of the most graceful flyers from his time for sure. His reputation with co-workers was one like Ricky Steamboat or Ricky Morton: a guy that was easy to work with, would always have a good match, would never hurt you and would never hurt himself. I wonder if we'd talking him up more as a super worker if he had stayed with CMLL and never gone to AAA (he had some great matches there with Parka and Jerry Estrada but never seemed to be a great fit). I have always felt his stock would go up if we had more of his 80s footage.