ohtani's jacket

This was cool. It was built around Vampiro vs. Ultimo, and Ultimo being the best heel in CMLL naturally made it awesome. There was even a flashback to last week's low blow. Holy continuity, Batman. I am actually hyped to watch the Ultimo/Vampiro singles match after this. Vampiro was DQ'ed for throwing a back elbow at Babe Richard, who sold it like a fucking champ. I can get down with this reckless Vampiro with a hard on for Ultimo. The other story was Tarzan Boy vs. Casas, which is a great match-up. Tarzan Boy bust Casas open, which was barely noticeable at first, but when Casas put a rag around his head it soaked right through. He looked like Buck Shelford playing the French in '86. Look it up if you don't get it. I kept thinking how much I wanted to see them have a hair vs. hair match and then Casas got on the mic and said the magic words. There's a lot riding on that match. It could make or break Casas' year. The build up was ace.

Virus and the Guerreras are on the same side despite last week's brawl, but of course they're not cooperating. The tecnicos keep inviting Virus over to their side, which the Guerreras openly mock. I hate these drawn out turns in lucha, but at least Virus is in the spotlight and it's fun watching him sell the angle. Fuerza gets absolutely humiliated during the match when Niebla bumps and grinds all over him. Virus wants Juvie mano a mano, but first he has to go through Pops.

I'm gonna go with Casas on this one. I'm not really a Terry Funk guy. I love listening to his promos, but he's not a guy who I get immediately excited about when it comes to a match. And he doesn't represent wrestling to me like he does to so many other people. In fact, I went down a YouTube foxhole recently and wound up watching his roast, and I was interested in the part where Funk started listing the guys who represented wrestling to him when he was coming up in the business. Terry's a legend in the business, no doubt, but I don't think he's everything. I am interested in watching more of his 70s work if I get the chance. I didn't realize that we had some agnostics on the forum when it comes to Casas. That's interesting.

I've been reading up on Dump to see if there's anything I can add to this thread, and man, between the way rookies were treated, the management practices, and the amount of money the Matsunagas blew, AJW ought to be a lot more notorious than it is. One thing I've discovered recently, and they did this with Aja and Bull and Dump and the Crush Girls, is that management would get in the workers' ears and feed them lies that their opponent was saying about them. Then they'd encourage them to take it on their opponent in the ring.

Hashimoto's body of work is deeper than people gave him credit for in the past. If you pimp any of those matches as a MOTYC then clearly they're going to be an unconventional choice for MOTY, as I don't think a Hashimoto match was ever given serious MOTY consideration in real time. The 1998 Hashimoto/Tenryu match may have gotten MOTYC buzz, I don't remember. I do think it's important to keep re-evaluating and adding to the canon. I despise the idea of a canon that is set in stone. And, yes, that sort of attitude creates a bias towards things that are new and shiny, and not old hat, but if people have a problem with that, I think they should find something new to say about a Jumbo or Flair. There's not a lot of discourse going on these threads just sides. I know no-one wants to have page after page of arguing, but what's going to happen in 5 years is that the folks who think Hashimoto is cooler than Jumbo will vote Hashimoto higher, and the folks who think Jumbo is untouchable will set him on a pedestal, and we won't have advanced the discourse because both sides will ignore each other.

This is a brilliant match. It was the closest thing you'll see to a 70s Inoki match in 2002 New Japan. Takayama could have destroyed Nishimura in a stand up contest, but I loved how he worked Nishimura's style while staying true to his own formidable stand-up game. Watching Nishimura try to figure this monster out was a ton of fun. I adore Nishimura's out of place style. God bless him for working that way in the modern era. Easily the best Japanese men's match of the year. Probably a MOTYC for 2002 overall.

This is tricky. Casas is in a lot of crappy matches, and there are periods where he's given nothing to do and languishes in random matches because of lucha's weak ass booking. The argument used to be that he was brilliant even in those matches, but I'm not so sure. Given him a program and he's an all-timer. That '92-93 period after he'd jumped from UWA to CMLL was the absolute peak of his genius. It was as though he was hellbent on making Arena Mexico his house. I also like the way he changed his style later on after working in Japan. I have a lot of respect for the way he was able to adapt and stay relevant as he got older. That's basically what I'm witnessing now as I watch his work with Ultimo Guerrero and Rey Bucanero. Tamura, on the other hand, basically worked one match a month and essentially spent the rest of the time training. It was kind of a sink or swim scenario as to whether the match was any good, but even in a match against a bad opponent, or a guy who wasn't great doing a work, he still gets to flash some technique and the selling point is that it's an actual fight, and Tamura looks great if he wins. So that's probably an advantage over being stuck in random trios matches. Casas' genius vs. Tamura's athleticism and technique... You could make a case for Casas being the best luchador of all-time and Tamura being the best Japanese wrestler of all-time. Lucha vs. shoot style. This is really tough. These are basically the two types of wrestlers I like -- the genius performer vs. the skilled wrestler. I will go with Casas because he probably had more all-round ability. Tamura may have been great at pro-style, but we'll never know because of his career path.

Bob Elandon & Albert Falaux vs. Rene Caballec & Gilbert Puydebat (aired 2/23/63) This was an old Bob ALPRA upload, but it's worth watching Bob's uploads in context. I'm assuming this was before Elandon started doing the N'Boa the Snakeman gimmick. He was a strange looking dude but a great heel. His partner, Falaux, grew on me throughout the bout as a nifty heel technician. I'm pretty sure Falaux appears later on in the footage. I know Caballec does. If you can concentrate on the bout, there are a lot of great exchanges. However, as with most catch tags, the rhythm is strange. The match goes two out of three falls to a finish, but that's all it does. If you don't care about that sort of thing then there a plenty of neat moments. I enjoyed it a lot after two months of not watching any Catch.

Ultimo Dragon greeted the crowd before the match and mentioned he was here to see his friend Vampiro. The rudos jumped him and gave him a working over until the tecnicos arrived. WTF is up with Shocker's entrance attire during this period. He was wearing a rastafarian hat with dreadlocks. The match had the usual exchanges between Ultimo and Shocker, Shocker and Tarzan Boy, and Casas and Bucanero. It was short compared to their other main events and ended up a crappy low blow finish instead of a payoff to the Ultimo Dragon beatdown, but the Shocker & Casas vs. GdI dynamic is the best thing going in CMLL.

About halfway through this, I thought it lacked spark aside from the usual excitement around the tecnico comeback. Then La Familia de Tijuana turned on Satanico and it made sense. More beef. A lot of angles on this show.

This match was an excuse for Virus to start beefing with the Guerreras, but that's a good thing since it means we'll see more of Virus on TV. I've complained about Juvie a lot, but he was perfect in this. Just an absolute shit. The match wasn't much, but the post-match brawling was cool and the crowd cheered loudly for Virus to wipe the shit-eating grin off Juvie's face.

If you're interested in Lou Thesz, go ahead and watch a Lou Thesz match. They're not hard to find. I'm not interested in championing Thesz so that people will vote for him. I'm too old, tired, and swamped at work, and it's not going to happen anyway because it's not an era of wrestling that people are interested in. If people want to talk about Thesz that's cool, but watch a couple of matches first. I don't know why people wouldn't like the Thesz vs. Schmidt matches and not be interested in seeing more Thesz, but I can't wrap my head around a lot of things.

It's not about liking or disliking Toyota. I get why people have a problem with Toyota. It's about actively hating on Toyota while claiming that every other Joshi wrestler is great. I don't get how someone can watch that period of Joshi and not coming away with the understanding that she was an integral part of the era and a worker who embodied what it means to be a Joshi pro-wrestler. I don't know anything about current Joshi, so I'll stick with the older era. Aja, Dynamite and Bull were not indicative of Joshi pro-wrestling or Joshi pro-wrestlers. They were given the gimmicks they had because of their body type and the way they looked, and also because it had worked in the past. That style was antiquated, the audience changed, and finally they were able to show traits that were closer to what Joshi was truly about. Aja got to show more of herself. Bull got to show more of herself. The best part of Bull's career, IMO, is when she's the respected elder stateswoman speaking on behalf of all the wrestlers. She had been moved sideways, career-wise, but she seems happy to be in that role. I don't know that for sure, that's simply my impression. I know from listening to her speak that she had a hard time at the beginning of his career and a difficult time during that early 90s period people have been talking about a lot recently. Anyway, back to Toyota. Toyota was representative of practically every girl who broke into Joshi or tried to break into Joshi. The outliers might be bigger girls, smaller girls, or sporty types, but the point is that pretty much every girl who tried out for AJW wanted to be the babyface idol. Aja wanted it. Bull wanted it. They all wanted to be like Chigusa. Toyota didn't have the charisma to be an idol like The Beauty Pair or Crush Girls, but she did have the drive and determination to be a fierce competitor. People praise Hokuto the hilt, but to me there is no difference between Hokuto and Toyota when it comes to their mindset, their attitude, the raw feeling they tapped into. I do not see a difference between Toyota and Jaguar when it comes to determination, either. There were a lot of girls on the AJW roster who were good workers, or fun workers, inoffensive, but not on Toyota's level. I'm not gonna say Akira Nogami was a better worker than Shinya Hashimoto and I'm not gonna say Takako Inoue was a better worker than Manami Toyota. The most frustrating thing about Manami Toyota is that you can never have a proper conversation about her. You can't talk about what she was like in '89-90 or how terrible her GAEA work is because all anybody ever talks about is selling the leg. Anyway, this was an antagonistic thread in the first place, and I gave an honest answer even if it made no sense.

Well, he's a better wrestler than just about everyone else, so yeah.

I would take the '92 Dandy, '93 Dragon and '93 La Fiera matches over any Santo vs. Casas match. I actually think Santo vs. Casas is probably Casas' most overrated match-up.

First of all, Bull keeps saying that the Matsunagas were in Bull and Aja's ears trying to get them to hate each other and that a lot of the emotion in the ring was real. I don't know how much of that you can believe, but from what Bull says it wasn't a case of Bull dragging Aja to her level, but Bull fighting to retain her position. I think Bull was a good worker from her rookie days through to her retirement, but I don't think she had great matches with the younger girls when she was the company ace. Some good matches, for sure, but nothing amazing. And by the time the interpromotional era rolled round, she was downplayed by All Japan Women and didn't have a lot of singles match opportunities.

I'm tired of sticking up for Toyota, but I will say two things: 1) I don't get people who say they love Joshi, or whatever, but they hate Toyota. To me, I don't know that those people really get Joshi. Even worse are people who don't like Toyota but think everyone else was great -- like we're supposed to believe that Hasegawa, Mita, Shimoda, Yoshida, Takako Inoue, etc. were better than Toyota. 2) Toyota was a better seller than most wrestlers who'll finish above her. She didn't sell pop up transitions. Not the only wrestler who didn't, but somehow the worse offender. The argument that she stopped selling all together is lazy and false. I would say that in Joshi only Hokuto, Ozaki and Chigusa were better at selling, and only at their absolute best. What I would really like to see is some proper critical analysis of Toyota from someone who doesn't dislike her. The first good Toyota match that I've seen is from 1989. The last great Toyota match is from 2002. That's 13 years as a good worker, which is a lot more than most Joshi workers. Her absolute peak is 92-94, IMO. I'm not a big fan of her '95-99 period, and prefer her '00-02 work, but I like her earlier work more than her period as the company ace.

Regal vs. Larry Z is his signature WCW match. You should check out his series with Flair as well.

I love both guys, especially Dangerous Alliance era Arn and WCW TV title era Regal, but I think 19 and 21 are ridiculously high. They're both great performers, but not that good. Regal was probably the better singles worker, but Arn had plenty of good singles matches and was a better tag and multi-man worker than Regal. Arn's run was short, but Regal pissed away a chunk of his prime with addictions. Regal started too late to work good WoS bouts while Arn took a while to piece it all together. Arn probably had more range. He could work like an Anderson and pinball like a Buddy Rogers. He was intense on the mic, but showed plenty of ass in the ring. Regal did a great job with his gimmick, but it was mostly comedy. Regal was the better wrestler. It's close, and I think it's fitting that they're paired together, but I went with Arn.

Inoki is in pretty rough shape.

I watched the Jaguar/Lioness 10/97 match the other day and it kept bothering me that Jaguar never played to the crowd, got in Asuka's face, or emoted in any sort of way. I also find her style awkward at times. She did a lot of flippy shit that she didn't really need to do, or doesn't fit into the flow of the match because she's not selling the performance. There's a really cool spot where she wraps a chain around her foot and nails Asuka with a missile dropkick, but it would have been a much better spot if she'd sold it. I'm not saying she has to stand on the turnbuckle and get the crowd clapping, but you can physically sell the fact that you're doing something extreme. I think her comeback work is a bit overrated.

This was disappointing. First of all, it would have made more sense for Black Tiger to have defeated Felino so that he could continue his beef with Black Warrior. And secondly, it was a weak match and a precursor to the poor singles matches that would follow in later years. Every now and again, they throw Felino a bone. This was one of those moments, but it didn't do anything to elevate Felino, Black Warrior or Black Tiger, so it has to be considered a failure in that sense.

This ended up being pretty cool. Shocker has apparently discovered Eminem and is rocking a B-Boy look. Magica looks like his mini. Vampiro is wearing some goofy Lestat shirt but doesn't really have a gimmick. He actually worked better with Black Tiger and Takemura than he did with Ultimo and Bucanero. The main reason you want to watch this, however, is the chemistry between Shocker and Wagner. I don't want to say they're CMLL's version of The Rock and Austin as they're not quite that electric, but they're definitely the most charismatic tecnico/rudo pairing in CMLL. Magica is great as Shocker's sidekick, and despite how solid the rudos are here, it's always cool to see a match where the tecnicos kick ass.

Decent little match with Casas stepping down into the midcard to have some fun exchanges with Virus(!) and Zumbido. Juventud continues to be pretty much dead weight. Could have used another fall.

Arena Coliseo handicap match. These matches are well done and it's always fun to see the heels pinballing for Silva. I'll take a stock match like this over Vampiro any day of the week.