General thoughts on 1995

[Loss]

Post them here.

[smkelly]

Things that look good on paper and/or intriguing: (when the other thread is made, please, move this post to there )

 

WWF MSG NY 3/19/95 Jerry Lawler/Owen Hart vs Bulldog/Bret Hart, Bam Bam Bigelow vs Undertaker

WWF DORTMUND GERMANY 4/17/95 Bret Hart vs Owen Hart, Undertaker vs Bam Bam Bigelow, 123 Kid vs Hakushi

WWF Povidence RI 5/12/95 Bret Hart vs Jerry Lawler, Tatanka vs Bam Bam Bigelow

WWF BOSTON MA 5/13/95 Bret Hart/Bulldog vs Jery Lawler/Hakushi, IC Title Ladder Match Jeff Jarrett vs Razor Ramon, Bam Bam Bigelow vs Tatanka

WWF NASSAU NY 6/9/95 IC Title Ladder Match Jeff Jarrett vs Razor Ramon

WWF MSG NY 6/10/95 HBK vs Sid Cage match

WWF MEADOWLANDS NJ 6/11/95 Tag Title 2 out of 3 falls Owen/Yoko vs Smoking Gunns

WWF Anaheim 6/17/95 Sid vs Bam Bam Bigelow (cage match), Tatanka vs Davey Boy Smith

WWF BOSTON 10/5/95 Bob Backlund vs 123 Kid, IC Title HBK vs Bulldog (10/6/95 - same two matches stand out)

WWF NASSAU NY 11/10/95 HBK/Bret/Diesel vs DaveyBoy/Yokzuna/Mabel Bob Backlund special ref, Owen Hart vs Bam Bam

WWF MEADOWLANDS NJ 11/12/95 Bret Hart vs Bulldog, Owen Hart & Yokozuna vs Diesel & Shawn Michaels (Lumberjack match)

[Loss]

Went through all of it. Shawn/Davey Boy was the only thing that really stood out and we ended up having to cut it for space.

[smkelly]

Now that's depressing. All that stuff looked awesome...

[Loss]

Just to clarify, this thread is to talk about/reflect on 1995, not make match recommendations. I'm opening another thread now.

[Loss]

It would be great if someone else would walk through the set with me. And while I always enjoy reading their posts and I'm sure they'll show up at some point, it doesn't always have to be childs, shoe or Time Evans.

[Tim Evans]

Who's Time Evans?

 

I should be getting the set some time this week. Looking forward to it as 1995 was the year I became a wrestling fan.

[KB8]

I ordered this last week as well. Still plugging through '93 and '96, but I'll get started on this one as soon as it arrives, too.

[Kevin Ridge]

Really enjoyed this yearbook which was kind of unexpected for me compared to the other years. I wasn't fully paying attention to wrestling at this time so it was good to see a lot of this stuff for first time. I like that there was more wrestling on this set compared shoot wrestling on the other sets which I tend to fast forward through unless it includes Vader. SMW/USWA was a standout for me on this set. WWF stuff was better than I remembered.

[PeteF3]

And away we go with the 1995 Observer Awards ballot. This was simultaneously the toughest overall watch of the Yearbook project so far while being the first set since ’91 to close things out with things in the U.S. in a more optimistic place than where they started. Somewhat—after all, SMW is gone and the USWA is pretty much a zombie at this point. WCW survived a wretched 12 months to turn into a rather compelling promotion, even with some rather sizable warts (of the orange and yellow variety, namely) still around. The WWF finally started making an effort, with just a month to spare, of appealing to an audience above the age of 7. ECW had what is easily its strongest year and maybe the best Yearbook year of any non-Big Two North American company—it’s at least fighting it out with ’94 SMW and ’90 USWA. Unfortunately as the Big Two are showing signs of coming out of their business and artistic comas, international business is starting to go through a malaise of its own. AAA had a bad year involving the death of its top heel and the departure of El Hijo del Santo, All-Japan fell off in the second half, the interpromotional era in joshi seems to have come to an end, UWFI collapsed, PWFG folded, Maeda dried up as a drawing card for RINGS, and while New Japan closed out strong with an absolutely huge Dome show, it too started showing signs of losing its booking fastball with a pretty underwhelming start to the UWFI invasion. Puroresu of 1996 and beyond is going to be almost entirely new to me, so that’s going to be exciting even if business continues to decay.

 

Still…most of the Big Two was unbelievably rough. Maybe the lightest year yet in terms of strong TV bouts, and the presentation and booking for the bulk of the year were just painful to revisit. This is going to result in one of the more half-hearted set of selections of this project—there are only a scant handful of awards that I’ll be comfortable in truly going to bat for to pick a winner, and many of the winners will have significant drawbacks.

 

The standard drill follows. Real WON winners in parentheses, my votes going by the calendar 1995 year as opposed to the Observer’s November-to-November standard.

 

CATEGORY A AWARDS

WRESTLER OF THE YEAR (Mitsuharu Misawa)

1. Mitsuharu Misawa

2. Manami Toyota

3. Keiji Mutoh

Mutoh was actually making a strong run to take this home, but that Takada match pissed me off so much that I was this close to dropping him off the ballot entirely. Still, the match made too much money to be dismissed entirely, so he gets the Bronze. Despite the weird stop-start nature of her run as champion Toyota seemed to be firmly established as Aja Kong’s equal by year’s end, and was responsible for more great matches. Misawa kept on keeping on, being the ace, champion, and top tag wrestler for All-Japan.

 

MOST OUTSTANDING WRESTLER (Manami Toyota)

1. Toshiaki Kawada

2. Mitsuharu Misawa

3. Rey Misterio, Jr.

Such an unbelievably close call between 1 and 2. Misawa may have had more great matches, but I think that Albright performance may be the tiebreaker—Kawada has him beat on versatility, while Misawa like Ric Flair had his formula that he executed very, very well, over and over. (Oversimplifications abound, I get that). I always feel like I shortchange joshi with this award, but by the end of the year it’s the AJPW guys who continue to leave the best impressions. It’s just hard for a joshi worker to break away from the rest of the pack, despite Kansai, Toyota, and Ozaki having terrific years.

 

BEST BABYFACE (Perro Aguayo)

1. Rey Misterio, Jr.

2. Mitsuharu Misawa

3. Bret Hart

3a. Mikey Whipwreck

I didn’t even want to put an Big Two-based worker here, but Bret had an undeniable ability to come off as a real person with real emotions in an increasingly unbelievable environment, so he gets to share his spot with Mikey. But Rey was the biggest crowd-pleaser of the year, and he proved it in all three major wrestling countries in front of vastly different audiences.

 

BEST HEEL (Masahiro Chono)

1. Bill Alfonso

2. Masahiro Chono

3. Raven

When you’re that hated by that particular fanbase, you’re doing something right. No one elicited a more viscerally nasty response throughout the year than Fonzie. Chono was spectacular in his own right for ramping up his heelishness in an environment where that had mostly ceased to exist. Raven? Yeah, Raven—another guy who successfully pulled off a complete inability to be likable or “cool” in front of the too-cool-for-school ECW crowd. Not sold on him as a worker but he didn’t really bother me in ’95 either from either a work or interview standpoint.

 

FEUD OF THE YEAR (Dean Malenko vs. Eddy Guerrero)

1. Rey Misterio, Jr. vs. Psicosis

2. Tommy Dreamer vs. Raven

3. USWA vs. SMW

Dean and Eddy impressed a bunch of dick-waving meatheads in Philly, whereas Rey and Psicosis impressed those meatheads as well as indy puroresu snobs and the entire Mexican populace. Hard to argue with a feud that so successfully spans three countries. Better matches, too, and incredibly versatile matches also—far more than one might think at first glance. Dreamer vs. Raven…hey, it worked for me. I love new guys coming in with personal vendettas, I love feuds that build layers and involve more and more people, which this did to an almost absurd degree, and I love intense brawling hatred, and even when their fights and beatdowns went overlong, they didn’t descend into Itchy & Scratchy cartoon territory either. Lastly we had a WAR-NJPW invasion on a much, much smaller scale, but still very fun and probably the final gasp for the USWA as a quality promotion.

 

TAG TEAM OF THE YEAR (Misawa & Kobashi)

1. Toshiaki Kawada & Akira Taue

2. Mitsuharu Misawa & Kenta Kobashi

3. PG-13

Misawa & Kobashi were just a little bit better against other opponents, but the Holy Demon Arrmy I think were just a bit better in the matches against each other. Again as in the Most Oustanding award, almost too close to call. I go with Kawada & Taue for being better apples-to-apples wise and as a make-up for them getting fucked out of the RWTL. PG-13 was the best tag act in North America, by an order of magnitude. The Heavenly Bodies and THUGs were good in their own right, just not quite good enough, and further the Bodies just withered in the WWF. In real life, Public Enemy finished second for this award—ahead of Kawada & Taue. Talk about an indignity that makes the RWTL loss seem minute.

 

MOST IMPROVED (Johnny B. Badd)

1. Diamond Dallas Page

2. Hayabusa

3. Shinjiro Ohtani

Come on, Badd had hit his stride the year before. DDP got a passable match out of the goddamned Renegade. Plus he had finally learned to tone down his act to be good-heel annoying and not change-the-channel, skip-the-chapter annoying. Having Kimberly and Maxx to play off of helped. Hayabusa was in an unbelievably tough spot with having to take up the slack for FMW after Onita’s retirement, but he emerged as a world-class worker even if I really didn’t care for that first Oya match.

 

MOST UNIMPROVED (Hulk Hogan)

1. Hulk Hogan

2. Diesel

3. Shane/Dean Douglas

Sure. I liked the first Vader match, but the other two sucked and he had absolutely no good in-ring performances aside from that. Plus he was such an overbearing and obnoxious personality that it tended to toxify whatever he did in the ring. Poor Diesel—from the Most Improved winner to Most Unimproved runner-up in one year. I know he had shit opponents when he wasn’t in with Bret, but he showed no inclination at all that he was deserving of his spot. Shane takes a lot of shit from the online community, so I really, really wanted to go into the Franchise run with an open mind, but my God was he truly unbearable—even before being saddled with the Dean gimmick. And he was clearly badly banged up, as his slow, stiff, and loose in-ring style stuck out badly in an ECW environment.

 

MOST OBNOXIOUS (Hulk Hogan)

1. Hulk Hogan

2. Eric Bischoff

3. Vince McMahon

“No shortage of candidates for this one” will be a constantly recurring thought for every “bad” award this year.

 

BEST ON INTERVIEWS (Cactus Jack)

1. Cactus Jack

2. Buddy Landell

3. Ric Flair

I thought this one over for awhile, but while I praised Landell for his promos being better in a ticket-selling sense than Cactus Jack’s dramatic monologues, the fact is Landell didn’t really sell tickets either, as his #1 babyface run in SMW was a bomb that was part of what led to the promotion closing up shop. So Cactus it is—they’ve had a lot more exposure thanks to his book and DVD sets, but his post-heel turn promos are still legendary on merit. Flair got to show more versatility in ’95 than he had in feuding with Hogan in ’94. We got Crazy Flair, cool & cocky Flair, scheming Flair, disingenuous Flair, and even a little bit of babyface Flair.

 

MOST CHARISMATIC (Shawn Michaels)

1. Shawn Michaels

2. Atsushi Onita

3. Public Enemy

I wanted to give as few positive awards to the Big Two as possible, but Shawn DID have a good year. Not a perfect one, but a good one, and he did connect with the WWF crowd to a greater degree than Diesel did, or even Bret considering how mired in mid-card purgatory Bret generally was. Onita could have taken this if he hadn’t retired. I hate Konnan and I gave him a nod in this category before, so I begrudgingly put Public Enemy in the #3 spot. They were truly over in an emotionally connected sense with their audience. Somehow.

 

BEST TECHNICAL WRESTLER (Chris Benoit)

1. Chris Benoit

2. Volk Han

3. Toshiaki Kawada

As ever I struggle to define what makes a Technician. Matwork really fell off a cliff this year—it seemed to matter less than ever in the Japanese Big Two, and we didn’t get a ton of it in lucha either as AAA was more about bullshit and brawling. Kawada just nudges past Eddy Guerrero here, again on the strength of that Albright match.

 

BRUISER BRODY MEMORIAL AWARD (Cactus Jack)

1. Cactus Jack

2. The Headhunters

3. The Sandman

Even though my favorite Jack performances weren’t brawls at all, he had enough good deathmatch stuff to give him the nod here. I’m not sure Sandman is technically a “good” worker but none of his ECW matches stood out to me as bad. He knew how to work to fit his character.

 

BEST FLYING WRESTLER (Rey Misterio, Jr.)

1. Rey Misterio, Jr.

2. Great Sasuke

3. Psicosis

Rey laps the field, much like Woman did as Best Manager. Psicosis was the year’s best bumper and wasn’t afraid to hit a legdrop from any position in the arena.

 

MOST OVERRATED (Hulk Hogan)

1. King Mabel

2. The Renegade

3. Psycho Sid

I still can’t fault WCW for having Hogan in the mix where he was, as overbearing and monotonous as he was. King Mabel was one of the most forseeable disasters in wrestling history, and Renegade almost as much but he didn’t quite get pushed hard enough. Sid was sunk by an idiotic “running coward” Honky Tonk Man gimmick but still was another box office failure when given a chance to run with the ball.

 

MOST UNDERRATED (BodyDonna Skip)

1. BodyDonna Skip

2. Al Snow

3. Hakushi

In an ideal world, Skip would have gotten the IC-level title push that the Dean got, though 1995 was still a little early to be pushing a guy that small that far. He had the goods to work in that role, though. Snow, who was 1995’s most improved talker, was naturally given a masked gimmick in the WWF that completely precluded talking at all. Hakushi was the most over babyface on the Underdogs team at Survivor Series and that was followed up by turning him into a JTTS.

 

BEST PROMOTION (New Japan)

1. New Japan

2. All-Japan

3. ECW

All-Japan could have taken this if their second half was able to equate to their first. But it didn’t, as it seemed to spend its last 4-5 months spinning its wheels.

 

BEST TELEVISION SHOW (ECW)

1. ECW

2. Monday Nitro

ECW continued to revolutionize how televised wrestling could be presented, and was good for too many good angles and promos to lose its spot here. Nitro revolutionized things in a different way, and even when it wasn’t good, it had enough to keep you wanting to watch.

 

MATCH OF THE YEAR (Manami Toyota vs. Kyoko Inoue, 5/7)

1. Mitsuharu Misawa & Kenta Kobashi vs. Toshiaki Kawada & Akira Taue (6/9)

2. Mitsuharu Misawa vs. Akira Taue (4/15)

3. El Hijo del Santo, Octagon, Rey Misterio Jr., & La Parka vs. Pentagon, Blue Panther, Psicosis, & Fuerza Guerrera (6/18)

4. Mayumi Ozaki vs. Dynamite Kansai (3/17)

5. Aja Kong vs. Dynamite Kansai (8/30)

6. Manami Toyota & Sakie Hasegawa vs. Kyoko Inoue & Takako Inoue (1/4)

7. Keiji Mutoh vs. Shinya Hashimoto (8/15)

8. Aja Kong & Kyoko Inoue vs. Manami Toyota & Blizzard Yuki (4/2)

9. Mitsuharu Misawa vs. Toshiaki Kawada (7/24)

10. Shawn Michaels vs. Razor Ramon (8/27)

Definitely not as high-end as previous years—one top-10 finisher and another that would have been at #12 weren’t even on the Yearbook proper, as they occurred on the 4/2 Weekly Pro Tokyo Dome event. The 6/9 tag title match held on to its legendary reputation and the second-place finish for Misawa/Taue has me re-pondering the Most Outstanding Award again, but I think I’m going to stick with my initial instincts. The lucha match is simply as good and enjoyable as any multi-man lucha match to take place in the first half of the decade.

 

ROOKIE OF THE YEAR (Perro Aguayo, Jr.)

1. The Giant

2. Tiger Mask IV

We only saw Aguayo, Jr. in angles on the Yearbook. Meltzer helpfully provided us with a list of eligible candidates this year but most of them were guys I’d never heard of and the ones I had (Chris Kanyon, Maunakea Mossman, El Puerto Ricano) were non-factors. The Giant was raw as hell but had clear potential and mileage as a main eventer, a rare case of WCW successfully developing a main event act from scratch. Tiger Mask looked more impressive in his first year than 2 or 3 did in theirs, and the match with TAKA was even better than Sayama’s debut against Dynamite.

 

MANAGER OF THE YEAR (Jim Cornette)

1. Woman

2. Jim Cornette

3. Sunny

Cornette was at the point where he could get this award if he refrained from eating his boogers on camera in more than 50% of his appearances, but he had the worst year of his professional career and for the first time was cutting promos that I found actively bad. The stress of running SMW in ’95 was too much for him, and the Militia gimmick was a loser. He still had enough good contributions to finish 2nd in a lousy year for managers, but Woman laps the field. Smoldering, sultry, evil, in a top spot, and probably the best woman to work a mic in wrestling history. Sunny was kind of wasted with the go-nowhere Skip but her charisma and presence shined through anyway, and by the end of the year she was ready to break away.

 

BEST TELEVISION ANNOUNCER (Joey Styles)

1. Lance Russell

2. Joey Styles

Lance, from his ability to keep up with hot southern tag action to his ability to rationalize the heel actions of the Rock ‘n Roll Express to the guy putting Mark Curtis and Bob Armstrong in their place, is still the man as much as he ever was. Styles still has some things that drive me up the wall—his Bischoffian levels of smugness, his hammy acting on camera, and his ridiculous predictions of what’s about to happen which telegraph with 100% consistency that the precise opposite event will occur instead. But, he was a lot better here than in ’94 and he was the best fit for the promotion. And sometimes his smugness even worked, like when he bragged about actually knowing the moves Rey and Psicosis were doing, and cutting off any potential Heenan-like jokes before they could start. No one else is deserving of consideration. Schiavone had some great calls for some matches but also sank what WCW was attempting to go for in others, Ross was wasted on Action Zone and didn’t fit into the new 3-man booth yet, Vince was growing more behind the times with every passing week, Bischoff still came off as a huckster, and even Alfonso Morales and Akira Fukuzawa seemed strangely absent from the Yearbook this year.

 

WORST TELEVISION ANNOUNCER (Steve McMichael)

1. Sonny Onoo

2. Steve McMichael

3. Eric Bischoff

In a major upset, Mongo does NOT walk home with this award—Sonny Onoo was just that bad, folks. In fact McMichael noticeably improved as Nitro wore on. Not to the point of being good, but he did get better. I understand what Bischoff was trying to do in hosting Nitro, but his constant potshots at the WWF—however deserved they may have been—still made him come off as a prick. And if you’re going to usher in a new era of exciting high-flying wrestling—an admirable goal—then learn the moves or at least learn how to get the specific psychology over.

 

CATEGORY B AWARDS

BEST MAJOR WRESTLING CARD (Weekly Pro at the Tokyo Dome). Yeah, this takes it hands down. Two outstanding MOTYC-type bouts, one of the best deathmatches of the year, and a Lou Thesz speech segueing into Ryuma Go fighting hillbilly aliens. This is a card that will probably never be beaten for versatility, ever. Just a shame about the main event.

 

WORST MAJOR WRESTLING CARD (Uncensored). Sooo many candidates to choose from. Uncensored was cheap and insulting but it did at least try to be something different and had some decent action in-between the hideous booking. King of the Ring was cheap, insulting, and carried out in about the most half-assed manner possible in-between the even more hideous booking. In Your House 4 is also a very strong candidate, and would be a walkaway winner most years.

 

BEST WRESTLING MANEUVER (Misterio’s flip dive into Frankensteiner to the floor). I’m going to go with the straight springboard huracanrana/West Coast Pop, back when Rey could execute that move with unbelievable grace and fluidity.

 

MOST DISGUSTING PROMOTIONAL TACTIC (Gene Okerlund’s 900 line teases): The Starrcade World Cup of Wrestling build, featuring a main heel right out of Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips. Even updating the premise from sneaky Japs bombing Pearl Harbor to sneaky Japs buying up American companies was outdated by the end of 1995. This was all the more infuriating coming off WCW making legitimate attempts to add puroresu influences to its style with the bringing in of Sabu and the NJPW 3 and making efforts to book them the way New Japan would.

 

BEST COLOR COMMENTATOR (Jerry Lawler). I’m going to go with Arturo Rivera out of spite to North American wrestling in general, even though lucha had a bad year in its own right.

 

PERSONAL FAVORITE WRESTLER (Manami Toyota). Cactus Jack seemed to “get” the state of wrestling better than anyone else, wrestler or promoter, in 1995. I do wish he showed more commitment to the anti-hardcore gimmick once the bell rang, but he was the year’s overall smartest and most entertainining performer.

 

PERSONAL LEAST FAVORITE WRESTLER (Hulk Hogan). While this would be the start of Observer readers giving every possible negative award to Hogan, this is quite the agreeable pick.

 

WORST (NON-ROOKIE) WRESTLER (The Renegade). Okay, despite his 1992 debut by my standard Renegade qualifies as a “rookie.” Shark Tsuchiya actually ended up offending me even more, combining Renegade’s smoothness with Mr. Pogo’s penchant for disgusting mutant barbarism.

 

WORST TAG TEAM (Bunkhouse Buck & Dick Slater). As much as I love them, that Fall Brawl match is BAAAD. They really had no business holding the tag titles by this point.

 

WORST WEEKLY TELEVISION SHOW (WCW Saturday Night). Sooo many candidates to choose from. No AWF made the Yearbook, but I think that has to be the winner. Weird washed-out film, a roster so old it made 1999 WCW look like Matrats, and Ken Resnick and a heel Lord Alfred Hayes on commentary.

 

WORST MANAGER (Mr. Fuji). Fuji wasn’t even the worst Japanese heel stereotype of the year. Sonny Onoo was at ringside for the NJPW folks at Starrcade, so Mr. Onoo it is.

 

WORST MATCH OF THE YEAR (Sting vs. Tony Palmore, 1/4). I checked that match out—Palmore was a short, squat Bart Vale trainee who threw a bunch of pulled punches while Sting covered up, before Sting locked on the scorpion deathlock in what was laughably part of a Martial Arts tournament. Bad, but I didn’t find it offensive. Kudo vs. Shark was offensive. And three times as long.

 

WORST FEUD OF THE YEAR (Hulk Hogan vs. the Dungeon of Doom). Between HHH vs. Henry Godwinn, Bob Backlund vs. Man Mountain Rock, DDP vs. Evad, Jim Duggan vs. Big Bubba, Undertaker vs. IRS, and Hogan vs. the DOD this year had no shortage of Worst Feud candidates that would be slam dunk picks for other years. I’m going to just BARELY agree with the Observer readers here—Diesel vs. Sid and Diesel vs. Mabel were both wretched and neither picked up the way the DOD feud did with the unique presence of Luger, the hot moustache-shaving angle, and the admittedly rather well-done Giant push. But there were too many stupid and offensive moments to ignore, whereas the Diesel feuds were mostly just dull, though still quite stupid in their own right.

 

WORST ON INTERVIEWS (Hulk Hogan). At first I thought this was one of those instances of Observer readers automatically giving any “Worst” award to Hulk, but the more I think about it the more I see their point. Hulk did more to sink major angles than just about anyone else in the history of wrestling. His acting was worse than ever, every opponent was treated the same for the entire first 7 months of the year, and his attempts at changing his character up (crying his way through that Giant promo, and then Dark Hulk) were somehow even worse than what we had before.

 

WORST PROMOTION OF THE YEAR (WCW). The WWF was awful throughout the year whereas WCW was picking up and showing an actual desire to move major American wrestling forward, instead of just paying lip service to it.

 

BEST BOOKER (Paul Heyman). The Choshu/Baba stranglehold on this award comes to an end—yep, I’m going with Heyman, too. ECW had its best year ever with a number of clever angles, compelling feuds, and well-booked and well-laid out matches. Not to mention a truly unique product. Oh, there was some shit, but at least it was a different kind of shit. AJPW was spinning its wheels after a very hot first half of the year as it seemed like they squandered Taue’s coming-out party in the Carnival and in the Summer Action Series, and the booking of the UWFI invasion was right out of the Crockett UWF buyout and the 2001 Invasion—pretty tough to forgive.

 

BEST PROMOTER (Riki Choshu). As much as we bitch about how UWFI came off, the October Dome show was a monumental success. With AAA falling off badly and AJPW mostly ensconsing itself in its bubble, New Japan continued to establish itself as the dominant promotion in the world. Was Choshu really the “promoter”? I guess Inoki was busy in the Diet. What was Sakaguchi doing at this time?

 

BEST GIMMICK (Disco Inferno). An amusing undercard comedy act, and a rare 1995 winner and even rarer WCW winner. Raven could probably win this on merit, as he was a top guy and the most culturally aware gimmick to hit wrestling in years. But my personal bias has to go to Waylon Mercy. Spivey did the best he could, but he was too physically shot and stuck in the wrong era to really go anywhere. It was a fantastic idea, though. And while I was higher on Goldust than many at the time, he wasn’t there yet, he was staggeringly not over to start with, Dustin was very slow to adjust to working as a WWF style heel, and I didn’t like the homoerotic turn the character took in December.

 

WORST GIMMICK (Goldust). Oh, goodness, there’s no shortage of candidates for this one, making the Goldust pick all the sillier. Renegade has a very strong case, as do Zodiac, Isaac Yankem, Bertha Faye, Xanta Klaus, and Evad Sullivan. But none of those guys were Himalayan cryptozoological beasts dressed as mummies. Only the YET-TAY had that going for him. Oh, and he was doing the Goldust homoeroticism shtick before, too.

 

MOST EMBARRASSING WRESTLER (Hulk Hogan). Okay, I’m as down on ’95 Hulk as anyone but this is going too far. This goes to the Renegade, a third-rate knockoff of a guy who would be a strong candidate for this award on his own.

[ohtani's jacket]

Did AAA really have such a bad year in 1995? I think it's probably the best year of their '93-95 run in-ring wise.

[PeteF3]

I was thinking more business-wise, as most of the news in the Observers seemed bad. It's certainly not easy to recover from Art dying and Eddy and Santo leaving and the Ron Skoler partnership eroding and U.S. business drying up. On the other hand, a.) we seemed to get less lucha on this set overall, and b.) it seemed like '95 was a renewed push for Los Hermanos Dinamitas as top heels, and their reputation in Observer circles at the time was just about zero, so maybe there's some bias going on there.

 

AAA started off with a bang in '92, so by '95 the feeling of same-old, same-old may well have been inevitable. It's hard to sustain business that hot for that long.

[ohtani's jacket]

That makes sense. '95 seemed to me the year that the core group of workers perfected the AAA style. The '95 trios and atomicos from memory are better than the '93-94 stuff. Lucha suffers from not enough people going through it with a fine tooth comb. There's plenty of stuff good enough to make a supplementary set, it just needs to be watched. The problem is the best stuff really ties into the feuds that were going in at the time, the history of the workers or the lead in to singles matches. I'm not sure a lot of it works on a stand alone level. In that case, it may be better as part of a Lucha Yearbook than an overall global one. There's two guys who upload quite a lot of interesting stuff on YouTube and I know Loss has handpicked a lot of promising stuff. The mid-90s were dark years for CMLL in particular, but I'm hoping we'll shed some light on them in the near future.

[WingedEagle]

Always love reading your recaps. Been avoiding much of the thoughts on specific matches and angles since I'm going to '95 when I eventually get through '94, but its always fun to compare my thoughts with yours and others when going through it.