FLIK

Almost 40, just had a kid, needs a big payday

So what're ppls opinions on Lord Tensai so far? I know Meltzer & Alvarez have been down on him and don't think he's gotten over yet but I don't really trust their opinions on this. I watched his debut match on youtube just now, in ring I thought he looked really good (been a Bernard fan for years so no surprise to me thear) but the gimmick is ridiculous. Let's have a giant white guy pretend to be Japanese only since this is the WWE their warped perception of being Japanese = a bunch of random asian wrestler stereotypes from the 80's & early 90's thrown together. Oriental music, silk robe, Great Muta style ninja mask, little slitent mini man servant throwing salt & bowing, mist spiting, Hakushi style tattos, nerve pinch hold of some sort (claw in this case). I'm surprised they didn't have him come out in wooden shoes, wrestle bare foot and throwing judo kicks & karate chops too.

Dunno whear it fits but there's also this Battlarts 10/14/2001 Takahiro Oba vs Manabu Sato Ikuto Hidaka, Mr. Sakai & Mr. Sakai '01 vs junji.com, Black Sakai & Tommy Diablo Takeshi Ono vs Tanomusaku Toba Daijiro Matsui vs Shannon Ritch Katsumi Usuda vs Touradj Mansouri Tadao Yasuda vs Mohammed Yone Bas Rutten vs Carl Malenko Dos Caras, Jr. vs Kazunari Murakami Quinton Jackson vs Alexander Otsuka Muhammed Ali vs Yuki Ishikawa First 8 are pro wrestling but the last 2 were shoots. Ali is of course not the famous one but another fighter that happened to have the same name. I've had this show for years but never watched it as everything except the last 3 or 4 matches appears to be cliped heavily on it.

edit - wrong thread

Finally got around to the 2 Chico Che vs Black Terry matches. Not sure where but the Hair match i'd have in the upper part of my MOTY list, I acutally liked the finish, made Che come across like a dick for getting the win like that. The 2nd one I liked a lot too but would put in in the lvl just below MOTY.

Yeah, this is more Meltzer's usual argument, not so much that adults/anti Cena fans don't go to house shows but that more kids/pro Cena fans do.

Tried watching TNA for the first time in forever last night and couldn't finish the show. The booking seemed ok but I have no interest in like half the roster. Like Austin Aries & Bully Ray but they were stuck with Crimson & Morgan who I can't stand, hate RVD, Anderson & Hardy so wasn't sticking around to watch that, i'm boycoting the entire career of Garett Bischoff & I have no use for current day Ric Flair in my life anymore so I just changed the channel, Angle & Styles have had great matches in the past but their one this week was about 1/100 of what they usually do. The 8 woman tag was apealling but felt rushed. Nothing at all that made me regret skiping the show every week

Fuck, if we're limiting things to just 2012 current wrestling the stuff in Dean's thread is almost all i've been following + a handfull of joshi shows, lucha and stuff my local indy sceen puts on youtube.

Chigusa vs Lioness then the reformation of Crush was a bit of nostalgia but Chiggy had been out of retirement for 6 years by that point and Lioness a little over 4 and they hadn't had ANY interaction up until that point so it was a no brainer angle to do and became the most succesful in the companies history. Worth pointing out that "old women" weren't exactly that old at this point either. I know what your point is since by joshi standards they were but Devil was the oldest and only 37, Chiggy was about 35 and the rest were still only in their late 20's/early 30's. Hardly time to put them out to pastue. Irregardless, the influx older stars besides the above example wasn't built around nostalgia, it was a combination of a shrinking home roster and all the other companies simultaniously collapsing & GAEA taking advantage. End of 1996 GAEA had 11 home grown wrestlers on their roster, by 2002 they were down to 5. It would be kinda dumb to say no Devil, Kansai, OZ, Aja, Toyota, etc... we're not interested in having you join our company and for every talent like that they also recruited Ayako Hamada, Ran YuYu, Carlos Amano, Akino, Amazing Kong, Kaori Nakayama (on & off), The Bloody (for a while) & other top young stars to balance things out. My point was, it was more then just Chiggy because she allowed it to be which Onita could have but just chose not to even well past the point when he & the company were fully established and could afford to spread things around more. The entirety of W*ING is because Onita pissed off his business partners by being too egotistical so them & Quioness bounced to form their own company. When GAEA started all they had besides Chigusa was Kaoru (talented wrestler who never rose beyond lower mid card in AJW), Bomber Hikaru (underated talent but a complete no name) and 6 rookies so they had to build that up from scratch too. True but both companies continued on and the diffrence speaks for itself. FMW post Onita wasn't predicted to last until the end of the year, saw massive declines in attendance and had no one establised to carry the company in his abscence. They recovered but it was a very tough strugle and Onita did zilch to help. OZ Academy post GAEA with almost the entire GAEA roster automaticly became the top joshi company riding the wave they were set up for and didn't loose much of a step at all. They run less often but still draw well (by todays lowered standards) and are the only joshi company left with regular monthly tv at this point. Not producing new talent and having those that did debut quit early was hardly a GAEA exclusive problem. Still, GAEA produced about 14-16 rookies over the course of it's existence, there wasn't one that I would say turned out bad and all but 1 or 2 lasted atleast a couple of years in the business. Those that did leave early in their careers did so for a lot more varied reasons then "mean old evil Chigusa was too rough on em" which i'm not saying didn't happen in some cases but is overblown by ppl that either don't like Chigusa to begin with or saw GAEA girls and freaked out. Meiko as a trainer on her own with her Sendai Girls project has churned out 6 or 7 rookies in the last 6 years, a # of which have either allready retired or left the company to work elsewhere and none of which have become major stars because Meiko can't book worth a damn but in terms of quality they've also all been very good workers. While there's also been several other great new talents produced from diffrent companies over the last few years there's also a hell of a lot more horrid rookies being let loose then ever before so i'm fully 100% behind weeding the scrubs out with tougher/harder training instead of the "nice nice" approach & lax standards we get a lot these days.

Never visited or even heard of grantland until recently so I don't know how much wrestling content they have on thear but yeah there is some. Guy who wrote this article actually e-mailed me a few weeks back wondering if I had any more info on the Bruiser Brody interview http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/772243...tlemania-xxviii

Could GAEA have continued if they really wanted? Yeah, i'll give you that one but you couldn't possibly get more opposite then Chiggy & Onita when it came to how they ran their feds. GAEA from the start was about building up their trianees and making everyone they could into a star. Gonna talk more about this in a diffrent thread once i'm done but i'm currently re-watching the 1996 GAEA tv set and even that early I can point to multiple shows Chigusa didn't work the main event of, multiple tvs Chigusa didn't appear on at all or had a minimal role on and atleast 4 ocasions of the youngsters getting pins over the vets (which is a lot given GAEA only had 3 vets for much of the year until Hokuto jumped and all their youngsters only had 1 year experience at most). Contrast with the Onita era whear from 89 - 95 you can count the # of main events he wasn't in on 1 hand, zero tv shows & videos released that he wasn't the main (sometimes entire) focus of and except for Kudo & the women's division, nothing done to give spotlight to anyone but himself or the ppl he was feuding against with the entire rest of the cards clearly existing just to fill time and any rare instances of this not being the case being 100% due to the influence of other ppls booking not his own. Heck, Chiggy even jobed in her final match. Really complete day & night diffrence between the 2

Naw i'd say Lynn's is by far the more annoying of the two. What bothers me about the Lynn leg drop is that it's so unnatural. Under regular circumstances almost no one would ever throw a shoulder block through the ropes to a guy on the apron 99% of the time but it always happens in every match against the 1 guy who happens to have a counter for that move? Dumb. With Kidman and powerbombs, atleast a good portion of the people he's wrestling, especially cruiserweights, use a powerbomb as part of their normal offense anyways so I was fine with that and barely ever even noticed "you can't powerbomb Kidman" until it became a running gag online.

Well, plenty of ppl have the whole thing spliced together but taken in full it's just 6 mins of below average wrestling with a shitty screw job finish. The fact that we had to wait a freakin hour to see a combined 6 mins of below average wrestling, broken up into 3 or 4 chunks shown during the commercials of a mediocre Robin Hood tv remake is what makes it special.

Oh geez, the infamous "bait & switch" match. I remember this kinda sucking, I wouldn't say cut it because of the circumstances surrounding it but I wouldn't put it in the essential pile either. If this does make it on, you guys gotta include some clips of Robin Hood for full effect or maybe spread it out across the set, you know, have part 1 on disc 1, part 2 on disc 17, really capture the moment. Always loved this segment, especially the crazy brawl at the end. So so disapointed when they cut those guys out of the war games match. For WWF are you counting the Rumble show seperatly? Not that I really think anything is particularly yearbook worthy on that show, just wondering if that's the reason nothing from it was included or not. ??????

Heh, I haven't watched a Samu match or even thought about him in years and years but I was able to instantly remember that "oh yeah, he did do that one a lot"

Was that really a cross promotion deal tho or just WWF taking advantage of the fame Shamrock allready had off of it?

Battlarts 5/14/99 (Bed of Nails Death Match) Yuki Ishikawa vs Mitsuhiro Matsunaga Bed of Nails is always an interesting gimmick, because of how legit dangerous it no one ever takes any real bumps into the thing and you've gotta come up with unique ways to work around the limitation. In this they flat out just don't touch the thing but they do do a hell of a job teasing it and milking a lot of drama out of almost getting sent into the nails. I dug Matsunaga tying his belt to the ropes to avoid getting pushed off the apron. Eventually Matsunaga bust out the spike and bloodies up Ishikawa again, he brings in a barb wire bat but the ref gets whacked accidently. In a repeat of the last match Ishikawa gets the advantage, takes Matsunaga down with punches and a sleeper but this time with no ref he can't get the win and when he lets go Matsunaga recovers enough to toss a fireball at him then lock in a choke of his own which causes Ishikawa's seconds to toss in the towel. Post match Otsuka runs in to get Matsunaga off and he eats a fireball of his own. Not quite but almost as great as their first match in 98. Matsunaga is so awesome in the old school role of your special guest assasin heel. Someone who'd get old after a while in this environment but if you bring him in once a year for a short run, have him destroy some mid carders, spilling blood and causing chaos along the way then get beat by the big hero in the end it's fucking gold every time. So yeah, highest recomendation for this.

........review request for Tajiri & Great Muta vs Goldust & Hakushi http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x18vva_mu...n-hakushi_sport http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x18vvg_mu...n-hakushi_sport

Meh, it's not like 99% of the people watching had any clue about any of that or even who Tenryu was unless they remembered him from his 1 Mania aperance a few years earlier. Looking back in hindsight now I more see it as a cool little moment that he got to make a quick cameo. To me it just made Taker look like a super man and Yoko & Fuji look like evil geniuses. Like OF COURSE 2 or 3 dudes weren't gonna keep THE UNDERTAKER down especially when it's in a CASKET MATCH and he's prepared a DOUBLE WIDE DOUBLE DEEP casket for you and the WWF WORLD TITLE is on the line, those are near impossible odds to overcome, it should take an army to bring him down.

Have you ever wondered what would happen if Vince McMahn bought TNA and he hired Kevin Sullivan & Gabe Sapolsky to book it for him? Now you can find out aparently

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/implode 5/14/1999 Daisuke Ikeda vs Bob Backlund So uhhhhhh, this was.....interesting. Backlund comes to the ring all happy & jolly, high fiving every fan he can, then the match starts and he switches to heel mode telling them to shut up. They do a few minutes of the typical style matwork you'd exspect then out of nowhere seemingly on a whim Ikeda implodes Backlund's face with the hardest headbutt i've ever seen ever. Backlund rolls outside and a river of blood pours out of his nose. After a few minutes of non action Ikeda goes outside to roll Backlund back in and continue the match. He goes for a really awkward pin and Backlund won't even let him get a 1 count so Ikeda gives him a couple of punts to the back at which point Backlund looks at him like "fuck this", he rolls back outside the ring, fans start booing, he stumbles around for a few seconds then collapses and the Dr or Ref calls for the bell and Ikeda's declared the winner. I watched this 2 times in a row and I still have no clue WTF I just saw.

Listened to the interview earlier today and given his history I get why ppl assume it MUST be Hayes but the way Court phrased things I don't think he really pointed towards anyone in particular. Just said "someone in meetings" and left it at that. He told a story earlier about one of the office staff having confederate flags all over his house so it's not like Hayes is the only one in the company with those tendancies.

I don't think anyone who watches lucha seriously cares about any of this stuff. I mean, face in peril is stupid as shit if you think about it. How dumb do the babyfaces have to be to get themselves stuck in the same situation against the same opposition night after night? They must be thick as shit, not to mention the referees. And how can you work the next night with the injuries you were supposed to have sustained in a FIP match? Some of these guys have some miraculously fast healing bodies. If you hold FIP up to the light, heels should have gotten away with it for a while before action was taken to stop it from happening. All the NWA would've had to do is follow Gorilla Monsoon's old bugaboo about having a second ref at ringside. The first two falls in lucha aren't always rushed through and the finishes are often elaborate. The first two falls being rushed through is not always a bad thing, either. There is good lucha and then there is bad lucha. There is more bad lucha than good lucha. And there is a lot of bad lucha on Galavision. By the same token, sometimes FIP works and sometimes it doesn't. Watching all those 80s WWF tags where the entire FIP structure is shortened to about 10 minutes, FIP becomes worthless. I would rather watch a sprint then watch a 10 minute WWF FIP match. The actual moves used as finishers I don't have much of an issue with but yeah I also can't stand the rushed falls in lucha or in trios matches how easyily multiple guys on one team will get pinned either at the same time within seconds of each other (which happens in long or short falls all the damn time). Mostly I see it as specifically a problem of modern CMLL than anything else tho.

Yeah that was a really fun match, about as good as you're gonna get for something that short on World Wide.

Don't know if he wrestles on regular shows anymore but for the past few years he's been working for the Half Pint Brawlers midget promotion as ring anouncer, backstage agent, etc...