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Childs

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Everything posted by Childs

  1. Childs
    This didn't need any more time. They delivered a whole match worth of action and did a great job building to the big moments. Honestly, would this match be as remembered if it went 18 minutes with a standard peril section and hot tag? Also, no way this would have been as good if you subbed Flair in for Windham.
  2. Childs
    Great format for Joshi, because it emphasized pace without the need for long-term selling. I'm with everyone else in that I loved Moreno and found Madusa shockingly entertaining. But I even liked Toyota in this context. Structurally, they did a great job with Aja as the force who could not be balanced. They held her in reserve for most of the early going and then delivered all the "planes circling Kong" spots you'd want as a kind of sugar rush climax.
  3. Childs
    I think this was the first Joshi match I ever saw, and I had no idea what to make of these painted behemoths lashing each other with weapons. At this point, I'd rather watch it than the vast majority of pimped Joshi. Nakano made great use of the cage to showcase her athleticism and not just on the iconic leg drop. I also dug Aja focusing her weapon shots on Nakano's legs, trying to make the climb to victory more difficult. Nakano could have sold that storyline better. In the end, it's hard to rub me wrong with a spectacle match between bomb-throwing heavyweights. And they gave me plenty of spectacle and plenty of bombs with the added drama of ace vs. up-and-comer.
  4. Childs
    This was different from anything else on the yearbook. One of the cool things about 1990 Waltman is that the promotion trusted him to go all the way with some match concepts that might have seemed out there for your average rookie. In this case, he endured a hellish stretching/beating from an accomplished shoot stylist and just made it look like death. Waltman not only kept up with Wilkins technically, he showed a command of teasing and pacing that you wouldn't expect from an inexperienced worker. He was so good that he easily made himself a babyface for the night. Total prodigy stuff.
  5. Childs
    This was awesome. The flip side of the footage shortage in lucha is that you get wonderful surprises from guys like El Faraon, who are little seen but suddenly pop up with brilliant performances. He was terrific in the third fall, unleashing hell on Pirata and hitting one of the greatest topes ever. Pirata is more of a know entity, obviously, but he was tremendous as well, taking some unreal bumps and delivering one of the sickest blade jobs in wrestling history. They did a great job with the narrative tension created by the blood, something that's familiar to boxing fans but doesn't pop up in wrestling all that often. Morgan went from being the clear rudo in the first fall to a sympathetic figure in the third because of his determination to fight through it. Great stuff and probably lucha MOTY in the non-Dandy category.
  6. Childs
    I don't like Mr. Pogo as much as Goto, but I've enjoyed all these early Onita matches. He kept things tight and simple, with the focus very much on his strengths.
  7. Childs
    Great match and culimination of the rise of Misawa/Kawada in 1990. Kawada and Taue served as the workhorses, but Jumbo and Misawa made the match with their attempts to one up each other from the apron. As much as we've praised the young guys for how far they advanced this year, Jumbo also deserves credit for stepping up his game as the guy clinging to the crown. He delivered some awesome moments, both in selling and in cleaning house when he got pissed. I might have to put this one ahead of the 11/1/90 NJPW tag as well, because it delivered just as much action and heat with more character payoff.
  8. Childs
    It was particularly rough to have this follow the heatfest that was the natives tag. Everybody here worked and hit hard, but it's tough to argue that the match built to much. The fans reacted that way as well. They wanted to get into the last five minutes, but they hadn't been taken on the ride. As others have said, these teams traded control too often without developing specific plans of attack. And though the finish was a decent idea for making Doc look good, they executed it terribly. Lots of three-minute stretches of this would look good in isolation, but the result was far less than the sum of the parts.
  9. Childs
    This completely met my expectations, which is really saying something given the years these guys had and the quality of their Oct. match. Each fall was a fucking war, and the stretch of nearfalls at the end was ridiculous. I liked that, even as they beat the piss out of each other, they showed how deep they could dig into their reservoir of wrestling moves. It was a desperate fight but a desperate fight between superior craftsmen. I was interested to see how others reacted to the finish. It was definitely a Sopranos ending in the sense it made you think about the nature of the series more than it delivered easy satisfaction. But I dug it. The morality between these two was never straight black and white. Tough call between this and Dandy/Azteca for MOTY. In the end, I'm a blood-and-guts person, so I'll take this.
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  11. Childs
    Best match between these guys to date. As you'd expect, they kept it simple, but even the most basic stuff felt violent and fiercely contested. Choshu delivered another great comeback. It came off as a testament to Hash that Riki had to use the slightly dirty closed fists to seize the advantage. And the lariats into nearfall into huge final lariat on a running Hash made for a great finishing sequence. If Liger-Benoit featured a style I don't love well executed, this was a style I do love well executed. Big picture, the two-week stretch that started with the 10/19/90 AJ six-man was about as strong a burst of wrestling as we've gotten on any yearbook -- something excellent from just about every style.
  12. Childs
    Don't have a lot to add. I don't think this is quite my NJ MOTY, but they delivered balls-to-the-wall action with everyone looking great. The crowd's response really testified to how hard they worked. Sasaki was probably the biggest surprise. I think of him as more hit than miss for most of the '90s, but here he delivered big-time as a high-energy power wrestler. This vs. the 9/30/90 tag is an interesting comparison, because that one had more developed role playing but this one generated more heat and offered a more satisfying finish. I probably rate the AJ match a hair better, but that might be biased by my greater long-term interest in those four wrestlers.
  13. Childs
    I liked this better than the August match because they didn't go through the motions with a bunch of opening matwork. The soul of this particular rivalry was "Look at what we can do!" not "Watch us fight!" And in that spirit they really hit their shit. I also liked Liger's feisty little flurries of palm strikes, which he used to stave off Benoit a few times. Not my favorite type of wrestling at the moment, but very well done.
  14. Childs
    Another terrific match from this feud, with an interesting finish that made great use of the no-DQ stip. I didn't like it quite as much as the other two matches, because it didn't feel quite as wild. But man, that was hell of a bump Lynn took to set up the finishing stretch. And kudos to them for having the courage of their convictions in seeing it through.
  15. Childs
    Tough match to rate. There were moments, and not just in the third fall, where they looked out of position and uncertain what to do next. But both teams also pushed themselves to do things they wouldn't normally attempt. I loved some of the cat-and-mouse stuff with the Rockers and Neidhart, and the Hart Foundation went for some double teams that I don't recall as standard for them. I also liked the way each of the first two falls felt like mini-matches with their own ebbs and flows. Overall, I can't reconcile the bad stuff enough to call this a great match. But it was very interesting, unlike any other WWF match I can remember.
  16. Childs
    It was a little weird that Doom suddenly took on the role of powerhouse bayfaces. But the crowd responded OK to it, in part because the work from both teams was solid. Simmons was really good here, with Arn and Flair helping to make his offense look big and impactful. Actually, Arn and Flair worked a heck of a match in general, selling that they were overwhelmed by Doom's power early but gradually taking control with cheapshots and cutoffs. I never think of Flair as a tag wrestler, but matches like this suggest he would have done it as well as Arn or Tully if that was his role. Havoc '90 was quite a night for tag team wrestling, with three excellent matches that were all a little different.
  17. Childs
    Wow, two excellent Steiners matches from the same month! Again, the key was that they fit their shit into a fairly traditional babyface tag performance, with Scott playing a surprisingly effective face-in-peril. It helped that the Nasties were big dudes who didn't mind stiffing the hell out of the Steiners. Overall, a great blend of structure and recklessness.
  18. Childs
    Yeah, Rich really didn't do much of anything. This was basically Morton vs. MX and Cornette, with everyone playing their classic roles. The range of offense Eaton unleashed was pretty amazing, though he did appear to come up pretty short on a Savage-style axehandle to the floor. The rocket launcher to the ramp looked pretty sick. Morton was Morton. What can you say? He and Eaton were the best ever at their respective tag-team roles. It's a rivalry that deserves to be remembered with Flair-Steamboat, Misawa-Kawada, etc.
  19. Childs
    Finally back to watching wrestling after a few weeks of Super Bowl madness and what a way to dive in! These were probably the two best wrestlers in the world in 1990, and when they finally hooked up, they didn't disappoint. This is how brawling should look -- punches to the back of the neck, biting an opponent's fingers during a wristlock, copious blood, no space to breathe. I liked that the first two falls were decided by Satanico's cheating. It really locked him in as the rudo after a year of them both playing tweeners to some degree. And as Loss mentioned, these guys were so damn good that they interspersed some beautiful wrestling with the brawling. This was awesome without feeling definitive, which is what you want with a caballera contra caballera on the way. I had never quite gotten the GOAT praise for Satanico -- thought he was a very good older wrestler with a few brilliant performances from the '80s and a largely undocumented peak. After watching his 1990, though, I can see why he inspires such devotion. That just makes it all the more maddening that we have so little of his '80s stuff.
  20. Childs
    Nogami was a fun part of the 1989 stuff on the NJ DVDVR set. He was very much willing to die for your entertainment.
  21. Childs
    Most of the show made sense on paper, but none of it really excited me as a viewer. I agree with those who've said the Rumble match was well-worked, but I kept waiting for a wow moment in the last 10 entries and it just never came. Given the last five, I assumed Cena would win, and they did nothing to unsettle my expectations for even a moment. I'm fine with Cena-Rock II at 'Mania, but I'm not so excited about it that I wanted it to become a fait accompli with two months to go. I was into the body of the main event, even though Rock looked pretty shitty at points. But the execution of the finishing stretch didn't pop. For one, I wish they hadn't built the booking around Vince's anti-Shield proclamation. Just let Rock find a way to fight off the Shield. And then, after months of promos about Punk's pride in his reign, he went out like a lamb to a shitty spinebuster and that fucking elbow. At least let the man show some desperation to hold onto a belt that has validated his career. None of what they did was wildly illogical. But it sure as shit didn't feel special.
  22. Childs
    I felt bad for them, having to follow Fujiwara-Takada. But this was really good as well. Basically, Maeda had to weather the storm against Funaki's hand speed and activity level until he could find some ways to grind the young man down. And it worked, because Funaki's athleticism really was impressive. The last 1/3 of the match dragged a little compared to the opening. I would've liked to see them go to their feet a few more times to keep Funaki feeling dangerous. But it was still one of the promotion's best matches of the year.
  23. Childs
    This was a staggeringly great match. I'll talk about Fujiwara in a sec, but Takada was sensational here -- a focused, stalking badass with a variety of great strikes. And the one time Takada dropped down for his leglock of doom, Fujiwara goosed him through it by selling and then essentially inviting Takada to kick him in the face. Which leads me to Fujiwara's masterful performance. I think this is about as good as a wrestler can be. He did a great job establishing his strategy of luring Takada into corners and countering. His strikes, not just with the head but with the hands and feet, were as good as I've seen them. His selling, from the taunting grins to the way he let his body droop when Takada landed a particularly big blow, was remarkable. I just can't imagine a wrestler doing anything more, on macro or micro scale, to put over a match. Pete, I have no idea what boring middle you were watching, because I didn't see it here. Top 5 for the year.
  24. Childs
    Just to be clear OJ, I wasn't saying Kareem should be considered the greatest because of his longevity. I was saying it would be weird to discount his long run of post-peak excellence when assessing his greatness.
  25. Childs
    I don't think anyone here would argue that Jumbo shouldn't be in the debate because we didn't get to see him work through his decline phase. You just don't get to count in his favor great old-age performances.
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