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PeteF3

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Everything posted by PeteF3

  1. PeteF3
    Raven declaring that he's accomplished everything in his life by himself is pretty great heeling, one has to admit. As is his complaining that while he was in rehab, a guy with even more issues in Sandman was taking his title. This is a perfectly acceptable straight-up wrasslin' promo with Raven calling for challengers. The fake-out at the end where Raven's talking about the "man who's been trying to beat me since I was a little kid" (not Tommy Dreamer, but himself) was fun, too. That's followed by a horrible video package highlighting his title win, with a shitty match edited in particularly shitty fashion.
  2. PeteF3
    Quite the hard-sell for Hogan vs. Piper on this show. I guess that answers my earlier question about Piper's challenge. Piper stages an in-ring sitdown until Hogan comes out, but instead he's greeted by Eric Bischoff and his new evil goatee. Bischoff gets absolutely DRENCHED with crap on the way to the ring (Heenan: "Look at him, he's sweating!"). Really good segment overall with nobody wearing out their welcome. Eric makes his point, Piper cold cocks him to a huge pop, and the Outsiders and DiBiase are held off by Piper and Kevin Greene as the crowd loses their shit, and things go off the air right as Nash makes a play to enter the ring. One of many, many great endings to come (on both shows, actually) that had you counting the minutes until next Monday night.
  3. PeteF3
    Ric has to come out to Arn's theme, for not the first time. Flair's pretty much a full-fledged babyface now, even kissing up to Kevin Greene. He then brings out the "greatest Scotsman since William Wallace." Flair, Piper, and Okerlund are having too much fun here.
  4. PeteF3
    Okay, I absolutely love Larry Z dubbing the NWO leader as "Ed Wood Hogan." Piper hops around the ring to show the NWO just how much damage they did to his leg. Piper rambles as he's wont to do, but mostly keeps it on point. It's still a personal grudge with Hogan for him, not a WCW/NWO thing. With WCW Piper, you never quite know if he's sticking to the script or not, and I don't know if he's doing that when he's calling out Hogan "right now."
  5. PeteF3
    Sort of a standard Bret interview, carried by his gravitas. The highlight of this segment are the recaps of past Raws and a London house show, as they begin to tease a Davey Boy Smith babyface turn and feud with Austin. That was the originally scheduled match for WM13, had the Bret-HBK match gone through.
  6. PeteF3
    I do think there are some diminishing returns with these MPro multi-mans, because like all the Dangerous Alliance 6-mans in WCW there's no sense of an overarching, long-term story. The babyfaces do their shine spots, Kaientai do their 5-on-1 beatdowns and poses, and then the stretch run. Here, they attempt to shake things up by adding an elimination stip, and this also has the old '80s NJPW rules where throwing a guy to the floor is an elimination. That somewhat mitigates the rather cheap and sudden finishes that Loss talks about--we do get a few quickie eliminations in that standard WWF Survivor Series way, but a few guys get tossed out which thins the numbers more realistically, even if it's a somewhat cheap way for certain guys not to do jobs. All that to say that while this isn't as good as the best of this promotion, it's worth watching because things do feel different down the stretch--particularly when Sasuke is eliminated and Delfin and Naniwa have to try to fight to survive on their own. The closing stretch is probably the best Naniwa has ever looked, actually.
  7. PeteF3
    That sounds like the story Foley tells of asking Owen Hart how his match with Dan Severn went. Owen: "He's a nice guy."
  8. PeteF3
    Memphis was plagued by masked gimmicks around this time but I *think* I remember it being Jeff Gaylord. Aren't you glad you asked?
  9. PeteF3
    Piper vs. Funk happened in 1983 in Toronto, for the record. There were promos for the match on Youtube once upon a time (with Funk babyfacing himself by claiming his mother was Canadian).
  10. PeteF3
    Someone upload some of this Mr. Donnie shit to Youtube. When they were first hyping the Brother Love Show at SummerSlam, Okerlund went out of his way to say that Love's unannounced guest was "someone who had never been at Madison Square Garden before." Yes, we know that's not strictly true with Flair's case, but it got as far as announcing on TV that they had something a bit more special than Jim Duggan.
  11. PeteF3
    Another match that starts slow and blah but turns into something pretty good. There are some really good transitions and changes of momentum down the stretch and the near-falls are numerous without overstaying their welcome. Kyoko debuts the Victoria Driver, which is a less head-spiky version of the Burning Hammer, to put Toyota away. Feels like a big moment, sold wonderfully by a tearful Kyoko, one of the only "big moments" for AJW the entire year. They closed out on a relative high note but this feels like a downright moribund company. I mean, it's probably perfectly healthy in comparison to UWFI, but it's impossible to deny how badly it's fallen off in '96.
  12. PeteF3
    This is pretty slow and disjointed to start, then picks up at the end as Yoshida and Inoue start throwing every near-fall they have at their opponents. Yoshida shows off some fancy new offense, including one of the first chronological appearances of the Air Raid Crash. We get some pretty good near-falls, but the nagging feeling that this is all for naught persists. I'm not one to go this route in criticizing a match, and in fact I'm pretty sure I've never made this complaint to this degree about any '90s match in this project, but having Aja and Dynamite decisively go over as they did feels like a real missed opportunity. AJW seems desperate for new star talent and this really felt like time to pull the trigger on an upset. Not that it would have made either Inoue or Yoshida an instant main eventer or turned around the company's fortunes or anything by itself, but it would have shaken things up *somewhat.*
  13. PeteF3
    Goddamn, I want to see everything Tomoko Watanabe ever did. I should start a Microscope thread on her or something because as it stands now I definitely want to squeeze her into my GWE ballot. I don't know if the Great Matches are there but holy shit is she fun to watch. Big flying fat woman offense, unbelievable velocity and snap to her moves, and she bumps like a maniac and is a fine seller to boot. Bennett gamely attempts to match her move for move and bump for bump, but can't quite do it. Nakanishi, less than 6 months into her career is in for a few minutes just to get abused starting with Mita seemingly shoot sandbagging her as she attempts to apply a Boston crab. After she gets beaten into oblivion she plays almost no role the rest of the match--I get she's a rookie but this felt like Michael Jordan getting frozen out during the '85 All-Star Game. This isn't one for the Psychology Hall of Fame nor is it particularly heated, but it's a hell of a fun spotfest and one to watch if you like big folks flying around. The dive train climaxing with a LUCHA REGGIE tope is a highlight. One thing holding this back is a pretty poorly done ending with my new favorite worker being the main culprit, as Watanabe completely blows off the Death Lake Driver, which should be sold as a killer move, just so she can run to her finish. It's gold up until then though, and I could have watched these 6 go at it for twice as long.
  14. PeteF3
    ECW, where we're Extreme because we SWEAR ON THE MIC A LOT. So there were some flashes of good work here in-between all the uncomfortable moments. I actually liked the fan run-in, just as an illustration of the visceral hatred Douglas was able to engender with this audience. But Styles is as bad as Vince McMahon in justifying babyface behavior--Dreamer giving the cunnilingus piledriver and popping Francine's titties = good, Douglas nailing Beulah = cowardly son of a bitch. And how the fuck many times did we need to see contrived moments of various wrestlers turning their backs on their opponents like idiots only to get nailed? I do agree with El-P on Douglas' fantastic cover at the finish.
  15. PeteF3
    I honestly wasn't too puzzled by the crowd reactions--the point about the presence of casual fans is well-taken, but I took it as the traditional fans simply not wanting to see Santo lose the legendary mask, regardless of his behavior. Anyway, yeah, this is a tough one to rate because you can't just disregard the stuff with Casas, and both of those falls were rather perfunctory and even disappointing. But the entire presentation is incredible, from the video promos before the match to the promos *during* the match to the insane crowd. It's one of the best jobs either Mexican company has done at projecting a "big match" feel since the big bullring AAA shows. As a straight-up one-on-one, Dandy vs. Santo is as outstanding as you'd expect. I don't know if both guys bladed or Dandy's blood just got everywhere, but both guys are at about a 0.7 Muta by the end of things, and Santo's mask is a deep crimson. I don't think I'd quite call it Dandy's high point, as those Satanico and Azteca matches in 1990 were awfully good. But it's a fantastic renaissance performance from him after sort of fading to the background in recent years, while Santo crowd reactions aside proves himself to be a masterful worker worthy of his name and rep, as he continues to slip seamlessly into the rudo (or quasi-rudo) role. A great match, but not one I'm comfortable calling a MOTY--see above regarding the first two falls and I'm not sure the best action was quite as good as the previous two 6-mans. But this has been a hell of a day of wrestling nevertheless.
  16. PeteF3
    Lots and lots of babyface Big Boss Man matches--DiBiase, Mountie, Perfect, and Doink.
  17. PeteF3

    Adrian Street

    PeteF3 replied to Grimmas's topic in Nominees

    This is the first I've heard of a Street vs. Saint match being out there. Or are we thinking of Street/Jim Breaks?
  18. PeteF3
    That works if Pillman was legit unhinged train wreck and was an attention whore in real life. Well...
  19. PeteF3
    Arn got mileage out of that "shampoo a moose" line. In the '89 WCW timeline that just came out, Cornette quotes him telling that line to Tony Schiavone, in reference to Schiavone's 6 kids.
  20. PeteF3
    http://wrestlingclassics.com/.ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=9;t=024976 The Classics thread on Rogers. Hard to believe that was 11 and a half years ago. Also, the reaction of some of the people there is absurdly over the top even for a hypothetical TRUE version of this story.
  21. PeteF3
    A classic from old All-Japan: wrestler A picks up wrestler B for a backdrop suplex, and wrestler B kicks off either the top rope or turnbuckle, sending both men hurtling backwards and hurting wrestler A. I think 99% of occurrences of this spot in history have been in AJPW. Basically every ref bump in the history of Memphis came from a wrestler grabbing a side headlock and getting shot off straight ahead into the referee.
  22. PeteF3
    Yup. As expected, there's your MOTY. All the good stuff seems to have been mentioned already, but this is another match with twists and turns all the way throughout--it's an odd comparison but I love it for the same reasons I loved Shawn vs. Mankind. At this point Kawada/Taue were looking like perennial second-rate choke artists going in, like the pre-'04 Red Sox or Ohio State or the '80s Broncos. Misawa/partner were the Yankees, the SEC, the NFC. And if they lose a primo player like a Kobashi or a Montana or a David Wells--fuck it, they'll just go and get an Akiyama or Steve Young or Roger Clemens and re-load. This match is the Holy Demon Army's equivalent to the Broncos beating the Packers, to the Red Sox winning the '04 LCS, or Ohio State getting past 'bama. That it takes such a generally unsympathetic team and gets them over as such plucky underdogs is a triumph. But they make sure not to make them *too* sympathetic--Taue is still an opportunistic bastard with pretty much no qualms about doing whatever is necessary, as dawho sums up. Still, even as Misawa is being beaten down 2-on-1, there's a sense of...I don't want to call it justice, but the sense that he's had this coming. Best overall moment here is Kawada's second power bomb, with Akiyama half-dead but still desperately reaching out to make a save and Taue rather casually leaning against him to prevent it. That Misawa manages to kick out anyway is just icing on the cake--one of the best near-falls in history. I'll have to go back someday and give 6/9/95 a re-watch but as of now this is AJPW's peak tag match.
  23. PeteF3
    That was who broke was talking about when he mentioned smoeater. I think most of the big reveals got deleted off KFM in short order, maybe even the entire thread, though the old KFM archives are still around. The Classics post was still around as of a year or so ago.
  24. PeteF3
    Greco was supposedly trained by the Malenkos but with the bowl haircut and ridiculous '90s soul patch I think he's actually Eels frontman Mark Everett. I didn't think much of this. Kruger is good for some chop-down-the-tree spots and Greco has some nice suplexes, but this didn't have the strong layout of the MPro crossover match before and just sort of peters to the ending.
  25. PeteF3
    Pretty good match that's almost pure wrasslin', from the moves to the double-teams to the pure southern tag layout.
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