King of Debt

Future wrestling message-board scholars set a marker here, the beginning of the sequence of events chaining from elliott having a little fun to this website being shut down by the FBI just before the Mecha Mummy nominee thread reaches its 90th page in 2025

That match is from when Hyuga was still working under her real name, Tomoko Kuzumi, date is 11th October 1998. On an unrelated note, are those Chinese subtitles in the '98 video fansubs or was there actually a channel somewhere showing JWP and translating the commentary as such?

Going to immediately recommend this match as far as super-recent old-man-Otani goes. It got its fair share of praise when it happened but I honestly don't think it was anywhere close to enough. Real last-stand stuff, incredible performance.

Yu Iizuka immediately jumps to my mind and I'm extremely excited to see what he gets up to in GLEAT, VENY/ASUKA also, perhaps Takahiro Tababa if more of that ultra-sleaze-indy stiff son of a gun output pops up (I know he does mail-order for his IMPACT shows so there's always that at least). I could imagine some of the newer joshi upstarts being in the discussion as well but I don't know who I would make the call for yet

This is how he loses GWE 2026. Laugh now, but when the hairs need to be split, we'll all have to get down to answering the questions we were once too scared to ask.

This one rules, Toba trying to school the young Hashimoto while Ishii and Naito pop their heads in the door to make things difficult. Right from the opening exchanges between Toba and Ishii they're just smacking the everliving life out of each other, Toba throwing wicked punches while Ishii unveils his stunning counter-strategy of just not feeling pain when you get hit really hard in the face by a guy wearing boxing gloves and then hitting him really hard instead. You really want to see more of him and Naito but they're both awesome in their supporting roles - a large part of the drama comes in Hashimoto's close grappling style requiring him having to eat Toba's harsh strikes to even stand a chance, and he does well in getting this struggle across, finding small opportunities in between Toba's blows and struggling more to fight them as the damage takes its toll. Everyone is on form here, everything is well-paced, and most importantly everyone is hitting HARD. One of the absolute stand-outs of DDT's early days.

Should anybody be looking for IWE footage, there's two channels that have been uploading quite a fair deal of it over the past couple of months. Not necessarily in the best quality, but it seems to be the most overlooked of the major Japanese promotions despite having quite the cult reputation over there, so its good to have more of it around https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCazm-u1YyDA1vcqMMW7Kyig/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjrQb_JOvtp0oXr1N792aeA/videos Seeing Slim J's name in there makes me wonder if there's anywhere, video upload or tape trading, who has the old NWA Anarchy TV stuff on them. I know that NWA Wildside sold DVDs of all their stuff and its all been getting uploaded to IWTV anyway, so it would definitely be interesting to see it appear again especially with the reputation the WarGames stuff has with those who've seen it. I think a big part of why I don't get into projects like these is because I always just get overwhemingly frustrated with how many guys there are that cases could be investigated for if the footage just wasn't lost, decayed or decaying in a basement somewhere, never mind not being recorded at all

This runs 6m5s, we get 69% (nice) of it at 4m11s. The sinews of the match are missing in what we have but what we have is enough to inform us of this much; Koki Kitahara is a capital-P Prick. Ni Hao was a young upstart in Kitahara's CAPTURE International and neither of them showed much mercy to each other, Ni Hao swinging giant shots to Kitahara's skull from mount and then headbutting him into the red only for Kitahara to get on top and start swinging even harder. Then he breaks up a straight ankle lock by punching Ni Hao square in the goddamn face. Its a fluke that we have even this much of it on this comm. release but all that we get here is just wanton brutality, and yet as set in stone as the result is it never feels like Ni Hao is entirely out of his depth - it's just that his master hits a lot harder. Outstanding stuff, for all its brevity.

I only stayed up and tuned in for the main and I was slightly underwhelmed but considering the ceiling was, apparently, the pinnacle of the entire sport, it still did pretty alright. An insatiable appetite for deathmatches has left me feeling like they hold back with these sorts of things but the fight was undeniable. Eddie Kingston is going to be the AEW World Champion. It will not be today. But it will happen. And that's beautiful.

I'm all for changing the thread title from "Is Impact the best promotion in wrestling history?" to just "Yes.", to be honest.

It went down two weeks ago or so, and then it went back up after a few hours. It would be nice to know what's going on, but just to say it might come back later In any case there is still backups in... certain places where wrestling torrents of a extreme variety can be found. Not that I know anything of the sort, but there you go.

Eddie Kingston. Eddie Kingston. Eddie Kingston. Goddamn.

I really feel like I'm missing something with the plaudits the Kay/Rosa match is getting - very long with not enough momentum to justify it. I'll blame the time-zone difference... The tournament was really good, though. Aldis/Gordon might grow on me but this involves me having the thought process somewhere down the line of "Hey, let's rewatch this Flip Gordon match, that might be great!", which isn't something I ever thought I'd be thinking

South Korea apparently had pro wrestling but I don't know if any footage exists. Ireland too, but the footage I linked is most likely the only pre-1970 footage that exists.