ohtani's jacket

This was pretty wild by CMLL standards, which isn't saying much but I can understand why these matches were popular with fans who weren't in the Mistico camp. There's a lot of posing and the occasional flare up, and it ends in controversial fashion with your standard promo afterwards. That leads to a beat down and the wrestlers being escorted away by CMLL security. It's a fun spectacle in spite of everyone doing their best to avoid working a match. I've always had a soft spot for Perro vs. Universo. I just like Universo in general. Pierroth vs. Halloween and Damian was fun as well even if Pierroth can barely walk at this point.

I enjoyed the episode a lot. At the beginning it sounded as though you were reading from your blog post a bit too directly, but you became more relaxed later on in the podcast. Definitely inspired me to watch the match again.

Shiro Koshinaka vs. Steve Wright (8/20/90) I thought this was an excellent match. I am a long time hater of Shiro Koshinaka, but this match and his excellent apuestas bout with Satanico have convinced me that he was one of the better touring Japanese workers of his era. He basically worked as a heel here, but it created a platform for Wright to work a hugely compelling performance from underneath. You won't find many better Wright performances than this. You can find matches with great brawling or exhibition style Euro work, but very few matches with a compelling narrative. There isn't a ton of matwork, but what matwork there is comes across as a do or die struggle. I wouldn't have expected a match with Koshinaka in it to be one of the better German catch bouts from the early 90s, but it makes sense given the makeup of competitors in these tent shows.

Always fun to see these guys. Yeah, you wish they'd get more time to let the match breathe, but beggars can't be choosers when it comes to these guys making TV.

This was slower than your typical CMLL television match. Unfortunately, that didn't make it any better than average. It was mostly built around Tarzan Boy vs. Lizmark Jr, which was only mildly interesting. Casas wore pants, which was off-putting. I hope the door is shut on the narrative about him being one of the best in the world for each year of his prime. It's not his fault that CMLL isn't doing anything with him, but he's not exactly stealing the show in matches like these. This was a crowd pleaser in the sense that they did a few house show style spots, and the tecnicos won, but there's nothing to really sink your teeth into here.

Talk about New Zealand's gift to wrestling history.

Fit Finlay vs. Otto Wanz (8/10/90) After watching Vader slug it out with Otto, I was interested to see what approach Finlay would take. It was more of a standard heel performance from Finlay. He bumped and sold for Otto in the beginning before chipping away at his legs and working him on the ground for a while. Nothing great. The finish was some BS with the heel ref whose name escapes me. Man, Finlay vs. Bull Power would have been interesting, especially if Vader threw a stray punch or two.

This was better than I thought it would be. I thought a rudo Atlantis might be exposed a bit in a singles match, but he did a good job of modifying his offense. He won't gonna give the top rudos a run for their money, but he's not embarrassing himself either. Mistico was having an off night. There was a large contingent of rudo fans booing him. I don't know if that affected him or not. Some of the blown spots were bad. There was moonsault spot where he was meant to land behind Atlantis, but he flew sideways and bounced chest first off the ropes. Despite the fact that Mistico was rattled, I still enjoyed the match. The finish was shit as Mistico pulled Atlantis' mask off for a cheap victory (I hate it when tecnicos resort to those sort of tactics). The Mistico fans were pumped up about it and drowned out the boos. It felt like a bit of an overreaction on their part but added to the spectacle. Dave gave this 4 stars, which is bizarre. I guess the crowd heat swayed him.

Matt didn't review the match so perhaps the INA mislabeled it.

It’s the same info that Bob shared but in a slightly different format.

I did a search for it and found it in the INA archives.

Bull Power vs. Otto Wanz (8/21/87) I love Bull Power vs. Otto Wanz matches. They're such amazing slugfests. In fact, it may be my favorite Vader match up of all time. Sometimes I wonder how he got away with slugging the boss so hard. This is a great fight. Wanz delivers a hell of a haymaker at the end, and they work a proper KO finish. This made me want to revisit the other Bull Power/Otto Wanz fights.

This was a fun match. It was probably asking a bit much for it to laden with psychology. It was reasonably well laid out and the execution was decent. Kobashi and Joe seemed a bit tired from the night before, Homicide was hurt and Low Ki had just arrived in the country a few hours earlier, but you couldn't fault the effort. Not as special as the night before, but that match was lightning in a bottle.

OK, so the Atlantis heel turn is officially the best thing happening in CMLL. If you watch a lot of CMLL, you'll know that most of the time you're sitting around waiting for something to happen. I won't pretend that Atlantis is a great rudo, but it's fun watching him try. This wasn't as good as their match from the week before, largely because it was built around next week's Mistico vs. Atlantis match, and was strangely edited to boot, but the time flew by.

It could be, but that's not how they work the final round. They're clearing searching for a pinfall. I don't think there was a lot of counter wrestling either, for that matter. They did some armwork, but aside from a few things that Taylor may have done, there wasn't a lot of undressing of holds. Owen was doing his favored kip up spots. There was a lot of buggering around with the ref. It was typical houses show stuff. I like the match overall, though.

Antonino Rocca & Pat O'Connor vs. Reggie Lisowski & Art Neilson (NWA Chicago, 10/22/1954) I'm not sure if this has been uploaded before. If it has, I can't remember seeing it. It's a long match that supposedly goes to a 60 minute time limit, but we only see 40-odd minutes. It's a typical 50s tag with two bruisers working inside moves and the occasional flash of brilliance from the babyfaces. Fortunately, Lisowski and Neilson have a convincing aura of toughness and make for credible thugs. Pat O'Connor makes me proud to be a New Zealander. I wish he was a bigger deal in NZ. They should put him on our money, if you ask me. I'm not really sure what I think of Rocca. He's an exciting hot tag, but he does so much stupid leaping about. I get that it was different for the time, but he does a lot of rolling about when a more straightforward hold would look better (sounds like a criticism of modern wrestling.) I did like the spot where he was taunting the heel with kicks to the face (or rather wiping his feet, as Davis put it.) Overall, an entertaining bout but not one high on drama.

This was one of the better trios matches of the year. You can skip a lot of the other stuff and just go straight to this. It was so good even Meltzer bothered to watch it. I'm sure Dave was on a Mistico tip at the time, but the intriguing part of this was watching Atlantis play rudo and the most exciting parts were his flare ups with Santo. Atlantis vs. Santo is a matchup I never thought I'd see as a rudo vs. tecnio pairing and it's one to savor. Atlantis isn't a great rudo, but does anyone really expect him to be? I didn't realize that KeMonito followed him over to the rudo side. That leads to some role reversal spots where it's KeMonito hitting spots on the tecnicos and the tecnicos threatening to beat him up. This was an exciting bout. Mistico and Perro Jr may be the hottest stars in CMLL, but the Atlantis rudo turn is stealing all of my attention

Tanahashi and Nakamura make for boring luchadors. it's as though they're not even trying. That said, they're being forced to play rudos, which goes a long way to explaining why their performances are so generic. I can't say I approve of Rey Bucanero's new look unless he's auditioning to be the third Hardy brother. He's lost a lot of his brilliance. Where's the Rey Bucanero who could carry anyone to a good match? Olimpico was also in this but might as well have been invisible.

More of the same meandering about from these fractions with the occasional flash of brilliance. Rudo contra rudo feuds are brilliant on paper but not when they're booked like this.

Dave Taylor vs. Owen Hart (Wien, 8/4/90) I'm not a huge fan of the globe-trotting younger Owen, and Dave Taylor has always lacked something for me, but I do like the novelty of watching a Dave Taylor vs. Owen Hart match. This was a deliberately paced draw, but an entertaining contest nonetheless. I particularly liked the final round where they stopped buggering around and tried to score a pinfall. If they'd worked he entire bout with that intensity it would have been a great match.

Fun match but nothing essential. I feel like I've seen better Tenryu matches of this ilk, and to be honest given the year KENTA has had there wasn't much to gain from being a Tenryu punching bag.

How were Finlay and Jones destroyed? They had just won the previous fall and were dominating the final fall until the tombstone reversal. Jones and Finlay worked what would be a comedy spot in other territories. If they'd used the tombstone reversal as the knockout finish then it would have been more dramatic, but you don't really see finishes like that in European wrestling. A solid finish would have seen the babyfaces beat the heels cleanly. You cannot convince me that the crowd were celebrating because it was a knockout finish. I'm sorry, but regardless of how people feel about European finishes (and even British fans sometimes complain that they're weak), KOs being the most prestigious form of victory was never a thing. If it had been, it would have been evident in the hundreds of hours of WoS that is available.

That's another awful finish. It's hard to believe the titles could change hands on a spot like that. It's not even a proper knockout spot. Of course the crowd are delighted -- the faces won the belts. It had nothing to do with how they won them. Jones and Finlay are absolutely protected by that finish. If you don't lose the titles on a pinfall, submisison or a proper knockout of course you can claim it was a fluke, etc.

Scrubber Daley is displaying the dominance of his gut, but aside from that there's nothing prestigious about a heavyweight squashing a lightweight. I can see how pins meant less in European than in other territories as you had to get two of them to win a bout, but KOs (and injury finishes) were excuses to have wrestlers lose without being pinned the same as DQs and count outs in other territories. The exceptions would be KOs from finishing moves. The KOs you're talking about were rarely executed well.

I'm not a big fan of 90s nostalgia in 00s wrestling, but I can see the appeal of this as we never really got to see the young guys wrestle Tenryu in All Japan. There were some impassioned exchanges between Kobashi and Tenryu, but the guy I was rooting for was Akira Taue. It's been a long time since I've seen Taue wrestle and I forgot how much I love the bastard. I thought he'd screwed the pooch when he went to the top rope, but mother-frucking Taue! Great finish.