PeteF3
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Everything posted by PeteF3
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Years later but oh well...I think Loss meant Gordy was "gone" in a figurative sense. Which is correct. That's a pretty underwhelming babyface team.
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Undertaker vs. Unabomb...yay. This isn't a bad promo from UT, all told. They more or less telegraph that Undertaker will end Unabomb's career.
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The Hardyz get a good little flurry to start, but Jeff's dropkicks at the end are sub-Renegade quality. I'm loving seeing the switch flipped, with Randy Hales being characterized as the "most obnoxious man" Les Thatcher has ever met and Wolfie and JC regressing into arrogant douchebag heels.
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Another killer promo from Budro, who is--yes--the second-most compelling force on the microphone in 1995 past Cactus Jack. Except Buddy's not had the Shane Douglas albatross around his neck.
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The full match (or nearly full) is absolutely awesome as I recall, on the level of their Louisville bout. A standout performance by Robert Gibson (!) again. Here we just get the finish of PG-13 regaining the tag belts and a LONG post-match beatdown. Mark Curtis hands a spur off his cowboy boot to Ricky Morton to bust up Randy Hales and he drops legs on referee Bill Rush, while Gibson uses his high position in the ring to head off PG-13 and Brickhouse Brown. Hales is eventually stretchered out (the EMT yells at the cameraman to turn the thing off in a nice touch). Russell reports back in the studio that Hales looked like he was in "some horrible car wreck" with ultra-high blood pressure just to sell this angle even more. Lance puts over how the Rock 'n Rolls have been unable to adjust to a new era where PG-13 are a more popular team--it's like 1990 Sgt. Slaughter! Fantastic work from Lance. His balance between explaining the angle and his righteous disgust for their actions is stupendous. Mark Curtis cuts a promo comparing decrepit old fossil Lance Russell to "that old Indian in the commercials." The entire USWA--heel and babyfaces--are upset over the injury to Hales, which Curtis finds amusing. Eddie Marlin has now phoned up Bob Armstrong (a conversation I'd love to hear) and a Texas Death rematch is set for Monday. Great promo by Morton putting over the match stips. Lance declares that Smoky Mountain Wrestling is a HAVEN for outlaws. Now Curtis is out and they immediately take steps to make this look unplanned--shaky cameras, Curtis yanking the mic away from Russell and Lance swiping it back, etc. He and Lance almost get into a fight(!) before PG-13 run Curtis off. Wolfie cuts a very serious promo putting over what Randy Hales does for the company. The quality of the USWA has dipped quite a bit since 1990, but they've proven on multiple occasions this year that they can hit it out of the park when they have to. -
Couldn't get into this at all, and I like UWFI and even UWFI tags far more than most shootstyle.
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The Gangstas jump PE in back of the arena and spraypaint them after a brawl where all four guys are appearing to try not to break a nail. They follow up with a promo that rambles on quite a bit longer than New Jack did in SMW. It's fine, but I think they were more effective in Smoky Mountain precisely because they didn't "fit." Here, they're two garbage brawlers out of many.
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They're trying to push Sid as a coward as the apparent hook for the lumberjack match. Dumb, dumb, dumb. I'm no Sid fanboy but the USWA did a much better job of using him as a lawyering heel rather than a total fraidy-cat. Sid doesn't say much and we get an entirely too-close shot of his nostrils.
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WWF commercials were getting pretty cringe-worthy at this point. Bob Backlund is the highlight.
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A replay of an old Double J vignette from before his debut--Ronnie P. Gossett is sighted again. Now he's in Vegas celebrating the success of Ain't I Great? and he runs into an older, fatter Eddie Izzard Rip Taylor.
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Ross and Pettingill are in full-blown comedy mode, almost like Cole, Lawler, & JBL today with fewer product and Twitter plugs. This should have led to a semi-sustained push for Barry Horowitz, who had earned one, but he quickly settled into JTTS-dom soon after. Ross and Todd can't help but yammer while Sunny is talking.
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All the best bits have already been quoted, but dig the knock-off Jaws music when Shark first comes out.
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Whoops, Bullet Bob has vacated the title and put it up in a rematch.
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Another double Dusty finish, coming off the Raven/Richards-PE title switch. We get official-sounding soundbites from the ring announcer and Mark Curtis explaining what all happened.
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Awesome stuff all around. I love how Curtis can make himself come across as a non-wrestler despite being fully trained. An entertaining bullshit finish to the match at hand as Curtis takes it upon himself to clobber Wolfie D with a hubcap and fast-count the pin to net the Rock 'n Rolls the USWA tag titles. Really fun post-match, too. First PG-13 beat up Mark Curtis, then the Rock 'n Rolls beat up PG-13, then Randy Hales comes back to make the save and get his licks in on Mark Curtis. And a heel promo from the Rock 'n Rolls to boot. This is back-to-back matches I've watched now involving Evil Tsuyoshi Kikuchi and Evil Robert Gibson. Give the win to Robert on this one--his mannerisms and the way he carries himself is more convincing than almost anything he's done as a babyface in SMW.
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Mitsuharu Misawa, Kenta Kobashi, & Jun Akiyama vs. Toshiaki Kawada, Tsuyoshi Kikuchi, & Yoshinari Ogawa (7/8) Because I couldn't go through '95 without getting a glimpse of EVIL KIKUCHI. He's even switched to evil black tights, though he eschewed the evil goatee. Sadly he seems pretty banged up and out of it by this point, so he doesn't do a ton and leaves the heavy lifting to his partners. The first half of this is all about setting up Kawada as a killer, as he chokes out Misawa and is basically treated almost as a no-selling monster heel from the way he carries himself and the urgency with which Kobashi and Akiyama take him on. After that it bogs down into a pretty through-the-motions tag, with a through-the-motions FIP segment on Akiyama and a through-the-motions finish with Misawa putting Ogawa away without a ton of trouble. One for AJPW completists, though I could get into Kikuchi & Ogawa as a ratfuck tag team.
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It wouldn't have changed much, since it was the pure Ronnie Garvin "win the title so he can drop it back to the champ" role, but Vader over Sid as WWF champ in late '96 is the pre-eminent instance for me.
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I'll just say that one of the very few post-2000 matches I really found myself getting emotionally invested in was Jeff's ladder match against the Undertaker on Raw. Jeff had me pretty much willing and praying for him to climb that thing and beat 'Taker. That has to count for something. I don't think I'd vote for Jeff but I actually could be persuaded. His level of psychology wasn't your Arn Anderson style in the least, but in terms of emotionally connecting with a crowd, I don't think it can be denied that he had something to that.
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This was quite the war, with a very shine-heat-comeback style layout across each fall. There have been previous AAA matches with greater babyface comebacks than this, but this was quite a performance by the rudos, and it's hard to complain about a match with this much blood, hate, violence, and mask-tearing. Fuerza getting mask turned around...I'm torn on that, actually. It's a well-done comedy spot, but I don't think it came at a good point in the match, as by that point this was all about a hate-filled war and asskicking rudos and I think things sort of retrogressed to be going back to stooge comedy. That said, it was certainly effective, and Fuerza creaming Tirantes with a big boot gets the biggest pop of the match.
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Fantastic match. Not as good as the Mascarita Sagrada matches, but Munequito is not far behind him and Espectrito as far as being a minis worker. His agility and quickness for such a fat little guy is impressive, and he's able to twist himself into all of the crazy submissions Espectrito cares to put him in. It's really Espectrito holding this together, as he comes off as a really smart worker in addition to being a master technician and bump machine. Tirantes interpreting the camel clutch as a chokehold and breaking it was a great spot that got awesome heat and had Dr. Morales practically ready to leap out of his announcer's desk--it felt like Munequito was wrestling against two guys here (three if you count Payaso Azul) but unlike some other matches, Tirantes established his role without smothering the match.
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Weird as fuck, and it's probably for the best that this is in highlight form. But gosh darnit, it's hard not to feel affection for this match with the crowd so into it and the youngsters so willing to bump like loons for the old guys' trademark offense. Backlund forcing Saturn into trying the short arm scissor/one-arm Gotch lift spot right in the middle of the finishing sequence doesn't say much for Bob's psychology expertise.
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"COME ON, BABY!" "THIS IS IT!" "AAAAH! AW, FUCK! SHIT!" "ASK HIM!" Jericho's Iron Mike Sharpe-esque vocalizations in Japan are always fun. Now, Jericho is *not* a guy I expect to drag a good match out of Ultimo at this point, or any other point pre-'98. And this starts off with the indy standoff spot that just hasn't aged well, no matter how cool it may have seemed at the time. That said...they ended up getting me into this. This is a match that you expect to go off the rails at any point, and aside from a couple of botches from Ultimo, it really doesn't. Jericho actually has some really well-timed dives and offense in general and I started biting on a bunch of the near-falls, particularly Dragon's la majistral cradle which was a really clever set-up. That said--this goes on WAY too long with, literally, probably ten 2.9-counts too many. I can see why people of the time would go nuts for it, and I in fact enjoyed this more than some other mid-'90s spotfests. Coming from Ultimo that is high praise indeed. Not one of the high-end junior matches of any year, but I can see it as a coming-out party for Jericho as a worker.
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Is TNA the worst wrestling promotion in history?
PeteF3 replied to Loss's topic in Megathread archive
It was damaged by the big earthquake in 2011, I don't know if that has anything to do with its current look or not. -
Hiromichi Fuyuki vs. Shiro Koshinaka, 7/7/95 These aren't exactly two guys I gush over the opportunity to see, and aside from a few interference spots and Fuyuki taking a bell to Shiro's head on the floor, this isn't a bloody interpromotional brawl either. But it is a very well laid-out match between two guys who know how to work a crowd. Fuyuki has finished his transformation into possibly the biggest slob in the history of wrestling, but can still move about--he's pretty much a Japanese indy Dusty Rhodes. Fuyuki has taped ribs which plays into some cool counters as well as the finishing stretch. Nothing that will change the world but a match that reflects well on both guys.
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That was cute. After the initial reversal, Alfonso declares that there is no instant replay in ECW, therefore the original decision stands after all. I question why the Gangstas would want to cost PE the tag titles right before a match against them at the ECW Arena, though.