strobogo

NJ has had consistent bad and lazy booking for like...5 years, though.

Yeah it's pretty good. Has a lot more energy than Choshu tags had had in quite a while up to that point. As for Killer Khan, the next match is Road Warriors vs Takano/Machine but LOD attacks and bloodies Takano before the match, so Khan comes back out and replaces him in his street gear. After that match, a long post match brawl happens and eventually Choshu comes out to not really do anything but hold a bloodied up Khan in the corner while LOD continues to beat up young boys and officials. Khan then turns on Choshu and double teams him with Super Strong Machine and unofficially joins the Calgary Hurricanes for the next 3 months before forming a team with Terry Gordy for the last quarter of the year and then going to the WWF.

El Rey was pretty cool at first but in the last year it seemed like they'd just air Air Wolf for 15 hours a day and then From Dusk Til Dawn the series in prime time and maybe a LU rerun or ultra cheap kung fu movie before going into infomercials.

Riki Choshu spends 80% of his time in matches in half a scorpion or adjusting his hair

I have it as recommended, but not highly

Counter point just for the sake of arguing: Nothing gets ratings on these tiny ass channels, regardless of content. El Rey had to shut down entirely because they had so few viewers for the entire network.

Rusher from time to time is involved in some really good matches but most of the time he's just kind of there 3/28/76 Rusher Kimura vs. Jumbo Tsuruta UN Heavyweight Title reactivated after closure of JWA in 1973, part of IWE vs AJPW show Highly Recommended It seems to me he has about 3 pretty strong performances a year and the rest he's just a guy filling the card

I've mentioned it multiple times in multiple threads that I've been going through the AJ Archive and I'm into the middle of 1986 and can not stand Choshu at this point. Anything that goes over 10 minutes is guaranteed to be mostly Choshu sitting in half of a scorpion deathlock which will never end a match unless it is a very low ranking member of a tag or six man being put in it. Singles matches, as few and far between as they are in AJPW, are full of blatant filler and bullshit finishes no matter the length. You can be pretty well assured he's going to take your finish and then pop up to hit you with a backdrop or lariat with in 45 seconds. In a tag, he does nothing, lets his teammates carry the whole match, then pops in to no sell a finish and hit a lariat or find something else to do while his team mate drops a fall. For whatever he added to AJPW's over all match style, by mid 1986 he's such an albatross and I dread anything he's in. At that time, the Calgary Hurricanes are far more exciting and have more heated matches than anything Choshu and his group are doing. Choshu's revolution lasted about 4-6 months before it was stale, or more specifically, HE was stale. His single matches suck, the tags his crew are in that don't feature him at all are routinely better. Can not wait for this little shit to go back to New Japan. Of all the big legends in puro, Choshu has to be the guy I like the least.

It took probably until 2015 until Okada started to click for me, and I agree with all criticisms in this thread. I've come to be less and less interested in his work outside of the G1 because of the main event style default becoming longer and longer in NJ leading to the boring first 15-20 minutes of work that goes nowhere. There's also certainly a too much too soon factor with him where he broke basically every achievement there is to have in the company by the time he was 30 which leads to things like "he's bored and knows he's going to get the title back multiple times so he's going to try to use this shitty submission no one likes and looks lame for a year just to challenge himself". Unless NJ booking continues to be so dull and uninteresting, it's impossible to think he's not somewhere on the list in 5 years.

Did they look anywhere near as good as they looked in Japan, though?

I don't love that part and it also made me sick and furthermore headbutts in NJ since drive me nuts. There's literally zero reason to do real fucking headbutts in a fake fight.

Yeah the real world is people in WWE don't resign in protest over problem people being hired. And if they happened to in this case, it wouldn't be anyone of importance to the company as the top 3 women have an existing relationship with her that they've kept before, during, and after her unprofessional behavior. I think she's talented, but I have no stake in her. I wouldn't hire her if I were running a company not because some people might hypothetically get upset, but because she's an unprofessional asshole and has proven it multiple times in multiple promotions. Just like I wouldn't hire Austin Aries, Low Ki, or Teddy Hart for the same reasons. You seem to think I'm defending her or just a mark for her when instead all I'm saying no one is going to walk out of WWE if they decide they want to hire her some day, and anyone that would is not someone WWE would give a shit about walking out anyway. I really don't think anyone in AEW would, either, should they decide to take the chance on her.

The Bryan/Nigel match with the ring post headbutt spot disgusted me so much I completely gave up on indie wrestling probably until up to 2015 or so when I'd occasionally find a PWG show to watch.

That makes sense but it's still funny to me. I occasionally will get a notice about some Memphis or 70s AJPW stuff I have up, I think even some JWA stuff, and it will come years after its been uploaded.

Worst rings to bump in: Lucha rings 40s/50s/60s that just used boxing rings WWF from late 80s to the early Attitude Era Because I've actually bumped in a boxing ring before and it didn't seem nearly as awful as when you see bumps in the WWF ring especially 1989-1992ish but the 1994 rings also seemed absolutely brutal

I know you're not asking me and this isn't specific to Choshu vs Fujinami matches, but fuck Choshu's spending anywhere from 25 to 50% of any given match over 10 minutes sitting in half a scorpion is coming off as the laziest shit and blatant filler while he waits to pop up after someone's finish and win with a lariat or just happen to be distracted while his partner drops a fall.

Her relationship to three of the four most heavily pushed women in the company is totally immaterial to anything? Lol. She's been training with Sasha and Bayley post Impact debacle. Who is going to walk out and who is big enough to make WWE decide against hiring her if they want to?

She has a relationship with Sasha, Bayley, and Charlotte. Also, I find it hard to believe anyone is going to walk over a hire outside of maybe Joey Ryan in either company. In fact, I can't think of anytime someone has been hired in WWE and anyone quit out of protest.

Shibata/Okada is a pretty specific story with specific character dynamics that couldn't be replicated with any two other wrestlers. Okada being Okada and booked like Okada is completely essential to the match, as is Shibata's history, style, and personality/persona. This match couldn't have been replicated even with Tana/Shibata, which has their own pretty specific history and story for their matches but is quite different. It's important to Okada's career narrative as well, and if Gedo wasn't so lazy, it would play into NJ lore like so many of the 70s/80s/90s matches, but instead it kind of gets swept into a corner because of Shibata braining himself.

Both the Owen and Rumble match with Diesel I could find in pieces but one part missing for both so I didn't include since I mean surely everyone posting here has seen both many times anyway and I had their other matches in the series so whatever. I was pretty amused I could easier find fan cams from the 90s than some stuff that aired on TV and was up on the Network for years.

Without spending excessive time searching, here's nearly everything on Grimmas' Bret top 100 list. A handful of matches I couldn't find at all, some are split up into parts, and a couple I could only find by looking up the entire tape they were included on. The Rumble 1995 and WM Owen match I could not find online, which is wild. Bret top 100 playlist

If I had to guess, probably from his WWF run as basically everyone coming in from Japan had looked not good in the WWF basically up to Asuka, or at least Tajiri.

Shibata/Okada might be the match of the past decade, so that has to be a solid check in his resume

Agree he was actually a better brawler, but disagree about his matwork. His technique on everything was so good. Excellence of Execution really is among the most accurate wrestling nick names of all time.

Tenryu going out almost paralyzing Okada sure was something