ohtani's jacket

Making a best of list for films or records isn't the same as these type of wrestling discussions. Very few people would argue that only the Beatles knew how to record songs or that only Hitchcock knew how to make movies to the extent that people praise (or used to praise) All Japan Pro-Wrestling. There is far more leeway in other forms of entertainment because despite the fact that there are seminal figures people don't go around claiming Hitchcock and Kurosawa are the be all and end all unless they've just discovered Hitchcock and Kurosawa. Those directors are the jumping-off point for most people not the end point like All Japan Pro-Wrestling. All Japan was seen as the perfect way to wrestle and therefore nothing could better it. I don't think that's completely analogous with the way people treat other forms of entertainment despite there being people who think the Beatles made perfect music or that the '87-88 Lakers played perfect basketball. The Smarkschoice poll was in 2006 a full six years after Jumbo died. Plenty of people who participated in that poll had not seen a significant amount of Jumbo prior to his death as Jumbo was not a gateway to Japanese pro-wrestling when many of us first began watching. Just because he was talked about among WON readers in 1990 doesn't make a difference to those people, most of whom were in elementary school in 1990. What Meltzer thought of Choshu in 1983 is also irrelevant to these people. There were a group of people who began writing about wrestling and joining discussion post-2000 who got into things much later than the first wave of people online. If you want to squabble perhaps more than 90% of them were aware of Jumbo prior to his death. I think the first time I heard about him was when he retired and I think it was on 1wrestling. I doubt very much they were watching Jumbo prior to his death, though they may have seen the Tenryu feud or the early 90s All Japan opposite Misawa and Co., but even that became more widespread with the DVDVR best of the 90s results through the early part of the 2000s. There are people for whom the GOAT was Bret or Shawn and then suddenly became Misawa and Kawada and then Jumbo and never really moved past the jumping-off point. That's all right, it's not really a criticism, but like this Choshu and Fujinami thing which Graham Crackers spelled out, to act like it didn't happen because x and x knew about it all along is way off. We're not talking about x and x.

Jumbo has never been regarded as the strongest Japanese wrestler. I'm not sure where you got that idea from. I have heard that at the Feb 1990 Supershow he got the loudest reaction and at that point was considered the MVP of Japanese professional wrestling, but I don't know if it's true. Anyway, we're really talking about what English speaking, Western fans think not Japanese fans. I don't buy Jerome's '98 memory. He's probably thinking of Other Arena or Frank Jewett or something. They were obviously ahead of the curve in that (from memory) Jewett had the Tenryu/Jumbo comp tape made that ended up circulating and being sold by people like Lorefice and Scott Mailman, etc., but I don't know whether that comp predated Jumbo's death nor do I think it's really important. It was the memorial tapes that kickstarted the Jumbo boom and I think Dean's Jumbo vs. Harley review in the DVDVR was more influential than the Other Arena crew as DVDVR had a greater reach. After that people got into AJPW Classics and Williams' DVDVR 90s pimping post and ballot were also highly influential. If people are lifelong Beatles fans that's their business, but do people go around touting the best ever in other fields of entertainment? It seems a particular obsession of wrestling fans. If pushed I would name what I think is the greatest of all time in any other field, but it's not some badge of honour like it is with wrestling. I wonder if it's because wrestling fans spend more time talking about wrestling than watching it. Or maybe I don't move in the right circles in regard to my other hobbies. Wrestling sure has its sacred cows, though. Regarding Fujiwara, neither shoot style nor 80s New Japan were widely watched by the swarm of new fans who got into Japanese wrestling late. They may have been watched by hardcores previously, but those people didn't make up a vocal presence on the internet from 1999 onwards in my experience. Fujiwara was not well regarded in real time, so to speak. You only have to look at Lorefice's site to get some idea of the dated opinions about shoot style and Fujiwara from the late 90s. I always kind of dug Fujiwara but began to seriously re-evaluate him with the failed Smarkschoice best matches ever initiative around five or six years ago. That was some glorious revisionism. Revisionism is a wonderful thing even if it may be disrespectful or sacrilegious at times. Returning to your original point, I actually think we caught up with what Japanese fans already knew in regard to Fujinami and Choshu most recently.

Here's 50 of them -- http://www.complex.com/sports/2012/08/the-...rences/#gallery

I bet you the bell time was longer especially if it was a draw.

Jumbo as the greatest of all-time was a revisionist trend in the first place. Ninety percent of the people pimping him as the greatest didn't even know who he was until he was dead and even then it took a few years for the memorial tapes to circulate. There weren't too many people around from when his matches originally aired in the 80s and early 90s and those who were ahead of the curve were a small minority compared to the ever expanding newer, young fans getting online and discovering foreign wrestling. I don't know what it was like in the mid-90s as when I first started using the internet I was only interested in WWF and WCW news, but if Jumbo had been pimped from the mid-90s onwards he would have been one of the first guys to be immediately pimped when people turned to "puro". AFAIC, he was some way down the list from juniors and Misawa and Kawada and garbage wrestling. Without trying to put too much of a historical bend on it, Jumbo as the greatest arguably peaked with the Smarkschoice poll after which many of the people involved slowly stopped watching wrestling and the newer fans became (inexplicably) more interested in the newer stuff. But I thoroughly agree that if Lawler and Fujiwara had been consensus picks for a long time that people would look elsewhere. Who doesn't crave new footage or new workers or new footage of old workers which suddenly sheds things in a new light? Everyone went through their Misawa and Kawada phase (or whatever) like some kid discovering an old rock band and thinking he's found the greatest band of all-time, but c'mon... move on, discover new things... It doesn't matter whether Satanico or Fujiwara are better than Flair or Jumbo or anybody else... the idea that somebody has to be atop the mantle is what's really boring.

Nothing on AJW TV in the 80s aired near complete. WoS is largely incomplete as well.

Tell me more....is there Japanese media with this written out somewhere online? Not really sure what you're after... The kanji for Ishu Kakutogi Sen is 異種格闘技戦 Inoki didn't coin this term as such contests existed long before his fights. These days MMA is usually called 総合格闘技 (Sougoukakutogi.)

Inoki's fights were called Ishu Kakutogi Sen, which is MMA in concept but not in direct translation.

Finlay is in the first crowd shot of them walking in the street next to the Dutch Mantell looking guy. I saw Klaus Kauroff, Franz Schuhmann, Mile Zrno and Dave Taylor.

How am I going to watch these matches? Do I have an unlimited supply of batteries? If I was on a desert island for the rest of my life wouldn't I want a woman instead of wrestling? Hmm? 80s AJW is so heavily clipped that it becomes frustrating after a while. I'd give all my non-essential organs for the complete 80s EMLL TV.

Living in Japan for six and a half years will cure you of that exoticism. I don't see the point in comparing Tully with a lucha worker or a Brit or whoever tickles my fancy unless that worker happens to remind me of Tully in some way. I know Tully is awesome, just like I know which lucha workers and Brits are awesome. A lot of consensus opinions are boring and need taking down a peg or two. I'm not whether Tully being awesome is consensus, but it isn't boring.

Isn't that Barthes example a bit like saying the UK has no film culture because nobody's ever written about it like Andre Bazin? Barthes was captivated by wrestling as a modern mythology and I believe he made some interesting comparisons between American wrestling and French wrestling as well as a bunch of comparisons to French literary classics, but I think it's a bit of a stretch to say because a French literary theorist and philosopher wrote about French wrestling that somehow it was more ingrained in French society than in the UK. How much money did Wanz draw? What makes you think the German tournaments were successful? Regal claimed they weren't that successful on that recent podcast he did, at least not every night of the week. Perhaps the foreign talent that passed through Germany had more to do with Wanz' talent-sharing arrangements with AWA and NJPW than the paydays, I don't know. The paydays probably were better than in England for however many weeks the tournaments lasted otherwise they wouldn't have drawn so many Brit heavyweights, but it wasn't some big secret that the heavyweights were out of the country and not on TV much. Walton used to give a run down on what each wrestler had been doing since the last time they were on TV. I don't really see how working Germany, Wales, India, South Africa and Japan (for example) was any different from moving around the US territories; it's just more travel and a tad more international. For what it's worth, I don't think they went from the UK to Germany to Canada. The heavyweights worked the route I mentioned. The lighter weight guys went directly to North America. Wanting to leave the UK for America is hardly remarkable. The same thing happens with UK actors and again I hardly think that means the UK has no film culture. I also think you're overstating the number of guys who left. Robinson, Dynamite Kid, Davey Boy Smith, Adrian Street, Ringo Rigby and Chris Adams are the only guys I can think of who made permanent moves while Joint Promotions still had TV. There's probably a few I'm forgetting. Regal, Finlay and Dave Taylor left much later. In my home country (New Zealand) there was a wrestling television program on air from 1975 to 1984 and prior to that pro-wrestling was extremely popular particularly in the 1950s, but it died before the promoter could take any sort of advantage of the WWF boom in the late 80s. Once they took wrestling off the air in '91, there was no way you could say it was part of popular culture in New Zealand, but it had still been extremely successful in its day, much like Saturday Afternoon wrestling was an institution in England. In both countries it died, but that doesn't mean it never was.

Does anyone know much about Korean wrestling? Was watching a Korean movie from the 60s recently and they went to a wrestling match.

Of course it's not part of British culture now, but in its hey day it was. It didn't spring up out of nowhere with Big Daddy. Pro-wrestling isn't really part of any country's culture (pop culture maybe, but that's transient), however I'd love to know why you think France and Germany have deeper wrestling traditions than the UK. Seems like exoticism.

"Pimping" wasn't the right choice of words. What I meant to say is that some of us were made aware of it from this rspw post linked off Cubsfan's site -- https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups...aI/HTIKRzO0MZUJ

Adam Copeland? I really believed his name was Edge.

Actually, the source of pimping for this was none other than David Scherer. A few years after the DVDVR poll Dean reviewed some 1989 CMLL and Rippa wrote about some 1990 CMLL. From there guys like Tim Cooke and Kevin Cook did some awesome pimping of early 90s CMLL. Tim used to write these awesome reviews of his Lynch purchases on the DVDVR board that were some of the best "what are you watching" style posts I've ever come across. Prior to that lucha was mostly viewed as the AAA hot period and the Santo turn and Casas feud. This was mostly due to tape trading trends, AAA being hot during the early stages of the Internet and perhaps more of an interest in the sheets and access to Galavision in the late 90s. I don't know how long Lynch and Alfredo had early 90s TV available for but it's more than a decade since I first bought it from them.

I assume Dave is basing that on something like television ratings, which again isn't a straight apples and oranges comparison with the US.

I doubt very much that Chigusa was as popular as Hogan.

More like a few thousand every year. So what do you think a better analogy would be? I don't think there's any easy analogy. Chigusa was primarily seen as an athlete. In the mid-80s, the only Japanese female athletes with any sort of profile were (I'm guessing) the women's volleyball team, gymnasts and figure skaters, but none of them had their own weekly TV show where they were part actress, part idol, part athlete. I think if you're going to compare her success with someone from the US you might as well compare her to other wrestlers not a singer or an actress.

I find it more annoying when Gorilla criticises a guy like Tito for having the wrong temperament or when he brings up one of his talking points like having a second ref on the outside, but I kind of doubt that people paid much attention to Gorilla's commentary at the time.

One big rumour around the Internet back then was that it was supposed to be Jake Roberts. He was also supposed to show up in WCW as part as Raven vs DDP angle the year before. Yeah, we were all about Jake Roberts in the late 90's. Ted Dibiase was another of the rumours. I think Al Issacs had the scoop on it being Yokozuna as well.

He came in at 18 in a 2007 poll of the most influential people in history. http://www.japanprobe.com/2007/04/01/histo...-edition-video/ I'm sorry but that's just silly. 100 most influential heroes? So many is a few dozen at the most. Probably hundreds more if you count try outs, but unless there were a bunch of short haired teenage girls wandering around wearing suits with giant shoulder pads I don't think she influenced fashion to any great degree. There were short haired sporty types before Chigusa.

I can't really speak for Mexico, but Rikidozan is not one of the top 20 or so most iconic figures in Japanese history. Perhaps of his era, but certainly not in history. How do we know that Chigusa had a big lifestyle and fashion influence on teenage girls? That's even flakier than Dave walking into some shop in Tokyo, only recognising Chigusa among the dozens of other stars and thinking she was the Madonna of Japan. It's easy to exaggerate things when there's a language barrier and a lack of information. Chigusa Nagayo's English wikipedia page, for example, says the Crush Girls had several top 10 hits, but I checked the Japanese charts and no single by either the Crush Girls or Nagayo was in the top 50 selling singles from 1986-89.

If there was a female entertainer who was bigger than Chigusa then I don't see how the Madonna analogy works. Think about it the other way round, if someone said Hogan was the most popular athlete in America during the 1980s or that he was as big as Michael Jackson would you agree with that? First he says Chigusa was on the same level as a Pro Bowl quarterback, then he says Madonna, now he's saying Miley Cyrus. The strange thing is he's ignoring that the Crush Girls were an idol pair, even if Chigusa was the more popular of the two. The 80s was the so-called golden age of Japanese idols. They used to produce 40 to 50 a year, most of them disappearing in short order. Chigusa had amazing success, but she wasn't the biggest idol in the business.