ohtani's jacket

The New Frontier is an incredible piece of work. Cooke was a major loss. Lord only knows what else he could have created. I just recently read his Spirit/Batman crossover and it was a lot of fun.

Four score and twenty years ago, I was a fan of KAORU's tag team with Hikari Fukuoka in JWP. I especially liked their 7/7/96 match against Dynamite Kansai and Cuty Suzuki.

This, and the Colin Joynson match (which exists because I know someone who got it out of the archives) were anomalies though, and I think it's mostly Elijah guiding Daddy through the match and Daddy, for some reason, determined to show he can hang. I do quite like the tag matches Daddy had around this time, but I'd have to see more from the archives to believe Daddy was on this sort of trajectory until his brother made him a star. Hogan proved it over and over again.

The only time I would compare Hogan to Daddy is Hogan vs. The Dungeon of Doom, and maybe Hogan's 1993 run in the WWF. Prime Hogan, there's just no comparison.

Blue Panther vs. Vulcano (AAA, March 21st, 1993) This was decent. I liked that they attacked each other while they were still wearing their entrance attire, and that Panther worked the entire first fall with his jacket on. His comeback was okay, but it highlighted how difficult this sort of match was for him. He was the tecnico here, but he lacked the apuestas experience of a Santo or a Villano III, and of course he couldn't be expected to have the dramatic presence of a Pirata, Satanico or Dandy. When we think of Panther do we identify with him as a tecnico or a rudo? I'm talking about pre-unmasking. I suppose for the majority of his career he was a rudo, but what sort of a rudo? His role seems poorly defined. He's constantly presented as a maestro figure regardless of whether he's on the rudo side or a tecnico. This seems to be one of the biggest weaknesses with Panther. The match ends with a Horsemen style beat down on Panther, which was disappointing at first but probably would have been a hot angle if we were talking about Crockett. Panther sells it well, but will he bring an extra edge to the apuestas match?

Bret Hart vs. Davey Boy Smith (WWF, 6/30/92) Not from the 80s but close enough. This was the famous dark match that Bret and Davey Boy had prior to SummerSlam '92. The story Bret always tells is that the match was awful and that when he got to the back Vince said, "I hope it's better at SummerSlam." Then Davey returned to England and spent the entire summer getting messed up on substances, while Bret spent his every waking moment thinking of how to work the greatest match ever, or so the story goes. The match is kind of mediocre, and it feels like they're going through the motions, but I don't know if it reaches the threshold of "awful." I'm not sure what else to expect from a dark match, to be honest. It's at the very least interesting. If it had been on a MSG card or something it might even have some fans.

I'm not sure if anyone was impressed by the hold itself, but merely the fact that it was Hogan doing it. It was an effect of the tape-trading days where we didn't have access to as much footage we have today to know that Hulk was trained to a reasonable extent in the territories and worked harder in Japan in general (as mostly everyone did.) I remember being part of tape trading circles back in the day and trying to get people to agree to get All Japan matches and there was always someone who wanted to get Hulk vs Muta or Hogan vs. Hansen instead.

And Hogan could have the next Hiro Matsuda, but the point is that Daddy was awful. Hogan was never awful. At least not during his peak Hulkamania years. I could give a crap about Hogan doing a hold in Japan. I'm talking about working competent house shows and main events. Now I realize Hogan throwing a punch or whatever isn't going to appeal to you, but if you ignore your preferences for a second, Hogan's actual mechanics were better than Daddy's. Hogan vs. Andre at WrestleMania III may have been a poor wrestling bout compared to some of their early bouts, but it is nowhere near as bad as Daddy vs. Haystacks at Wembley Arena. You can get as sentimental as you want about the era, but that's a hill I don't even need to think about dying on because it's as true as the sky is blue and the earth goes round the sun. Vince's original plans are open to speculation. His most recent comment on the matter was that he was considering Dusty. If Hogan had meant to be Superstar v.2, I think you'd see a lot more of that in his gimmick. Muscles plus blonde hair equals just about every wrestler in the 70s and early 80s. Cornette says Hogan got a lot of his shtick from Austin Idol, but the truth is he picked up things from all over. Watch him cut promos in Memphis, he's not trying to be Idol or Graham. If anything he's doing a weird version of Terry Boulder.

Hogan was never as bad as Daddy in the ring. In fact, for the most part Hogan was a competent worker. There was a time in the 70s where Daddy was reasonably competent, but that's about where the similarities as workers end. Hogan was also a much bigger star than Daddy. I don't think Hogan was a ripoff of Superstar Graham. That's lazy, second hand hearsay. Graham cut the same sort of promos that Dusty did. Hogan never cut promos like that in the territories. When he first started, he wasn't a particularly strong promo. The closest thing he did to that sort of promo was as Thunder Lips. It was Vince who got him doing those coke-riddled promos about moving mountains and swimming across oceans.

Anton Tejero is a good worker to follow. He's a solid worker with a relatable heel shtick, and an entertaining performer.

Wrestling went off the air in New Zealand in early 1991 after a bunch of complaints that kids were copying the moves. As a result, I never saw the tail end of Hulkamania in real time. I only saw it later on VHS. I do remember once I finally got access to WCW thinking that Hogan's act was fairly lame, but then he became the Wood and was relevant again. At no point was he as bad as Big Daddy, though. That's a slight.

Blue Panther & Vulcano vs Rocco Valente & Tony Arce (AAA March 14th, 1993) This was shorter and more focused than the previous week's bout. The main purpose of the match was for Vulcano to turn on Panther. Panther spent most of the match being beat up. He was fine in that role so I'll giving him a pass mark for this week.

I suppose, in many ways, I wouldn't have become a wrestling fan without Hogan. Territorial wrestling had died out in New Zealand when I was a small child and was no longer on television. The WWF became hot in Australia before New Zealand. I remember I had an uncle who lived in Australia who came back to NZ for the first time in like 15 years, and we were sitting in my grandmother's living room on the night he returned and he wanted to watch two things, Married with Children and WWF Superstars. That was the first time I saw wrestling. I clearly remember watching Hacksaw Jim Duggan hit Andre the Giant with his 2x4 on the episode I watched. Then it blew up at school and was massive for about a year until Ninja Turtles took off. We had the Apter mags and various non-WWF wrestling tapes, but I don't believe I would have been exposed to wrestling if not for Hogan. Folks always talk about the WWF going national. They actually went global.

Hogan was off making a movie when I began watching wrestling. Macho was the guy for the first few weeks that I watched it. I vividly remember the angle where they reintroduced Hogan. This was right before SummerSlam '88. I remember DiBiase saying that Hogan had crawled out from under the rock he was hiding under. I missed out on WrestleMania III and The Main Event and didn't watch them, or WrestleMania IV, until sometime later. I was into the Mega Powers, though, and the absolute peak of wrestling in my country was the Mega Powers exploding and the lead-in to WrestleMania V. I kind of fell into wrestling and comics around the same time. I think wrestling came first and then comics, but that was a formative year.

Typical Los Perros del Mal match. It helped that Casas was there as he tends to bring out the best in Perro. When Perro's not busy mugging for the camera or gawking at the ring girls. I'm not sure about sticking Shocker with Los Perros. The faction is bloated enough as it is and that's two alpha males in the same unit. I guess they didn't want to bring him back as a tecnico or give him room to shine with a new Guapos faction. The thought that it was punishment crossed my mind, or forcing him to pay his dues again, but it looks like turns We'll have to see how it plays out. I have zero faith that they plan these things out.

That may be true, but Japan is also a society based on seniority and hierarchy where decision-making of any sort takes an eternity and innovation is stifled. You can't just look at things through a prism of "this must have been best for business." The narrative that people like to tell in the West is that Baba reacted to this, Baba reacted to that, but there's the TV people to consider and other external factors. In other words, Japanese wrestling was a political hotbed all of the time. I think Baba missed a step by not putting over Jumbo, but I don't know the ins and outs of it. All you can say is that New Japan had much more success pushing native stars at the time than All Japan did.

There has been a bit of discussion elsewhere about how good Blue Panther truly was. I want to preface this by saying that I'm a Blue Panther fan. There ae many Blue Panther matches and performances that I hold dear. That said, unless he's working a title bout or having classic lucha exchanges in a trios bout, I don't have a lot of time for Panther. I don't think he's a great brawler or a great rudo. I don't think he's very good as the lead guy in a feud, and I don't hold him in high regard as a rudo trios worker. So there's definitely a version of Panther that I consider ideal. I intend to put that to the test until I get bored. Blue Panther/Vulcano vs. Rocco Valente/Tony Arce (AAA March 7th, 1993) I'll lay my cards on the table straight away. I'm not a big fan of AAA or Pena's booking, and by and large I think Panther and a number of other good workers wasted precious years of their primes working for AAA. Those biases aside, I'm trying to look for the good in these matches. That's hard to do in a match like this. It's a long, boing, half-arsed match where there's something going on with Los Destructores that I don't fully understand or care about. They work the same pace throughout the match, which is never good, and nothing is resolved. If Panther was meant to be the fuse behind all this, it's another example of him not being great in the number one role. He did throw better strikes than I expected, but not a good start to Project Panther.

Bob Backlund vs. Adrian Adonis (WWF, 3/20/82) I was hoping this would pop up at some point. This is the Philly version of their MSG bout. It's not really a great match. The work is logical and the wrestling is smart, but it felt like there was an entire third act that they left out. Still, it's Backlund vs. Adonis and that in itself carries some intrigue. Kal and Dick were strangely subdued, especially Kal. They treated the match seriously, but I kept waiting for one of them to say something outlandish and it never happened. They showed a keen interest in the finish and poured over it with Adonis and the ref. Adonis threatening the ref might have actually been the high point of the bout. Well, the arm work was pretty good, but I needed that third act.

At the beginning of the match, a masked man accompanied Los Perros del Mal to the ring. He leapt onto the turnbuckle ropes and revealed himself as Shocker before putting on a Los Perros del Mal t-shirt and leaving the ring. I always thought it was anticlimactic how CMLL would introduce wrestlers to the crowd then have them leaving ringside. You'd think they were so Americanized at this point that they'd have them involved in the finish. He did have an altercation with Rey Bucanero on the ramp, so it wasn't a total waste, but still it's like hey, Shocker's back, here's a match. It was actually a pretty long match by CMLL standards, though if you tallied the amount of action wrestling in the bout it probably wound up being the same as a regular match. This was a Los Perros del Mal heavy match. If you like their shtick then you'll enjoy this bout. I know a lot of people like Garza's stuff, and he has some fun moments in this. My favorite part was when a guy in the tecnico section was taunting Perro with a giant dog biscuit. Los Perros were interesting in that while there have always been successful trios groups in Mexico, with the amount of t-shirts and merch they sold, they were over in a way that I can't remember any other faction being. They were almost like CMLL's version of the NWO. They sure as heck wrestled like the NWO. And as with the NWO, you know there's no real end game to this. Yet there's no denying that they packed in the fans.

Hulk Hogan vs. Killer Khan (WWF, 9/12/87) This was a summer feud that the WWF ran in select markets. It was prompted by an episode of The Snake Tape they taped where Khan spat green mist in Hogan's eyes and blinded him (a great, over-the-top Hogan sell that got a chuckle out of me.) They had matches that aired in Boston and Philly. From the sounds of things, they were the exact same match. Not the best of the Hogan mini-feuds, but fun for what it was. Hogan went after Khan with a chair, which I wasn't expected, and even did his infamous back rake. He was incredibly over in Boston. You could barely hear his theme music when he entered. Definitely the best of times as far as Hulkamania was concerned.

This was the match where Holly sliced his back open going through a table. Absolute nasty gash. I don't wanna say it added to the match, but it definitely wouldn't have been as memorable without it. I like Holly's no nonsense style, but when you're selling for real it adds another layer to work. Van Dam did a bunch of dumb shit in the bout, but the chair spots made me wince. Holly was lucking he didn't get a staph infection from this bout. He stayed in character even when the trainer and doctor were tending to him. Should have put a rocket on him in this ECW offshoot, but they weren't interested in capitalizing on the guts Bob showed.

This was pretty good. I don't think it was on the level of the Samoa Joe or Low Ki matches, but that may be because I've never really jumped on the Super Dragon train. There were some botches that they covered fairly well. The hand injury was a cool storyline and the finish was crazy.

El Hijo Del Santo, Felino & Super Astro vs. Blue Panther, Dr. Wagner Jr. & Principe Joel (6/13/1998) This was a fascinating match. It was wrestled inside a bullring in Bakersfield, California. The match starts at sundown and it gets progressively darker throughout the bout until you can barely see anything in the tercera. In a way, that adds to the atmosphere, as it's a weird set up to begin with. The rudos come out to Bad Medicine, but the tecnicos come out to Bret Hart's theme. The exchanges are good. It's house show lucha, but good house show lucha. I like this period of Wagner's work before he turned into the lucha version of The Rock. Felino is energetic throughout and even goes into the crowd. The Panther/Santo exchanges are excellent. The match is shot from ringside, so you get to see them close up. Those dudes were smooth. Fun stuff.

I seem to remember Eliot Frederico wearing some kinky shit.

Perhaps he was referring to some of the S&M gear the wrestlers wore in the 80s.