ohtani's jacket

I'll tell you what I don't recommend and that's the Orton/Adonis match from SCW. One of the most boring matches I've seen in months.

Coliseum Video was run by A & H Video Sales Representatives, Inc. The Evart Enterprises thing sounds like a bit of an urban myth, though someone said they did the box artwork.

To be honest, I always got the impression watching late 80s WWF that the faces were one big fraternity and the heels another, except that Hogan didn't dress with the boys, Bobby Heenan and Jimmy Hart's factions probably didn't trust one another and Bad News Brown didn't have any friends. I always assumed as a kid that the heels dressed in one locker room and the faces another like the home and away teams. That would have been kind of awkward when you turned. Imagine Jake showing up for the first day in the babyface locker after all those folks he'd laid Damien on. Somehow I imagine Duggan as the peacemaker.

Herb Abrams' UWF? SWS?

From a critical standpoint, a lot of critics blame Jaws and Star Wars for killing off the more artistic, auteur-driven New Hollywood cinema, so if people view the territories as being more artistic per se then I think Star Wars or Jaws is a fairly apt analogy for the WWF. I like the image of the WWF being Jaws. The auteurs were also largely to blame for the demise of New Hollywood, much like the territories themselves, and Hollywood was taking advantage of a changing commercial landscape much like Vince did. I think the analogy works fairly well.

The search function on my blog is buggy. I was a lot more positive about the Satanico/Atlantis match than I remember, though this entry wasn't really a critical appraisal:

Wow, dropping five on that one, huh? That's one I'll be interesting in re-watching since it felt like a bit of a poor man's Atlantis/Faraon the time I watched it.

UWA ran a lot of shows and brought in a lot of outside talent. They used to run El Toreo twice a week in their heyday so they needed a stacked roster and plenty of guys they could feed to Canek and other top stars, so in a sense they were loaded like AAA during its early boom, but they created some pretty big stars and they were excellent at packaging trios together and pushing the lighter weight talents and young guys. During the early 80s when the trios boom was in full swing and the Misioneros were pushed to the main event I can see it becoming difficult to decipher who drew, but that's an argument for putting trios in the Hall I suppose. One thing I'll say about Hamada is that if he was main eventing or semi-maining against guys like Aguayo, Fishman or Villano III, there may be a question of who was the real draw, the native star or the match-up. Then again, Hamada was a regular. The reason the shoot style promotions never lasted was usually because of the egos involved and squabbling over money. If they'd been run by a savvy promoter and not wrestler-promoters they may have had a longer lasting presence in the Japanese scene. I suppose MMA killed shoot style and now MMA is all but dead in Japan, and your fans who go to wrestling shows these days are a mix of hardcores and the casuals they bring along and are pro-style fans who want to see pro-style only, but there's still a bit of influence in New Japan isn't there? Don't they ape shoot style a bit? I don't really follow the Japanese scene closely. How long has Dragon Gate been in business and will they last or morph into something else? The influence thing is something I'd like to see fleshed out a bit more, because I don't think he had a big rep as a worker in Japan. Certainly not compared to the rep he had in Mexico. And he didn't really come back from Mexico and become a star like some of the other guys. He was behind the scenes promoting and training. Someone like Ultimo Dragon was much more visible as a lucharesu guy, I think. And promoting and bringing Mexican stars to Japan in the early 90s didn't really work even if it sparked the idea of M-Pro, but I'm not really sure that you can say stylistically that Hamada was the biggest influence on M-Pro since Sasuke had also toured Mexico and worked UWA. I definitely think he had an influence, but more as a figure who worked Mexico and knew it well than the style he actually wrestled. Is there any Atlantis outside of the more recent stuff that has disappointed you? Like any of his 90s stuff? I think the knock on Atlantis is that he was never directly responsible for any of the really hot CMLL runs despite being near the top of the card, though I think he had some decent drawing successes after the split like the feud with Mano Negra. Nothing earth shattering, though. Navarro is the most impressive because he completely remodeled himself as a great mat worker. I think he's been now than he ever was before. But he seems to have slowed down a bit this year. I like modern Panther when he works Monterrey and I'm sure I'd like him more if there was footage of him in the indies, I just don't think we see the best of him in CMLL, though credit to him for hanging in there this long and still being used by them.

They've been using super slo-mo in cricket for almost a decade now. It works well because of the speed of the ball. I wonder how it would go in ice hockey. I often have trouble following the puck in ice hockey games.

I just quickly listened to the Regal part as I was kind of the one who found Regal/Larry on Dailymotion during the Smarkschoice poll and I loved the Bret/Owen cage match and used to be a staunch defender of it in these circles, but I was expecting Loss to say something juicier. I like Regal's television title reign in practice, but I don't know that it produced that many great matches. The Larry Z match is the high water mark. I need to re-watch that Arn match at some point as I remember liking it but not as much as Phil and Will. I agree that Windham was awesome in '93. He was awesome from '91-93 or at least up until his injury. Davey Boy Smith also had a strong series of matches against Vader around that time so I don't think that was an exceptional carry by Regal and it was only really quasi-British matwork with a Japanese influence. The best thing about Regal was that he was completely different from any other worker in the company or in the States, really, and I do think he deserves a lot of credit for getting a pretty foreign sort of style to work in a mostly TV studio setting, which I don't think he could have done without developing that aristocratic character. It was the perfect marriage between ring work and gimmick.

The Longest Yard was Burt Reynolds best film.

With Hamada, I think you'd need to look at the houses he drew at El Toreo and other UWA venues. Jose mentioned the other day that he was a possible draw at Palacio de los Deportes. It's certainly the strongest part of his in-ring resume. In terms of a stylistic influence, I wasn't quite sure why you deemed "lucharesu" as being more significant to shoot style, but I don't think you gave Sayama enough credit for really being the figurehead of that style. Hamada may have been the godfather of the style in terms of promoting it in Japan, but Sayama was the spiritual father. Hamada also had a hand in training the JWP girls along with Onita, though to what extent he's responsible for the development of those girls is unknown. For Mexico, I would have liked to hear Dylan talk a bit more about Atlantis as a worker. I also think people need to decide whether Atlantis was a strong enough draw to be in the HOF. Blue Panther being one of the top 20 workers of all time was a big call. I might go that way if we had more of his UWA footage, but I'm not sure if on the weight of footage that we have that he's that good. Unless you're talking about technique. I don't think he's anywhere near as good as he used to be and Black Terry is the king of maestros, IMO, not for his technique as such but for his overall performing ability (acting and selling and so forth.) I really need to pick up that Caras/Panther match, though.

They had some great sit down interviews with Vince: Then they did a cheesy Christmas promo after getting back together. This was a fun one:

He turned heel at Royal Rumble '94 when he kicked Bret's leg out of his leg.

It's been a long time since I've watched it, but isn't there some niggle and some brawling on the outside? It's a heel vs. face match after all.

Bret/Owen was clean?

Wayne Bridges vs. Pete Roberts (10/28/81) Joint Promotions liked to run these programs between guys where the champion would lose the first match 2-1, the winner would ask for a title shot but have to go through a non-title bout first, they'd win that, often 2-0, then finally get a title shot. They'd run this on TV and at the halls simultaneously. Just about every program followed this pattern; what made this special was a Bridges heel turn or at least a quasi-heel turn. Blue-eyes would sometimes work heel or tweener in the halls and occasionally break the rules or get agitated on TV, but this was about as close to a full blown turn as British wrestling got. It wasn't really clear what Bridges' problem with Roberts was, only that he got pissed during the bout and refused to shake Roberts' hand after a fall. As the bout wore on, Bridges began wrestling illegally and smirking about it. The finish was Bridges hitting Roberts with a running knee while he was still on the mat. Bridges assumed he'd won the match but he was DQ'ed, threw a fit and cut an asshole heel champ promo. Considering Bridges was cut from the same cloth as Roberts this was a lot more interesting than straight up Roberts/Bridges. Pete Roberts vs. Indio Guajaro (11/13/85) Hey, it's Indio Guajaro. I always get a kick out of the Germany-based guys popping up on British TV. Guajaro played up the witch doctor gimmick here and played the dumb savage to start with. Walton kept mentioning that he couldn't speak a word of English and couldn't understand the public warnings he was receiving. He also accused Guajaro of using the all-in American style, which comes across as a knock on US wrestling at times. The bout started out with these cliches, but it turned into something pretty great when the women in the crowd got massively fired up at Guajaro, Roberts began retaliating in the most awesome fashion (including a killer drop kick that knocked Guajaro out of the ring) and Guajaro kept grabbing the ring announcer's mic and cutting promos in Spanish. Fantastic heat for this, an injury finish that worked for a change and really amusing schtick from Guajaro that drew some good one liners from Kent. I think they brought in Guajaro a couple of times, but he would have been great in longer stints.

Soup, to answer your question about Centurion Negro, we have some early 90s Monterrey stuff and then there's a big gap before he shows up again in indy footage from the 2000s. In that Black Terry Monterrey trios he has the most awesome heated exchanges with Jose Luis Feliciano.

Pat Roach vs. Pete Roberts (4/23/85) Despite being a heavyweight this was another bout where Roberts gave away two or three stones to his opponent. Roberts excelled at working against bigger men and was fantastic here both underneath and on top. Roach was nearing 50 however and starting to get a bit long in the tooth so his contribution didn't quite match Roberts'. This was particularly evident with the finish, which I thought was lazy considering it was only a one fall bout and Roberts had wrestled superbly up to that point. The match deserved a finish with a bit more care put into it like the Caswell Martin ref stop, not Roach swatting Roberts because he woke up and remembered he was 18 stone and 6'5".

I'm not getting what was so bad about that Joshi match. There have been far worse outfits than that in Joshi puroresu.

Sticking to the original theme, I always get weirded out when guys who ordinarily wear tights show up in a pair of trunks.

I think it's fair to say that Pete Roberts doesn't have the greatest reputation among the British workers. Even I'm a bit apprehensive when I see his name crop up in tape lists and I've seen more good Pete Roberts than most. But he's been delivering for me lately so I bit the bullet and got a comp made. Pete Roberts vs. Tom Tyrone (1/8/87) This was the final for the 1986 Grand Prix Belt, a real piece of shit looking belt. Joint Promotions had by far the worst looking belts in the history of professional wrestling. They were really into their tournaments at this point, which I guess was a plea/ploy to get people to tune in each week. Regardless of all that, this was my kind of wrestling. Tom Tyrone was a lot bigger than I thought he was. He was looking a bit battle weary here and had put on some pounds, but even with the extra weight there was a pretty significant size difference. The crowd was behind Tyrone and boo'ed Roberts and Tyrone was able to throw his weight around a bit, but for the most part this was a clinic from Roberts on beating a bigger man. He may have been the most charisma-less man in the world, but he could flat out wrestle. The match started to get really good when they began with the forearm smashes then cooled off a bit, but Roberts was savvy the way way through. I can see others not liking this as much. I don't want to say it was cerebral or anything like that, but if you don't like holds or the odd strike then Robert's personality is hardly going to hold you, but if you plain like wrestling then this was about as good as it got in a dying territory.

Caswell Martin vs. Pat Roach (5/11/82) Man, these guys were good together. Again we only got to see half the bout and I wish we'd gotten more because it really seemed like they were doing original stuff here instead of the spots they did with everyone. The finish was a great example, as they took your run-of-the-mill Dale Martin injury finish and did something special with it. Caswell Martin had probably the best headbutt in the business and Roach sold his strikes beautifully. Once he shook off the butts, he retaliated by body checking Martin repeatedly. Two or three times, Martin was knocked over the ropes which nine times out of ten is a technical knockout/automatic countout in WOS. Martin, however, got back in the ring and fronted Roach. Roach kept checking him and checking him and finally did his Brumagen Bump for the ref stop. If you're going to end it on an injury or knockout that's the way to do it. That's the end of the comp. There's a few odds and ends I may order later, but I've now seen the bulk of the Caswell Martin we have on tape. Unfortunately, I can't in good conscience recommend any of his matches for the 80s set, as the ones that really impressed me were JIP halfway through and the 1982 Marty Jones bout from the Royal Albert Hall is cut short by a shitty finish when it could've gone six rounds and been a certain pick.

Can't believe I watched a 35 minute, 2/3 falls Andre the Giant match. Wild.

Caswell Martin vs. Chic Cullen (1/16/85) Caswell Martin vs. Chic Cullen (2/27/85) These were okay. I've soured on Cullen a bit since going through a period where I was high on him. He has some good stuff that aired on TWC, but this extra original broadcast stuff hasn't pushed his case as a great worker and that's been against some pretty top draw talent. The first match only aired the meat and potatoes of what was a double countout to set up a rematch, so it was never going to be hugely satisfying. The second bout was better, though they did this strange bit of booking where it seemed like it was going to be an injury finish in the second round, but Cullen convinced the ref he was fit to continue. I've seen them do that to great effect in later rounds but never so early. I guess it was meant to draw sympathy for Cullen, but the crowd didn't seem to care that much and Cullen wasn't the sort of performer who could really put over an injury like that. At least the action was stronger than the first bout, though Martin tends to overuse certain pinning combinations. That's a criticism you could probably make of all British wrestlers, however, as those pinning combinations were seen as specialty moves and the workers often scored from them in every single match. Caswell Martin vs. John Elijah (11/5/86) Solid late period match. Going into this I expected a power contest with plenty of strength holds and maybe a bit of mat wrestling from Caswell and that's exactly what I got. Both these guys were reliable performers and two of the better guys on the roster at this late stage, but they were never going to have a four star match outside of the halls maybe. But dependable can be enjoyable with a safe pair of hands.