David Mantell

Just noticed you mention this was on TF1 also!. When exactly in 1977 did the channel go full colour? It may be once it did go colour promoters were happier to have matches on there.

At last! Evidence that the VdB DID know how how to use Johnny Saint rather than treating him as a sacrificial lamb for some heavyweight. First round is a bit slow with each man managing to keep the same hold for half a round (Rolo with a headscissors - I do like how he uses the forearm to tighten the scissorhold and prevent Saint getting his head out! Then Saint with a standing full nelson). After that it's a good couple of rounds of fast paced Johnny Saint complete with Lady of the Lake sequence and the German audience lap it up. It ends with a no contest - Rolo lands badly and Saint is offered but refuses a TKO. I guessed @ohtani's jacket won't approve but it's nice to see the German audience get the point and that it's not just us Brits that mark out for these sportsmanly finishes.

A thought re the Otto Wanz phenomenon. The big strong superhero lead blue-eye/babyface/Bon really started with the Hercules Cortez phenomenon. From there it seems to have inspired "Blond Adonis" Shirley Crabtree as the top star of UK Opposition promoter Paul Lincoln, Otto Wanz in the CWA/IBV and more recently George Tromaras in 1980s Greece.

Okay, a subject for discussion - the home videos programme run by IBV/CWA and the similar programme run more cheaply by VdB. What we know is that it started in 1980 and was still a going concern into the 1990s, perhaps up until the CWA's closure and replacement with EWP in 2000. Unlike television in the UK and France, it was never at the mercy of a TV exec who could cancel the videos like Greg Dyke. So when the WWF invaded, it was basically business as usual for the CWA and the German/Austrian tournaments. Does anyone have a more in depth history of the video range? How it came about? Stories from. It's evolution. The whole history in fact. Does anyone have more details?

@Indikator has this ever surfaced again since?

I posted a pic some pages back of Mark "Little Legs" Seely. He mostly works with full sized opposition. He tends to work tags and handicap tags, generally as an end of the night attraction to send 'em home happy. However he does have a rather neat "Human Glove" wristlock/arm scissors combination (and as similar legscissors based "Human Boot.") Neil "Tom Thumb" Evans was classed as a full grown lightweight (he briefly beat Jim Breaks for the European Lightweight Championship in IIRC 1986)

The above is @ohtani's jacket's reviews of German/Austrian footage from page 6-7 of the British Wrestling thread, moved here for greater convenience/relevance going forward. I get OJ isn't American but given my remarks about IBV/CWA being American- friendly, perhaps it is no surprise that he prefers it to Britain of the same period.

There's a German Catch thread on here. I've migrated some Germany/Austria stuff from here on to there. I shan't bother with German footage of Finlay, Saint etc posted on this British thread to illustrate points about them. Ideally we could do the same with Spanish, Greek, Egyptian, Lebanese and Iraqi wrestling. Let each territory have its own thread.

My reply to the rant: He doesn't exactly make it easy does he? To be honest it's very hard to take apart the Wikipedia page for the CWA since all the sources called it that.(Verifiability Not Truth and all that.) It seems to me (and correct me if I'm wrong). that IBV is what people are referring to when they talk of the CWA- the promotion with the big ring with white ropes, blue or dark grey mat, covered in logos of sponsoring companies, gong instead of a bell. featuring Otto and a load of visiting Americans, filmed very professionally by a multi camera crew for home video. While the VBD are the Other lot, smaller ring, a lot like Britain, lots of Joint Promotions mid careers on the bill, also quite a few older Germans like Axel Dieter, filmed badly with a single handheld camcorder.

The first bout of IBV's glorious ahead of the curve wrestling home video programme which made Germany/Austria the third territory alongside the Televised Two, Britain and France of which we have bulk quantities of footage. Otto Vs Don Leo Johnathan. With Otto looking a younger trimmer champion than the blubbery grand old man of the CWA he became. From July 1980:

Copying across @Jetlag's two 1970s clips: Me: @Indikator: Jetlag:

I wish I knew about this thread before. There's quite a few clips already posted to the British and French threads that really belongs here. One of the two last matches by Adrian Street in Europe (along with his Great Yarmouth match teaming with Steve Kelly against the Pallos for their home video release cum audition tape for ITV.). Street's beard at this point was later trimmed into the mutton chop sideburns/moustache he had in America in the 80s. Oddly good natured bout, Axel and Adam seem to have quite a few laughs together, you'd hardly know it was face versus heel (not sure what the appropriate terms are.) They even shake hands at the end of each round. Or was Adrian a good guy in Germany? Street the younger of the two doing his bridge and rolling with bumps up to a standing start. Didn't know Imagine What I'm could do to you was written and recorded that early. I suppose it explains the Sixties throwback musical style on some of his other songs such as the Freddie and the Dreamers esque I'm In Love With Me.

It was on a Best of Johnny Saint compilation tape that @Britwresdvds sold me back in 2002ish. (assuming @Britwresdvds is who I think he is, namely Adam Mumford.)

Thanks. Interesting. Why are they wearing Catch-style trunks instead of double arm leotards like a GR wrestler normally would?

1991, I believe. Not to be confused with their Reslo bout which Saint wins.

Have you seen the camcorder footage of Saint putting over Danny Collins 1-0 at a venue in South West England? (as can be told from audience members' "Pirate"/"Wurzals" West Country accents)

I've just remembered I have this on my wall, which I bought from Camden Market in London some years ago. Anyone know the back story?

The Saint-Prince match was like that except Saint dominated and Prince was the comedy heel getting stroppy at being made a fool of. Saint was better mixing his style with another master technician to create scientific classics with no distractions. Like combining two soup flavours. Being the moral counterpart to a heel was a distraction.

How NOT to use Johnny Saint! Courtesy of Germany's VdB, 1987 (You can tell it's Germany what with the gong instead of a bell and the DJ between rounds.) And I'm not just talking about Brody's attempt at the end to outdo fellow "South African" Col De Beers - (incidentally the former UK Magnificent Maurice and the former WWWF Polish Prince crossed paths in Germany quite a bit, indeed I think Ed W got the idea off Shaun B.) Saint gets in a few of his tricks but is mostly used as a kicking bag to get the bigger dirtier wrestler some heat. It's a pity because German audiences very much got the point of Johnny Saint as you can tell from the Johnny chant and some other German JS bouts I've seen. Brody could be a much better wrestler than this too - check out his 1991 Eurosport match with Owen Hart.

Some more Finlay - Interesting shoot interview with the then Carl Wallace of Double Trouble mainly focusing on Finlay and also on other British stars of the time. I thought about posting it to the French Catch thread as I'd just posted a New Catch DT match from France against two Old Catch stars (Flesh Gordon and Franz Van Buyten) but the content has more to do with this thread and besides which Karl/Carl/Pierre says Double Trouble worked for All Star (which I don't recall but in those post TV years it could be patchy what you did or didn't know about. and indeed namechecks Brian Dixon.

By the way, that's an awfully large amount of page space that one half hour solitary tag bout gets in that TV listings magazine. Half a page. About the same as the size of the panel in TVTimes's listings for a Saturday afternoon for a full five hour edition of World Of Sport (not just the wrestling slot but the On The Ball football analysis, the horse racing, the International Sports Special, any oddball sports features and the football results/pools numbers). All this for a wrestling show in the same length and timeslot as ITV's midweek late evening wrestling show, except that would typically have two bouts in the same amount of time. In fact the level of printed hype mostly resembles a major championship boxing match on 1990s ITV on a Saturday night in the same timeslot ("The Big Fight Live" with Gary Newbon.) Which seems to suggest to me that a wrestling TV broadcast certainly at this point was still a big deal in France.

Nice Andre docu interview. Backing music is dodgy Eurovision song, written by Serge Gainsborg, sung by France Gall about being a singing Dolly. (They later did a song together about lollipops. You work it out.)

Interestingly both these bouts were were on Channel 1. The 1971 bout you can see from the listing above. In the case of the December 1977 Zarak Bordes match the female continuity announcer is in front of a backdrop covered in old school TF1 logos, I still reckon TF1 wrestling was rare as the channel was in b/w until 1977 so one would expect at least a few B/W bouts for 1975-1977 unless this was a rarity. It's filmed in a very different style from normal, overhead from a balcony looking down on the ring. The ORTF was broken up at the start of 1975 and channels 1, 2 and 3 became TF1, Antenne 2 and FR3, each run independently of each other, so perhaps this is a one off. I've already reviewed the 1971 bout three pages back. If it was in b/w that's a pity, I hope as many as possible of the 1967-1974 bouts were on Channel 2 in colour with recoverable chroma dots. Rewatching the 1971 bout it too is shot in an unusual style with a lot of use of a camera angle corner-wise on to the ring, so maybe this was a rarity too. Zarak was in a simpler red/orange costume/mask in 77 but still the same strutting arrogant masked man The commentator admits that he is a British living in Paris because he likes the air of the place. Fast action packed bout suddenly ends in a draw. For some reason the audience and Bordes think he's won it and get stroppy when it is indeed a draw.

This reminds me a lot of masked wrestlers in Joint Promotions in the mid 80s like The Emperor (Bill Bromley), Battle Star (Barry Douglas) or El Diablo (Tony Francis). He's a fellow Brit so it makes sense. Bigger dominant masked man brutalises clean wrestler to get a win and heat. If this was Britain, they be warrming him up nicely for Big Daddy. But it isn't, Zarak was a well established masked man and it wasn't even the first time Bordes had faced him. Chants for Bordes "Mama-doux mais mais" and for an unmasking "Hey hey la Cagoule" merge and become inseperable. We've discussed already the role of the heel ref in French Catch from the late 70s onwards, suffice to say almost all refs except Delaporte were basically Dangerous Danny Davis, especially Michel Saulnier and Otto Weiss.

Apparently this was Flesh Gordon's TV debut, (broadcast the same month as Hulk Hogan's first WWF match. funnily enough.) Herve is anything but flash here, plain mint green trunks and pudding bowl haircut, working down on the mat despite his lunch background, very little escaping other than one nice cartwheel. Ramirez wears a matador's jacket to the ring which marks him as the heel - if Tito Santana ever wore his El Matador getup on an FFCP Catch show, it would massive heat for him. Herve gets a second public warning for stomping a fallen opponent and pleads his case to the audience - if this was England, the crowd would be booing him and Kent Walton would be excusing him for not knowing the British rules. Lots of arguments between Herve and referee Saulnier. It ends on a countout but even then Saulnier seems to change his mind and the audience give him heat.