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ohtani's jacket

DVDVR 80s Project
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Everything posted by ohtani's jacket

  1. I only watched the final match. It was short but a decent enough sprint. It wasn't the sort of all-out match you'd expect from a tag league final, however, and I think the slackness with which AJW booked both the Grand Prix and TLTB in '94 was pretty telling in terms of them losing their edge. They really got lazy cashing in on the interpromotional stuff. Big Egg Universe was poorly run, and if that alienated fans then the booking sure wasn't about to hook them back in.
  2. This was okay, but it wasn't a very compelling performance from Takako and turned into just another Toyota match. Personally, I liked Takako's work from '93 better than this.
  3. This was all right, but not a whole lot happened and it didn't seem that special to me. Even with the fresh match-up, Hokuto/Kansai, it still felt like a run of the mill, spotty elimination match.
  4. Yeah, but Hogan fans will say things like, "look at how he timed that atomic drop on Bobby Heenan to get the maximum reaction from the crowd, that was so good" when all it was was an atomic drop and not timed particularly well. Personally, I think he was too tall with too much muscle mass to be a good worker. Others might argue that he moved well in the ring, but I've never seen it.
  5. An interesting match to compare this with is the Toyota/Yamada match from a few days later. That match has a better beginning as they have some cool strike exchanges (Toyota may come across as shy and awkward in promos but man is she foul mouthed in the ring.) The stretch run isn't quite as exciting as Toyota/Kyoko, but in a way it's more focused. There are a few too many reversal attempts, and Toyota has the upperhand to a greater extent (making the finish rather obvious), but it all makes sense. (Or maybe I'm just getting my Joshi mojo back.) I never really liked Yamada in the past, but there seems to be a new appreciation for her these days because of her stand up game and Chigusa-like moveset. She was good in this match, though her star had clearly waned.
  6. This was a good match. People who like Joshi will enjoy it and people who don't won't, but I thought after a perfunctory beginning it developed into a long and exciting stretch run. The finish isn't quite as epic as they might have liked, and Toyota's botches hurt the rhythm a bit even if they're mostly covered well, but it was one Joshi match from 1994 where I wasn't begging for it to end. The thing I always liked about Kyoko is how she was able to convey the joy of performing. She doesn't get to really shine here but I was reminded of how likeable she is. People are probably aware of this from watching her promos but after six years of living in Japan I can tell you she's the type of person you'd love to hang out with. She has the same charisma as a TV comedian and seems like an awesome person. You can tell she's not from Tokyo, that's for sure.
  7. One has half an hour of defensive matwork and the other has pro-wrestling spots, I guess. I noticed Fujiwara/Fuke was in your top 50 for 1992. 1990 has matches more along those lines rather than something like Fujiwara/Malenko.
  8. Weren't those closer to pro-style matches?
  9. Can't really see the Dory Funk comparison as Fujiwara has Terry Funk charisma in my eyes, but perhaps 1990 will be the make or break set.
  10. I don't think it's going to happen. The closest Fujiwara got to the type of wrestling you seem to like was his 80s New Japan run. Have you seen the match he had with Choshu in '87? I didn't like it because I have funny ideas about Japanese pro-wrestling but everybody else did.
  11. How do you figure? What did Hogan do that was anything you wouldn't expect from a professional wrestling match? Hogan personifies doing the basics. You can't honestly say that his schtick was extraordinarily better than any other babyface. Hogan was over regardless of his matches. They were a formality, some of which were more entertaining than others. Do you really think that the way Hogan sells and all his mannerisms are better than anybody else? Or the reason he got heat for that matter? He was effective if effective means carrying out a match, but why praise him for doing simple stuff well? All you're doing is setting the bar ridiculously low for Hogan. The first time I ever saw Hogan was in 1988 when he returned after some kind of absence post Wrestlemania IV. Prior to that, Dibiase, Andre, Bobby and Savage had been cutting promos in the early stage of the build-up to the SummerSlam main event. So, the first time I saw him the music hit, he came out from behind the curtain, the crowd went nuts, etc. Hogan was a sensation and for much of the 80s it was like a locomotive. There was nothing innately special about Hogan making an entrance other than he was extremely over and that was contagious. Hogan obviously had qualities that made him popular, but did he really do anything that set him apart? I can't think of anything. Well, there was the entrance and the pose down afterwards, but there needed to be something in the middle and sure as hell wasn't going to be reliant on Hogan as a worker. I can understand people liking Hogan for whatever reason, but do you really get excited when Hogan executes an atomic drop or something like that? It's just basic pantomime.
  12. Every halfway decent babyface in the history of the business has been able to follow the script to the extent that Hogan did in that match. Just because Hogan was more over than just about every halfway decent babyface in the history of the business doesn't mean that he did something extra special. If Hogan's so spectacular then why do they need a three ring circus in Danny Davis, Bobby Heenan and the cage? Hogan wasn't bad or anything, but it's not as though he did anything special to draw heat.
  13. This match was so great. Really cements Fujiwara as the best worker in Japan from 1990-94.
  14. It's not hogan that changed. It's us. Well, I watched the Orndorff cage match and it was a fun match because of Jesse and Vince and Orndorff and Bobby in that order. I'm not trying to be contrary, but Hogan didn't do a single thing in the match that I would consider noteworthy. I guess you could argue that he was effective at following the script, so to speak, but that's the job of a professional wrestler. Nobody's going to accuse Hogan of not knowing the basics.
  15. I can't understand this revisionism that Hogan was effective. Somebody point to the one match for a skeptic like me.
  16. Hogan and Warrior had a very unfair advantage in Wrestlefest -- their slam would eliminate people over the top rope. I always went DiBiase and he didn't have a slam so had to get a pin or submission. Great game. Are you talking about the Royal Rumble? Anybody could throw someone over the ropes in that game.
  17. I finally got around to watching this and I guess the answer was that it was just different from a typical WWE match with Lesnar bringing the quasi-shoot style stuff and working stiffer than expected. It was kind of a one note match, but not bad. I thought it started off well and lost steam when Brock started bringing the ringpost and steel steps into play. Cena getting zero offense and then winning with a steel chain wrapped round his fist and a single finisher on the steps was kind of weird, but Brock winning would've been equally weird after beating the crap out of Cena for the entire match. I'm not sure I'd call it a spectacle since it wasn't that spectacular compared to say your typical Undertaker/Triple H/Shawn Michaels Wrestlemania extravaganza, at least in terms of how things operate in the WWE Universe, but it was certainly different.
  18. I don't think they pay off the Hokuto/Kandori storyline particularly well. The match is four different match-ups happening at the same time and not very well laid out. The first Hokuto/Kandori match was perfect and didn't need to be expanded upon. Hokuto won but learnt her lesson at the same time. This match was kind of messy like it didn't know whether it was about the bitter regret about Hokuto's pending retirement or a resolution between the heat between Kandori and Hokuto or both, but really Hokuto should have moved on from being a bitch to Kandori. I don't think that aspect worked well at all. But more than that it just doesn't play out in the ring that well. Aja and Bull are unfocused in their attack and there isn't the heat segments you'd expect that deal with the uneasy Hokuto/Kandori alliance. You kind of expect them to go all FIP on Hokuto or something and it never really happens. The abuse she sustains is the abuse she sustained in every match. The part where Kandori finally starts acting like a partner to Hokuto didn't have much effect and the whole thing seemed like they were just winging a long match. I'm kind of down on all wrestling atm, but that's how I felt about it a decade or so after the last time I watched it.
  19. Hadn't watched this in a long time. God it took forever. If they'd trimmed the fat it really would have been one of the greatest matches of all time instead of an overwrought epic.
  20. This was okay. The finishing stretch was engaging. Didn't really care for the outside stuff early on, but that's typical All Japan in lieu of any matwork.
  21. Toyota wasn't an outlier. She was the one that the majority of the other workers wanted to be like. Her style wasn't that unique, either. Dating back to the 70s there are workers who wrestle a go-go-go style. There was a period where the workers were influenced by Jaguar Yokota and Chigusa Nagayo, but for the most part go-go-go has always been the trademark of Japanese women's wrestling and only workers with different builds or slightly different strengths deviated from that path. The key is the rhythm. If you can't get into the rhythm of Joshi puroresu then it's not very enjoyable. You have to watch a whole bunch of it to get a proper feel for it. Kyoko Inoue was a super pro-wrestler. The camel clutches and surfboards were part of the rhythm of Joshi matches and I doubt they bother anybody who's really into Joshi like FLIK or MJH. Long term selling I think is a bulllshit concept and should be an obsolete criticism. Why should there be long term selling? It's lazy psychology. You can hobble around on a bad wheel in a big match every once and a while, but to do it every match is asinine. You got stretched out for a bit, it hurt, but you don't need to go around limping for the rest of the match. That's boring. The transitions either work or don't work depending on whether you're into the rhythm I guess. I mean when the partners start saving each other ad nauseum and they've called each other kono yaro for the millionth time it really depends whether you're into it rather than it being structurally sound. My problem in the matches I've tried to watch recently is that they're too dense, but Japanese wrestling is like that. It's full of overkill. The 90s was just this fat, bloated era where they overdid everything and cashed in.
  22. This match had a good dynamic, but it went on for far too long. Stylistically it was the same match that Joshi pro-wrestlers have been having for twenty years now, but it mostly worked well because of Bull and to a lesser extent Aja. Submission work went nowhere, which doesn't bother me so much but added to the length of the match. Didn't have a problem with the spot Childs mentioned, however, as the same thing happens in Southern style tag wrestling after the hot tag and is just a concession you make when watching wrestling. Aja looked small to me in this match or at least she worked small. Not the performance you'd expect from an ace, but then Bull always outshone her in the ring.
  23. Decent match. These guys had some good matches but it was never really a match up that excited me. Whenever I watch a match like this, I try to imagine what it would be like to have seen it on a random Saturday night instead of placing too great an expectation on it. In that regard it was entertaining, but it only really kicked into high gear for me with the finishing stretch. Would've liked to have seen a pin.
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