Jetlag
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[1999-04-04-AJPW-Championship Carnival] Kenta Kobashi vs Jun Akiyama
Jetlag replied to Loss's topic in April 1999
This was fun. I really liked how Kobashi was all "You're not working over my arm, dammit!" so Jun goes "Fine" and works over his leg instead. Akiyama had a great gameplan and may have in fact carried this. Of course, Kobashi came back at him like Kobashi always does, so in the end it didn't really resonate with me as much more than a solid AJPW style match, but yeah. Akiyama, you tried. -
This was your fairly typical Aja rookie squash that ends up being really good due to Satomura being Satomura. Aja absolutely picks her apart for an eternity, while Satomura hangs on with all her willpower and keeps on chipping away at the veteran. There is so little heat in the early going that it feels like Meiko is getting the hell beaten out of her in a basement or some other remote place, and if this were IWA:MS I imagine the crowd would have begun chanting "It's not worth it" by the time Aja drilled her with the Package Piledriver. Meiko already had her awesome fire and determination to keep the match believable though, and while not all her comebacks were great, her focus on toppling Aja while having a limited moveset built around kicks, arm attacks, a big strike and a big bomb move at hand was fascinating. Aja gave her usual performance that I've seen in a dozen other matches but works everytime anyways and carried Satomura over the 25 minute length with ease. Highly remarkable match that would be a slam dunk joshi MOTY if it weren't for ARSION that year. Still, outside of that this has to be the best womens match in half a decade.
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It's been said before, but parts of AJPW felt pretty old hat by 1999. Case in point: matches like this. Misawa no sells a few moves, parts of the Kawada/Misawa sections came dangerously close to current NJPW elbowfests, and the build and sense of escalation seemed to be lacking overall. It picks up here or there, but it speak volumes to me that 2 minutes before the finish in this match Misawa and Kawada were still working fairly standard exchanges that didn't feel like they were preceded by a 20 minute match at all. It was a pretty stiff match, so even if it wasn't exciting, it was atleast painful. Shinzaki didn't really add much besides a few different moves. He threw a few uppercuts, so I guess that makes him the stand-in for Great Kabuki.
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Impossibly gritty, underrated, blood-drenched classic. Saito bloodying Fuchi's ear in the opening and contstantly attacking it with nasty punches was some amazing violent pro wrestling. Fuchi throwing wild punches and fist drops like Jerry Lawler was great, and his dropkick was such a fantastic, simple spot. The finishing stretch of the match was really well worked and felt equal to a high end lucha brawl. Loved Fuchi leaving a bloody imprint of his ear on Saito's side while applying the back suplex. I wouldn't be surprised if this ended up in my Top 3-5 80s AJPW singles matches. After watching this I was wondering if Fuchi ever had a hair match in Tijuana, and thinking I should really watch more Hiro Saito.
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BLUE WOLF. I find mongolian pro wrestlers to be sorely unheralded on the internet. This was a really good match built around power vs. skill. Most wrestlers when matched up with a guy like Suzuki pretend to be helpless on the mat and go for the ropes, but Blue Wolf wasn't one of those guys. He brought the fight right to Suzuki and wouldn't let Suzuki get away with his usual bullshit. Man, Wolf was a fucking great babyface, and thus Suzuki's uncooperativeness actually added to the match. It lead to some damn good exchanges on the mat and a few really interesting bits as Suzuki was forced to try different approachs than his usual spiel. It leads to a unique and brilliant finish. Blue Wolf, a fighter till the very end.
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[2004-02-22-AJPW-Excite Series] Toshiaki Kawada vs Shinya Hashimoto
Jetlag replied to Loss's topic in February 2004
Even for two beaten up old guys past their primes, I thought this was a world class pro wrestling match. They stuck to a more methodical pace in a match built around selling and limb damaging, which worked really well and built to an incredibly tense 2nd half. Hashimoto may be the greatest ever at selling wounded but dangerous, and here we also got him working as a beast next to the smaller Kawada. Early on, Kawada was just overwhelmed by Hashimoto. I don't know if Kawada being unable to throw Hash properly was intentional or not, but it worked great in the context of the match. So we get Hashimoto as One Man Gang, working like an invincible wall of doom that Kawada has to figure how to topple. Hashimoto's facial expressions were absolute top tier acting and some of the best shit I've ever seen in a wrestling match. Then of course you get two of the baddest dudes ever standing face to face and dishing out punishment to eachother. The dueling limbwork was a great way to avoid the trite "stand there and wait to get hit" crap japanese matches sometimes have. Instead, you had two angry bears, one on one leg, the other with one arm, hacking away at eachoter's weakpoints. Just an epic battle. For the record, I thought Kawada's selling was near perfect. But Hashimoto's performance, all leading up to his eventual downfall, is the real integral part to the match. Just incredible stuff. -
The previous match was a chaotic, violent eruption. Here, Chavo had sat Lothario down and they shook hands before the match. So, this starts out with Jose and Hector wrestling with all good clean wrestling exchanges while Paul Boesch puts over Chavo's hot sauce. That weird beginning aside, this soon gets surely when Hector gets frustrated by Jose one-upping him. Hector starts the fun attacking Jose with some nasty side headbutts before quickly drawing blood with the steel ringpost and it's ON. The match quickly turns into the kind of gritty double juice massacre you want. It's pretty much impossible to have a bad match with even old flabby Jose Lothario in that situation. Jose was pretty great here as a tank with nothing but punches as offense, giving this the flair of a gritty seeding boxing match, while Hector used more standard wrestling offense that still looked good. Probably had a bit too many falls and was not quite the wild brawl I expected, but this was psychologically very sharp justifying the methodic nature of the match and let to a cool/silly finish (nice foreshadowing there Boesch) that got awesome reactions. Great little bloodbath.
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A Parejas Increibles Match! More disjointed pretty girl action! To make this even more disjointed, they clipped a 20 minute match down to about 6. I don't really bemourn this being clipped as it looked like their typical affairs that I wasn't in love with from 1999, plus they didn't really play up the Parejas Increibles aspect. To be fair, some of the exchanges here were kind of fun.
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Another clipped match. Hamada and Akino still seem to be working as plucky underdogs. What they show of this was mostly spots and double teams. The stuff looked good and Futagami is really fun in this type of match as she has nice unpredictable submissions and cradles. Still, I'm waiting for something complete.
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Hey look, it's Candy! Haven't seen her in a while. She looked skinnier than before. This was also clipped, but seemed somewhat complete. Another forgettable match where Candy dominated a lot then falls to the usual Aja trademarks. Okay but really nothing to write home about. Candy sold about that she was exerting herself to throw Aja around which was a nice touch, but her dominating so much of the match was kind of stupid.
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Into 2000 we go. Michiko Ohmukai/Etsuko Mita vs. Mima Shimoda/Yumi Fukawa (1/30) A Parejas Increibles Match! More disjointed pretty girl action! To make this even more disjointed, they clipped a 20 minute match down to about 6. I don't really bemourn this being clipped as it looked like their typical affairs that I wasn't in love with from 1999, plus they didn't really play up the Parejas Increibles aspect. To be fair, some of the exchanges here were kind of fun. Ayako Hamada/Mika Akino vs. Rie Tamada/Mikiko Futagami (1/30) Another clipped match. Hamada and Akino still seem to be working as plucky underdogs. What they show of this was mostly spots and double teams. The stuff looked good and Futagami is really fun in this type of match as she has nice unpredictable submissions and cradles. Still, I'm waiting for something complete. Aja Kong vs. Candy Okutsu (1/30) Hey look, it's Candy! Haven't seen her in a while. She looked skinnier than before. This was also clipped, but seemed somewhat complete. Another forgettable match where Candy dominated a lot then falls to the usual Aja trademarks. Okay but really nothing to write home about. Candy sold about that she was exerting herself to throw Aja around which was a nice touch, but her dominating so much of the match was kind of stupid.
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This was a good trios match. The highlights were the opening Genki/Saito matwork, Shisa's highspots and all things Kenichiro Arai who is such a cool character. The Toryumon crew couldn't touch the 90s M-Pro guys and you could tell that they were more interested in putting together finishing stretches than the body of the mat (the rudo work in this match was pretty average), but this was in the 90s M-Pro style and a very fun, fresh take at it.
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Cool 7 minute match built around swank technical stuff. If Dragon Gate still has matches like these I'd really like to know about them. Kondo does some surprisingly nifty submission stuff and SAITO has some impressive swanky headstand moves. Some moves were a little slow, altough in their defense they were doing pretty intricate stuff and things didn't get exhibition-y.
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You can call this a mat spotfest if you will, but fuck it. This ruled. This is exactly what makes Arsion so cool. Ultra smooth, tricked out matwork with plenty of freaky Solar-ish submission grabs, dreadful battling on the ground and Fukawa fighting the big bad spider lady like a fiend. Super enjoyable compact bout.
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Blitzkrieg gets to look damn impressive in his debut against Rey. Some awesome, high precision moves here. The announce team was working hard to put Blitzkrieg over as equal to Rey. He was close when it came to athletic moves, but you could tell he didn't have a great understanding of selling. Still Rey carried him well and both guys came out looking great in this bout.
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This was a very good popcorn match with a ton of sick moves and bumps. It was even psychologically interesting, as the heels didn't want to exert themselves and targeted the faces, while Rey and Kidman initially worked together. However, soon it was chaos and nobody cared who the legal man was anymore. Also, the commentators didn't know that it was First Fall Wins, so tried to explain guys breaking up pinfalls by them not wanting their winning chances decrease. Man, Kidman pulling Juvi by the hair getting a bigger reaction than Psicosis' insane bump to the floor is telling that these guys didn't have the most efficient understanding of crowd pleasing. Maybe Psicosis just likes crashing on the floor, it wouldn't surprise me. I also liked how violent some of the pin breakups were.
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This was okay. I really liked some of the avoid and move stuff they did. Yoshiko tried a few athletic moves like an ugly 619 that really don't fit her, and overall her "bruiser" style wasn't as emphasized as I would have liked. Sareee is one of those from a stream of pushed girls with offense ranging from decent to whatever, not very charismatic or athletic and not very interested in selling. It turned into one of those "do alllllll the moves" matches with a few submissions thrown in that came across as restholds. It didn't get overkill-y (atleast by modern standards) but this really needed some type of story to be more than good as neither woman was the type for this sort of athletic contest
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SUWA has hair, terrible acne and is dressed like the jerkiest kid in high school. Dragon Kid was only in his 2nd year of wrestling, but already a bonafide highspot machine. Again, Suwa has a heel faction at ringside that interferes very liberally. It's almost shocking how much this feels like the heel faction matches New Japan would do with the Bullet Club. The moves are better - in fact, the whacky twisting headscissors etc. look great, but the stuff in between is impossibly dry and you can tell they are just glueing spots together. SUWA wasn't as much of a prick as later on and this was merely an indicator of things that would plague Dragon System wrestlers and soon all of wrestling later on. However, because it went 8 minutes and not 16 or 45 the match didn't feel bloated.
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A pudgy black metal cosplayer teaming with a prettyboy against a japanese guy pretending to be black and another pretty boy dressed as Tarzan. The one thing that T2P got right is to supplement the spots with cool matwork and submissions: some of the execution here was a little soft (naturally), but the techniques were positively wonky and IWRG-like. Yoshino and Tsujimoto/YASSHI added some heel tactics to give this something to it beyond "young guys experimenting". The stuff between the spots was pretty lacking as always with these stomp-happy Toryumon guys, but they stuck to whacky submissions and tricked-out reversals, and it was for the better. Very fun experimental juniors match.
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This got **** 1/2 from Meltzer. As expected, the match was very fast and had a lot of slick moves. Also, Shiima had his heel faction at ringside, which added a semblance of a story to the bout, as TOKYO had half a dozen guys piling up on him when he ended up on the outside. The execution was fine and this wound up being a decent indy style match, altough the action was not the type that will leave a lasting impression on me.
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[1999-01-15-AJPW-New Year's Giant Series] Yoshinari Ogawa vs Masahito Kakihara
Jetlag replied to Loss's topic in January 1999
Very cool match. Kakihara working over Ogawa with stiff shoot-like offense like a Mini-Kawada and getting the better of him with his shoot submission skills was pretty great. The legwork, aswell as the selling of it, were pretty sharp and because both guys are good defensive wrestlers, the finishing stretch was a ton of fun and not once bordering on overkill. I didn't think this was a classic or something but one of the more interesting junior matches of the 90s for sure. -
[1999-01-15-AJPW-New Year's Giant Series] Kenta Kobashi vs Vader
Jetlag replied to Superstar Sleeze's topic in January 1999
This felt like a match of two halves. Kobashi, with the bloody mouth and bandage was a pretty great visual, and the match was really good when Vader was laying an epic beating on Kobashi. However, I felt Kobashi could have done much better to make Vader look like a monster. His comebacks were fairly easy, and aside from the great opening exchange, I thought he was offensively not as good as Sting. Kobashi just running through his moveset against Vader of all people was kind of poor. So, overall it amounted to a solid match. Afterwards Vader is backstage yelling about why the competition for the Triple Crown is a japanese only club with a sad look in his eye. Vader will not stand for these injustices! -
HDA assaulting Kobashi's face was pretty great. The work on Kawada's leg was utilized smartly and all l the twisting and turning exchanges down the stretch were really well done. It almost feels a bit like a Greatest Hits version of an AJPW tag as it seems these guys can do this stuff in their sleep at this point. Still, a very good tag that was a breeze to watch and hit all the right marks. Agree about Taue, this felt like his formula performance and showcases his coolness very nicely.
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A highly athletic 7 minute sprint that saw these guys busting out one spectacular, unique move after another. Psicosis and Juvi acknowledged their heel roles, so it wasn't a nonsensical spotfest either. Typical of these guys to work their butts off like this on a random Nitro, Psicosis even busting out his crazy legdrop to the floor.
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Aw man, I'm not that bad. I understand there are limitations for niche events like this. However, the tournament had 3 matches that went 6-10 minutes, and everything else was 5 minutes or below, with 1 match going exactly 1 minute and Cobb/Walter going 2 and a half. So the combined time of all the matches on this card was 40 MINUTES. That kind of thing is a joke even for a sideshow and it wouldn't have hurt to give some of these bouts 5-6 minutes more time. As the matches with Thatcher showed you can have a very good match in 6, 8 or 10 minutes. Plus, Cobb and WALTER are far superior workers compared to Carnage and Rico. But doing anything special in a 2 minute match is near impossible. So this match was just a tease and nothing more.