PeteF3
-
Posts
10287 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Blogs
Everything posted by 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?
-
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). -
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.
-
[1996-12-08-AJW-Real Earnest] Manami Toyota vs Kyoko Inoue
PeteF3 replied to Loss's topic in December 1996
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. -
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.*
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Lots and lots of babyface Big Boss Man matches--DiBiase, Mountie, Perfect, and Doink.
-
This is the first I've heard of a Street vs. Saint match being out there. Or are we thinking of Street/Jim Breaks?
-
That works if Pillman was legit unhinged train wreck and was an attention whore in real life. Well...
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Pretty good match that's almost pure wrasslin', from the moves to the double-teams to the pure southern tag layout.
-
Savage's contract was up and he was pretty unhappy with how things were going, and who could blame him? Havoc was essentially a contractual obligation and then it was widely assumed he was WWF-bound. I guess getting into the NWO and avoiding a demolition every week was one of the perks of his re-signing.
-
Mulligan was very much the Big Boss Man of the '70s--a big man who was not only surprisingly nimble but who could do a stunningly effective job of working underneath as a sympathy babyface, despite dwarfing most of his opponents. There's a face Mulligan vs. heel Paul Jones match on the Mid-Atlantic films that should totally not work, but it does.
-
Fire Pro Wrestling Returns for the PS2 calls it a "bat hanging lock." Sometimes they fudged move names to get around trademarks but that works for me.
-
pol explained it better than I did. No problem with the videos at all, I just take issue (and it may not entirely be rational) with the style of criticism it's unintentionally created.
-
I hate how it's made "botch" into some sort of quasi-insider term, complete with a fucking Wikipedia entry.
-
When was it confirmed that that actually happened? The PWO, F4W, and KFM threads all end ambiguously.
-
I think the more accurate statement would be, "Ask TV how important the major sports leagues are."