ohtani's jacket

Matt didn't review the match so perhaps the INA mislabeled it.

It’s the same info that Bob shared but in a slightly different format.

I did a search for it and found it in the INA archives.

Bull Power vs. Otto Wanz (8/21/87) I love Bull Power vs. Otto Wanz matches. They're such amazing slugfests. In fact, it may be my favorite Vader match up of all time. Sometimes I wonder how he got away with slugging the boss so hard. This is a great fight. Wanz delivers a hell of a haymaker at the end, and they work a proper KO finish. This made me want to revisit the other Bull Power/Otto Wanz fights.

This was a fun match. It was probably asking a bit much for it to laden with psychology. It was reasonably well laid out and the execution was decent. Kobashi and Joe seemed a bit tired from the night before, Homicide was hurt and Low Ki had just arrived in the country a few hours earlier, but you couldn't fault the effort. Not as special as the night before, but that match was lightning in a bottle.

OK, so the Atlantis heel turn is officially the best thing happening in CMLL. If you watch a lot of CMLL, you'll know that most of the time you're sitting around waiting for something to happen. I won't pretend that Atlantis is a great rudo, but it's fun watching him try. This wasn't as good as their match from the week before, largely because it was built around next week's Mistico vs. Atlantis match, and was strangely edited to boot, but the time flew by.

It could be, but that's not how they work the final round. They're clearing searching for a pinfall. I don't think there was a lot of counter wrestling either, for that matter. They did some armwork, but aside from a few things that Taylor may have done, there wasn't a lot of undressing of holds. Owen was doing his favored kip up spots. There was a lot of buggering around with the ref. It was typical houses show stuff. I like the match overall, though.

Antonino Rocca & Pat O'Connor vs. Reggie Lisowski & Art Neilson (NWA Chicago, 10/22/1954) I'm not sure if this has been uploaded before. If it has, I can't remember seeing it. It's a long match that supposedly goes to a 60 minute time limit, but we only see 40-odd minutes. It's a typical 50s tag with two bruisers working inside moves and the occasional flash of brilliance from the babyfaces. Fortunately, Lisowski and Neilson have a convincing aura of toughness and make for credible thugs. Pat O'Connor makes me proud to be a New Zealander. I wish he was a bigger deal in NZ. They should put him on our money, if you ask me. I'm not really sure what I think of Rocca. He's an exciting hot tag, but he does so much stupid leaping about. I get that it was different for the time, but he does a lot of rolling about when a more straightforward hold would look better (sounds like a criticism of modern wrestling.) I did like the spot where he was taunting the heel with kicks to the face (or rather wiping his feet, as Davis put it.) Overall, an entertaining bout but not one high on drama.

This was one of the better trios matches of the year. You can skip a lot of the other stuff and just go straight to this. It was so good even Meltzer bothered to watch it. I'm sure Dave was on a Mistico tip at the time, but the intriguing part of this was watching Atlantis play rudo and the most exciting parts were his flare ups with Santo. Atlantis vs. Santo is a matchup I never thought I'd see as a rudo vs. tecnio pairing and it's one to savor. Atlantis isn't a great rudo, but does anyone really expect him to be? I didn't realize that KeMonito followed him over to the rudo side. That leads to some role reversal spots where it's KeMonito hitting spots on the tecnicos and the tecnicos threatening to beat him up. This was an exciting bout. Mistico and Perro Jr may be the hottest stars in CMLL, but the Atlantis rudo turn is stealing all of my attention

Tanahashi and Nakamura make for boring luchadors. it's as though they're not even trying. That said, they're being forced to play rudos, which goes a long way to explaining why their performances are so generic. I can't say I approve of Rey Bucanero's new look unless he's auditioning to be the third Hardy brother. He's lost a lot of his brilliance. Where's the Rey Bucanero who could carry anyone to a good match? Olimpico was also in this but might as well have been invisible.

More of the same meandering about from these fractions with the occasional flash of brilliance. Rudo contra rudo feuds are brilliant on paper but not when they're booked like this.

Dave Taylor vs. Owen Hart (Wien, 8/4/90) I'm not a huge fan of the globe-trotting younger Owen, and Dave Taylor has always lacked something for me, but I do like the novelty of watching a Dave Taylor vs. Owen Hart match. This was a deliberately paced draw, but an entertaining contest nonetheless. I particularly liked the final round where they stopped buggering around and tried to score a pinfall. If they'd worked he entire bout with that intensity it would have been a great match.

Fun match but nothing essential. I feel like I've seen better Tenryu matches of this ilk, and to be honest given the year KENTA has had there wasn't much to gain from being a Tenryu punching bag.

How were Finlay and Jones destroyed? They had just won the previous fall and were dominating the final fall until the tombstone reversal. Jones and Finlay worked what would be a comedy spot in other territories. If they'd used the tombstone reversal as the knockout finish then it would have been more dramatic, but you don't really see finishes like that in European wrestling. A solid finish would have seen the babyfaces beat the heels cleanly. You cannot convince me that the crowd were celebrating because it was a knockout finish. I'm sorry, but regardless of how people feel about European finishes (and even British fans sometimes complain that they're weak), KOs being the most prestigious form of victory was never a thing. If it had been, it would have been evident in the hundreds of hours of WoS that is available.

That's another awful finish. It's hard to believe the titles could change hands on a spot like that. It's not even a proper knockout spot. Of course the crowd are delighted -- the faces won the belts. It had nothing to do with how they won them. Jones and Finlay are absolutely protected by that finish. If you don't lose the titles on a pinfall, submisison or a proper knockout of course you can claim it was a fluke, etc.

Scrubber Daley is displaying the dominance of his gut, but aside from that there's nothing prestigious about a heavyweight squashing a lightweight. I can see how pins meant less in European than in other territories as you had to get two of them to win a bout, but KOs (and injury finishes) were excuses to have wrestlers lose without being pinned the same as DQs and count outs in other territories. The exceptions would be KOs from finishing moves. The KOs you're talking about were rarely executed well.

I'm not a big fan of 90s nostalgia in 00s wrestling, but I can see the appeal of this as we never really got to see the young guys wrestle Tenryu in All Japan. There were some impassioned exchanges between Kobashi and Tenryu, but the guy I was rooting for was Akira Taue. It's been a long time since I've seen Taue wrestle and I forgot how much I love the bastard. I thought he'd screwed the pooch when he went to the top rope, but mother-frucking Taue! Great finish.

This was okay, but it was very much an abridged Arena Mexico version of their match-up. To see a better paced version of the bout, you'd probably need to watch them in Guadalajara or Monterrey. It ended with a run-in and a DQ finish, which ordinarily I'd hate, but it was my boy Atlantis and I got a kick out of him trying to act rude. They did a pretty good job of tearing Mistico's mask and even ripped his tights open giving us a glimpse of his tighty whities. Not sure I've ever seen that in lucha. I'd like to think that somewhere along the way Atlantis was exposed to a bit of Crockett NWA. Wagner made the same with the worst run-in ever. He was posing on the way to the ring while his sidekick was having his pants ripped off.

Bull Power vs. Rambo 'Wien, Summer '87) Vader had his ears and head taped here and was selling some sort of prior injury. Rambo targeted his ears throughout and kept Vader off his game. The clip was short and the finish was unclear, but interesting to see some sort of narrative going on with the ears.

This was the annual CMLL International Gran Prix tournament. Quite a well-booked cibernetico. All of the feuds converged in this one match, and the eliminations had weight and meaning. The action wasn't as good as in other cibernetico matches, but CMLL storytelling has rarely been this tight. The highlights for me were Santo and Averno going at it, the wild brawl on the outside midway through the bout, and the Atlantis/Wagner exchanges. It was also a lengthy bout with very few cuts, which is a plus.

It seems the narrative they wanted was that the same thing that happened to Jackie happened to Jaguar and in the end she was just a stepping stone (or a door mat, as they put it in the show) for the next girl. That's fine, but it glosses over the fact that she was a great champion and an outstanding wrestler. They mention her ability in the show, but the Matsunagas talk about her not being a star and how no-one in the audience has their eyes on her. I thought that was a bit harsh and wondered what Jaguar thought of it. It felt like the show was too short. I would have preferred 8-10 episodes. That would have improved the story tremendously. They didn't go into the bullying enough, didn't touch on Dump looking out for her juniors (in fact, they did the opposite, which kind of annoyed me, especially the part where she shaved Bull's hair off), Dump's foray into the entertainment world, or her pachinko addiction and the fact that she blew all the money she made from AJW. I also felt like they didn't do a good enough job of portraying the scale of what was happening. They showed vandalism to Dump's car and her parents' house, and scenes with threatening mail, etc., but on a larger scale there wasn't a strong enough sense of how loved Chigusa was and how hated Dump became. And where was Condor Saito!

This was entertaining while it lasted. Say what you will about Universo but he was good at wrestling these types of spectacles. Must have been in the DNA. Very slow, very deliberate, very poised. Some great big man spots like his awesome tope that took out Perro. Perro ducked Garza, which was predictable. There was a thwarted run-in from La Nazi and a cool cameo from Cien Caras at the end, who looked like Iggy Pop with his jet black hair and denim jacket. Didn't settle much as far as the various feuds went but there was plenty of confetti.

This was a nothing match. The Japanese guys turned on Averno the week before for reasons unknown. They were singularly unimpressive but would have had more of a chance of getting over if they'd wrestled babyface opponents.

The final episode bordered on ridiculous at times. The idea of Dump going "off script" in the hair vs. hair match after being offered 10 million yen to lose was ridiculous and I can understand why Japanese fans on Twitter weren't really happy about it (if even those fans are labelled as pro-wrestling otaku by others.) The way they staged the fight made it bloodier and more violent than the actual bout, but they went a bit far with it as it made it seem like Dump was about to kill her. The match did cause a riot and there were a flood of complaints that led to the show being temporary banned in some regions. The show is pretty light with the consequences. Instead, we get a muddled timeline that eventually leads to the Dump retirement match (which was also Yukari Omori's retirement match, but they don't mention that on the show.) They use the retirement match to resolve things, but man is the part where they knock out the Matsunaga brothers stupid. As for doing Jaguar dirty, the worst thing they do is make the 8/85 Budokan show seem like a failure because they didn't get the results from the Japan Grand Prix that they wanted. In reality, it was a hugely successful show for the promotion. Asuka got the big match with Jaguar that she supposedly wanted in the show. They just chose to ignore it. Just like they ignored the hair vs hair rematch, the title matches that followed Jaguar's retirement, and the fact that Chigusa, Lioness and Omori all held the Big Red Belt despite the show portraying them as being held down. Jaguar did get pushed out the door in part because of the mandatory retirement age, but for some reason they chose not to include the retirement rule in the show. According to Dump she was estranged from her father for 50 years before they reconciled on his deathbed in 2019, so no emotional scenes with dad in real life.. Personally, I thought the final episode was disappointing. I don't think they got the beats right in the story. There wasn't enough motivation for Dump to turn "face" again in terms of how they wrote the show. It's not a bad show, but I would personally rank it behind Naked Director and Sanctuary for Japanese Netflix shows dealing with similar eras and topics.

Faulkner was a smart arse and annoying, and I don't find him funny at all, but he was an excellent worker and a highly-skilled wrestler. The fans loved his cheeky behavior. Personally I like it when he gets upset.