David Mantell

Around this time Menard was turning heel and tagging with the hated Jacky Richard. In time he would become quite the vieux pontoufle grumpy old man heel. It's also the match where Roger Delaporte comes into his own as the good guy Arbitre who takes no faesces from Les Mechants. Action wise it's pretty much the Acme of faced paced Catch A Quatre, Les Celts are a great Bon team and there are lots of monkey climbs, throws, bump landings from spinouts, reverse snapmares and back somersaults off a top wristlock abounding. Delaporte owned this building, the Elysée Montmartre, and the other Roger, Couderc, regales the viewer with it's long star studded history (Rabeles, Toulouse Lautrec etc) plus just the really rub it in there is a display of classic wrestling posters on the stagecas Rumble Promotions in 2020s England are also wont to do. Nine months after this, Corne would pop up on World of Sport, on the 1978 FA Cup Final edition no less, to job the European Welterweight Championship to Dynamite Kid just as Jorg "Baron Von" Chenok would do for Danny Collins on the 1985 edition.

Camcorder footage. Pierre, brother of Marc, second son of Guy, TBW contemporary of Danny Collins. I've already posted a swimming pool tag matchi of him and brother Marc from FR3's La Dernier Manchette in 1984, filmed somewhere outdoors in the Mediterranean sunset. Now here he is in solo action against Jean Menard, now fully grey haired. Normally at this point Mean Old Menard was a Mechant but here he was on his best behaviour as le gosse completely dominated him with every kind of acrobatic move imaginable in the 20th century. One key difference between veteran Vs TBW matches in Britain and this is that the TBW wins hands down. At the start we get to see some other legends like Mammouth Siki in their dotage too.

Do you mean at 16:45 where Owen scissors one arm to keep it out of the way (and prevent himself being cross buttock thrown) while he gets on the rest of the abdominal stretch?

RIP Dave "Zarak" Larsen 1941-2024

I didn't see any comedy apart from a couple of bits involving McMichael where Owen leans on him to do a Spinout and Taylor lands on him. (McMichaels was grumpy but accepting, Didier Gapp would have been handing out yellow and red cards left, right and centre.) The rest was good solid technical work. Owen did spend time in Mexico but I believe that was later (him and Benoit under masks as the Blue Blazer and the Pegasus Kid.) The hold you mentioned was done a lot in Britain in the 50s/60s/70s/80s by Hungarian wrestler Zoltan Boscik. I think I posted a bout of him Vs Jim Breaks to the British thread. Kent Walton used to call that move of Zolly's the Three In One hold. On the WWF's WrestleFest 88 Milwaukee stadium show, during the Demolition Vs Bulldogs match, Dynamite Kid does the Zolly 3 in 1 to Smash (only for Ax to come to the rescue with Mr Fuji's cane.)

Reslo Goes To Graz! And just to prove it, here's Orig Williams speaking Welsh standing next to a CWA ring! Just before Xmas '91 while their own ring was on loan to WCW, the Reslo crew plus an S4C Outside Broadcast unit took the trip eastwards over the Severn bridge, across the Saesnag land and hopped on a North Sea Ferry to catch some CWA footage of their own. For advertisers' money's worth, they came back with TV footage of a bout between two North Americans, Rambo who we all know about and an aging flabby ex WWFer Ken Patera. Despite looking like a shopworn version of his late 80s WWF and AWA babyface runs and presumably a familiar figure to German WWF fans, Patera is the heel here against champion Rambo, conqueror of the hated Bull Power. He breaks Euro rules especially ignoring round ends a la Wild Angus Vs King Kong Kirk in their World of Sport match in the early to mid 80s. In the end Rambo prevails by reversing a suplex attempt for the pin. I wonder if Patera had previous in the CWA/IBV? His strongman contest antics would have been right up Otto Wanz's street! @JNLister The audio is badly out of sync so the last few minutes are played out to a soundtrack of the Reslo theme, a silence and Messrs Williams, Fon and Parry chatting in Welsh about Americans at the tournament and upcoming bouts between Johnny Saint/Kid McCoy and Danny Collins Vs Robbie Hagen. You might want to repair it.

I liked this one enough to run upstairs, take the tablet off charge and post a review (luckily OJ seems to have liked it too.). For me this represents Regal coming of age, able to work with a veteran to put on a decent scientific match. Both guys fitted the "heavyweights who can move like lightweights" category and Regal had a pretty decent repertoire of counters, none of them earth shattering but overall respectable. He and Brookside had an ITV clean tag match with Danny and Pete Collins around this time where Kent Walton said he hadn't previously been impressed by Regal but was finally warming to him. I wish this match could have been on ITV for Kent to comment on as it was a really good resume of what Regal had learned of technical wrestling by this point (okay there are the usual few forearms and Regal's "Look at me mum I'm Hulk Hogan" legdrop but never mind them.) Best bit is the folding press where Regal role his legs forward but instead of getting them hooked a la Bret/Davey/SS92 Regal actually uses his legs to break up the folder. Nice climactic finish too with Regal going for a cross buttock and press but StClair reversing it for the pin.

I think he knew that Colley was useless at counters so had to be allowed his section of the bout to do his thing. (There were some very crude attempts at counterwrestling in JCP/WCW in the late 80s/early 90s from some of the better workers, such as the go behind standing hammerlock reversed into another go behind standing hammerlock multiple times, and a cycle of reversion involving headscissors to side headlock to headscissors to side headlock. This, combined with some amateur freestyle sparring, appears to be was what passed for scientific wrestling in Southern US rasslin'. Or so it seems from a load of old 1987 JCP WCW @ Techwood Drive I've been watching the past 24h) Also Steve does win and he was indeed a pretty successful main event blue eye/babyface in Germany/Austria and had been for many years by this point. So I think they were doing with him already what you are suggesting.

Uneventful. Cyanide Syd Cooper was a "carpenter" noted for making blue eyes look good. (For this he was rewarded with a few months, unacknowledged on TV, taking care of the British Welterweight title while Danny Collins went off on tour defending his newly won Euro title in France and Northern Spain on FFCP shows for Delaporte, the first of several such summer tours.). Unfortunately his opponent here Colin Bennett is quite old and doesn't have that much in the way of clever escapes (about one cartwheel notwithstanding) and it goes against Cooper's legit nature to upstage Bennett so what we are left with is a lot of static holds, enough fouls by Cooper to clock up two public warnings and finally a basically clean submission. Cooper should just have accepted that this was his night to be the star and at least made himself look good.

It can work the other way. Not as often though. (Strongbow as a heel sounds interesting. Do tell on -or post he video.)

That was a common finish across Europe. A babyface/blue-eye wrestler valiantly battles back from near knockout only to be picked off by the heel for the deciding or only required fall or submission the moment they are fully off the canvas/in the ring. Rocco Vs Collins on British TV 1988 and Kendo Nagasaki's world title win over Wayne Bridges are both slight variants on this.

Kip up spots are themselves undressing a wrist lever which as I've said could be developed into something more substantial. There were only one or two bits with McMichael, similar in character as I said to his banter with Faulkner in their matches. It didn't get overbearing like Didier Gapp in the tag match constantly trying to be the "humourless" jumped-up petty official and grab all the attention with his antics to the point where he was the de facto heel in the match.

A TV play from Greece 1987 involving some wrestling. Three bouts. Starts with guy in red versus masked man in appalling leopardskin mask with fabric running down his shoulders, the costume makers had obviously not researched what a wrestling mask looks like. Masked man wins, guyin red gets ear bending from his trainer. Fast forward to 40min in, guy in red goes to draw with old grey haired bearded guy. Final five mins, guy in red and masked guy have rematch, guy in red's daughter shows up unexpected in his corner, guy in red gets his win back by submission with a Boston crab, big family reunion afterwards. Apparently set in a big theatre but the limitations of a TV studio plus the decision to decorate the set with flags hanging down by the short end make it all look like an episode from the time of WTBS World Championship Wrestling at Techwood Drive in Atlanta GA (which would have been at its peak right then). Ring has badly loose ropes and no turnbuckle covers or post pads, canvas looks suspiciously similar to the one from the actual Tromaras match I posted previously. Knockout counts are in force, prohibitions on attacks on the mat are not. The middle match appears to be on TV (a Bell from No Holds Barred style baddie is watching in his office). which as far as we know was not done in Greece except for the unexplained professional shooting of the said Tromaras match.

Interesting. I wonder when that first started in that case. How much foresight about the home video market could there have been in 1979?

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. Why would a submission not be similarly effective? Chain sequences in British wrestling are about one wrestler putting on a hold and either trying to advance it or the other escaping/reversing it - "undressing" the hold as Kent Walton would put it. An armbar not rolled out of could become a hammerlock and then a double wristlock or a chicken wing. As such it is about near-submission predicaments in the same way that a long string of evenly split 2 count false finishes (which is what is supposed to be so good about Savage/Steamboat at WM3 for instance) is about pinfalls. The same holds true with the styles of French Catch and German Catch except that the former has a more acrobatic edge, preferring to somersault upwards rather than roll downwards, and the latter (at least between two native Germans/Austrians) slower and more deliberate with longer struggle and more time before a counter is produced. In short I would dispute that they were at all "buggering around." Within kayfabe, a submission could have come at any time in those early rounds but for each man's knowledge of counterwrestling.

Is it professionally filmed with a camera crew like the best IBV/CWA stuff or is it a single handheld camcorder like the VDB footage?

Where can we see this one? It isn't on YouTube as far as I can tell. The earliest IBV (proto CWA) footage I have seen is Otto Vs Don Leo a year later.

Now THIS is more like it! Two partners from the earlier match going at it in a scientific bout without a heel referee constantly trying to upstage. Mick McMichael does do one or two bits of his old mock cantankerousness from his bouts with Vic Faulkner - witness him complaining of a hurt shoulder after Owen uses him for leverage to spin out of an armbar (actually the young Owen reminds me of a heavier version of Vic) but unlike Didier Gapp he basically falls into line to allow Hart and Taylor to have a good scientific bout, and all three men leave as good pals after a time limit draw. Classy stuff, the best I've seen in a German/Austrian ring.

James Mason and Johnny Kidd splitting a pair of old school matches on new school promotions in 2022 and 2023. They've recently had another one for the Jim Breaks memorial cup (surely a heel like Breaks should win that!) which I was looking for when I found these two.

Well they're not Mr Moto/Kenji Shibuya/Prof Tanaka/Mr Fuji caricatures which is a good start. Nice gowns on the Japanese team. Nice appreciative crowd too, cheering good play on both sides rather than just going for patriotism. Mercier comes up with the clever escapes, the Japanese are good mat wrestlers moving from hold to hold. The Japanese start to go a bit heel with clawholds that involve fish-hooking the nose and hiding chokes from the referee. The Japanese team go back to more scientific moves but are no longer trusted. Commentator calls karate chops "Manchettes Japonaises" - Japanese forearm smashes! Half an hour in, it's very much a forearms Vs chops slugfest which is a pity but I guess these boys were in Europe to learn such aspects of the game. The Japanese are on their second and final Avertisement. Montourcy tags in and Les Bons double team Yocouchi before Claude finishes him with not much of a chop of his own for the opening fall. Commentator uses the interim to chat up some young female fans. Second falls starts with a bit more chop Vs Manchette before Montourcy goes into a flurry of dropkicks and a victory roll for a second straight, clearly they were running out of TV time. Japanese team don't really know what has hit them and are last seen raising their hands. Mercier and Montourcy shake the referees hand - 11 years later Mercier would be routinely beating up refs and getting applauded for it. Straight up babyface locals Vs heel foreigners match you could see anywhere in the world. A pity there was not more effort to make stars of the Japanese but this was before the Gotch/Robinson revolution and the Satoru Sayamas of this world were over a decade off.

The exact same way Anaconda and Rasputin were destroyed in that Big Daddy tag match - they were left laying in a dazed humiliated pile at ringside. There is nothing strong-keeping about that finish. Both sets of heels thoroughly got their comeuppance. In the case of Anaconda and Rasputin, even Kent Walton joined in the jeering as the heels lay on top of each other like they were making out together "These two are either great pals or they're not doing it right." Sort of. The famous Daddy Vs Haystacks match at Wembley Arena 1981 which, (like similar bouts with Mighty John Quinn at Wembley 1979 and pre-Kamala Big Jim Harris in 1982) could ONLY be won by a knockout - a Texas Death Match by any other name - ended when Haystacks was knocked over the ropes and took a table bump. The table in question was piled high with bouquets of flowers fans had bought for Daddy. Consequently Haystacks claimed that he had slipped on the flowers and, as we Brits say, gone arse over teakettle. He claimed he was thus robbed and wanted a rematch. (It never came although tag matches between the two continued sporadically until Daddy's retirement in 1993. Bold highlighted bit - this sounds like French Catch mainly. As we discussed on that thread, from the late 70s referees with the exception of Delaporte were treated as quasi heel Dangerous Danny Davis types who were biased in favour of Les Mechants and whom it was OK for Les Bons like Guy Mercier, Mammouth Siki and Flesh Gordon to physically assault and batter. Generally Les Bons would get a raw deal for retaliatory tactics. In Britain on ITV the referees were forced by the Independent Broadcasting Authority to be positive authority figures who were consistently shown to be in control of the match. Referees were more likely to be biased in favour of the good guys and quite right too. They would as Kent Walton put it, allow as certain amounts "for retaliation" to balance out any advantage the heel gained from fouling. Picking up the ref and using him as a battering ram was not acceptable blue-eye behaviour in Britain. Generally the tying up a heel and battering ramming him was not done on ITV. It WAS done quite a bit on Reslo, particularly in matches involving Orig Williams as an active in ring blue-eye competitor. A similar amount of allowance of time for retaliation was permitted at the end of which the blue eye would be privately warned to drop ithe tactics. Obviously there was a lot of it in France and Andre in America was able to adapt this for himself -he last got himself tied up in the ropes in 1990 against Demolition at WM6.

Pancho Zapata is already a familiar figure to me from his 1969 match on World of Sport against Jeff Kaye (also a frequent traveller to France as was his Barons tag partner Ian Gilmour) which was featured in The Final Bell in December 1988. This is him four years earlier teamed with Anton Tejero (a name which would take on unfortunate connotations on 23rd February 1981 when a Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero staged an attempted military coup in the Spanish parliament.) French wrestling seems to be littered with heels wearing loud colourful Gypsy, Latin American or Spanish culture (hats, colourful coats, big moustaches, swarthiness etc. Roger Couderc tells us Tejero plays guitar.) The French would have HATED Hector, Mando and Chavo Guerrero. So a bald Mexican and burly Spaniard, both with Kong thick taches, are quite the heat generating dream team. Rene is a technical legend and he and Cesca make straight up Bons against these dodgy foreigners. Rene's constant barrage of throws to both heels has a similar effect to a Big Daddy tag where Daddy starts the match, both heels getting utterly blitzed early on. (In American Wrestling this usually serves to soften the blow for a BIG heel win such as both Sgt Slaughter and the Undertaker's respective 1991 interim heel title wins.). Couderc drops references to French pop culture such as Poupee De Cire Poupee De Son (that year's Serge Gainsborg penned, France Gall sung Eurovision Song Contest winner albeit for Luxembourg) and Le Manege Enchante, the a French original of classic stop animation children's TV show The Magic Roundabout. Perhaps Couderc was inspired to make the remark about Tejero being a guitarist based on Flappy, the lazy Spanish rabbit from the show which for the English version morphed into Dylan, a stoned beatnik American rabbit! Actually Couderc , the supposed dean of French wrestling commentary, seems to be mostly playing it for laughs in this bout. Referee Martial seems to be the tough Delaporte/Max Ward/Gorilla Monsoon type, physically the biggest of the five men in the ring and willing to use that power to enforce law and order in the ring, at one point lifting Pancho up by the waist and carrying him out of mischief and clamping his hands over Tejero 's eyes to drag him back to his corner (Terry Funk would have potatoed anyone who tried that, something Tejero clearly briefly contemplates then think better of). That said the heels still manage to run a couple of rings around him, getting the dirty in while the ref manhandles their partner. And they even get to administer unto the legendary RBC some of the slapstick usually reserved for faces to administer to heels later on in the bout, trapping him in the ropes and leapfrogging each other to land on him. And when the heels beat down on Cesca leading to Tejero pinning him for the opener, it is really an emotional low point after Les Bons earlier hi jinks. The heels seem to say "You're not laughing now!" as they taunt the crowd. RBC equalises and then gets Zapata neatly in a surfboard which overbalanced leaving both men's shoulders down. Rather than count them both, Martial just pushes the whole surfboard sidewards. Rene gets some great flyers in like headscissors and Huracanrana, as well as doing a kind of Fargo Strut, playfully aiming backwards kicks at both opponents. Les bons get a measure of revenge on Les Mechants for earlier antics which were more a Boy's prerogative anyway. After slamming the heels into each other and hitting them with synchronised missile dropkick which earns them a second and final Avertisement. Zapata ends up garroted in the ropes like Collins against Rocco. Tejero comes off the ropes but trips for reasons we don't see why and is splashed and pinned for the win. Technical point, the film has several jumps indicating sections of frames removed due to film damage, possibly from a faulty projector.

Afterthought: we can reasonably extrapolate that Jones and .Finlay were rolling around at ringside in defeat and humiliation (a la Rasputin and Anaconda) from the fact that they are never seen in shot again after they collide and go over the ropes. If they had got up, narrowly failed to beat the count and run into the ring to protest, then you would have had a point there.

They were NOT protected at all, they were utterly destroyed and humiliated, rolling around on the floor at ringside. European fans had a different way of thinking on these things. This (admittedly lousy) Big Daddy tag match has a very similar finish but I can't see for the life of me how Anaconda and Rasputin were protected by this finish! Admittedly the one single camcorder was not able to film the finish as well as an ITV outside broadcast unit could but the intended effect was the same - the heels rolling around in a heap of defeat at ringside. (As an aside Rasputin worked a lot in Germany and I expect we'll be seeing more of him as this thread progresses.)

One time archenemies Marty Jones and Fit Finlay team up as heels defending the CWA World Tag Team Championship they won from Mike and Tony DtClair two months earlier. "Franzi" and Mile are the scientific good guys doing lots plenty of British style reversals/counters. Finlay is his late 80s bully self. Jones mixes his usual skill in with a lot of dirty wrestling eg stomping. It's actually the sort of action packed bout Jones and Finlay would have or the Finlay/Murphy Riot Squad tag team would have. Schumann scores the opening fall with a victory roll on Jones. During the break Jones offers Zrno his hand but is refused. Jones then takes a swig of water and sloshes the rest over Zrno and the crowd are enraged - one ladies SCREAMING abuse at Jones in German. Schumann eventually handles both bad Brits and he and Zrno have some Southern US style fast four way action with Finlay and Jones. Schumann gets a cover on Finlay but Jones stomps it and Finlay slams Schumann and pins him for the equaliser. Schumann regains the upper hand and gets Finlay with a sliding dropkick. He tries for another but Finlay pulls him out to ringside (the other side from the camera sadly) and they brawl at ringside. Finlay tosses a bloody Schumann into Jones who punishes him further before tagging Finlay who continues the punishment until Schumann reverses a tombstone piledriver attempt and goes for a pin. Jones puls him off, hits the ropes, goes for a flying tackle but misses and hits Finlay and they both go over the top rope. The referee starts a triple knockout count., Schumann is up at 8 but the bad guys stay down at ringside for the 10 count and are knocked out making Mile Zrno and Franz Schumann the winners and new champion in a Knockout. The crowd are DELIGHTED at this Knockout finish to give their heroes the titles. It is quite the celebration and may I say @ohtani's jacket there is no sense of Jones or Finlay being protected. We see no more of them in the video after the knockout, presumably the cleaners picked them up off the floor after the show. Meanwhile back in Britain Marty would still be a blue-eye and kayfabe enemies with Finlay until 1992 when they were forced to team in Croydon. To their "surprise" they really worked as a heel team and Jones went bad, changing from dignified blue eye to bragging heel, and would remain such until May 2000 when Jones got into a feud with Kendo Nagasaki over the Wrestler of the Millennium trophy.