New Japan juniors in the late 90s

[Loss]

I thought this might make for an interesting topic. I'm looking through New Japan footage for the year to find matches to include for the 1997 Yearbook. The multi-man tags are excellent (when you can actually find one complete) and while I'm not a big fan of Kendo Ka Shin, I do think Takaiwa had potential. They were building a strong division around a core group of guys and dividing them into two camps -- Liger and company, and Otani and company.

 

I know Dave rated juniors matches pretty highly through the end of the decade. But I've noticed on things like jdw's top New Japan matches of the 90s, he doesn't really have anything listed after 1997. Was there something that wasn't liked about the next wave of stars at the time? And did the division experience its own decline with its own factors over time? Or was it just swallowed whole by New Japan's other problems?

[FLIK]

And did the division experience its own decline with its own factors over time? Or was it just swallowed whole by New Japan's other problems?

There were a number of things that kinda derailled the division for a while starting in late 99

 

- Liger MEGA push

For some reason they thought it would be a good idea to have him go into "Black Liger" mode & start destroying motherfuckers. He defended the JR title vs Kanemoto, Tanaka & Samurai & squashed them all in like 4-7 mins. THEN he went on to the 2000 J Cup tournament which overall was decent but doesn't live up to the first 2 and he won that as well when at the time most ppl thought it should have gone to CIMA instead. So all that left a bad taste in ppls mouths.

 

- Gutting the division.

Around the same time, Ohtani left to go heavyweight full time, Liger went back & forth & experimented with being a heavyweight for a while & they stoped working with outside groups as much. Plus when Z1 started up Takaiwa & Ohtani left to go with Hashimoto anyways.

 

- The shoot influence seeping down

Led to weird shit like Masayuki Naruse, who wasn't working the style the fans wanted out of that division, getting the jr title & Kendo Kashin's 2nd run with the belt.

 

Wouldn't be until late 2001/early 2002 when things started getting back on track again. By that time Minoru Tanaka had joined full time jumping from Battlarts, they snagged TM4 from M-Pro, Jado & Gedo came in full time after leaving FMW & bouncing around the indies for a while & they were using Takehiro Murahama from Osaka Pro a lot & just working with other promotions again in general.

 

I'm still kinda bumed Murahama didn't stick around and disapeared shortly after, he was a great lost talent who also prob would have ended up joining NJ had he lasted longer.

[Ditch]

I think Loss is mostly talking about '97-'99. And I have a one-word answer to his question: events.

 

Specifically, there weren't any all-star junior events to attract a specific focus ala J Cup, J Crown. Since NJ Heavies weren't in vogue (and shouldn't really have been from '97-'99), people didn't go out of their way to grab NJ TV for clipped juniors bouts. It seems to me that most people saw Best of Super Juniors '97, and after that it was hit-or-miss.

 

I think the division was still perfectly enjoyable and that this time period is seriously underrated. Not chock full of MOTYC, mind you, but lots and lots of *** matches.

[World's Worst Man]

How late did the NJ Classics series get? It'd be nice to see some of the 98-99 Juniors stuff in full.

[ohtani's jacket]

I think the big issue is the clipping. If New Japan classics had covered the Liger, Samurai & Co. vs. Kanemoto, Ohtani & Co. era in full I think it would have been re-evaluated by now. I think a lot of the repeat match-ups aren't as good as the peak year for juniors ('96), but the division appeared to be strong through to the end of '98. Wagner's run is really underrated, IMO. Arguably, the best a luchador has adapted to Japan. In fact, he looked like he belonged in Japan more than he did in Mexico.

[Ditch]

-Wagner should have gotten the singles title; the '98-'99 IWGP singles bouts are almost entirely forgettable.

 

-NJ Classics stopped in early '97 IIRC, or at least we don't have it any more recently over here. However, I think there's enough between comms, main TV and Samurai to get a good sense of the division... it's just that it takes a lot more shows to go through than in the middle of the decade and pretty much nobody did so for late '90s.

[Loss]

The last two Classics episodes have a pair of tags -- Liger/Samurai vs Otani/Kanemoto from 1/20/97, and Liger/Samurai vs Jericho/Kanemoto from 1/29. I thought the first one was good enough to make a yearbook.

 

I think for '98, the answer to finding more complete footage is in Samurai TV and DirecTV specials. I will probably include a few short clips for good measure, because it helps paint a more complete picture. But yes, it is indeed frustrating. At some point, maybe we'll get a Classics run that targets the last few years of the decade.

[jdw]

As Ditch says, there's an insane amount of commercial release and other sources (Sammy, etc) for shitloads of juniors in 1997-99. It's just that no one bothered to watch it back at the time.

[tomk]

I know Dave rated juniors matches pretty highly through the end of the decade. But I've noticed on things like jdw's top New Japan matches of the 90s, he doesn't really have anything listed after 1997. Was there something that wasn't liked about the next wave of stars at the time? And did the division experience its own decline with its own factors over time? Or was it just swallowed whole by New Japan's other problems?

NJ juniors did pretty well on the DVDVR 500s at end of nineties, and OJ is right in that the Doc Wagner story is fascinating ( on some level we expect Jeff Farmer to go to work in Japan and come back with crisper execution and better understanding of how to put match together we don't expect him to come back learning how to project Rock style charisma and how to weave in shtick better).

 

I think the thing that happened in terms of english language internet users attitudes toward NJ juniors at the end of the decade has alot to do with Japanese indies. I don't know if I can articulate this well at all.

 

Part of the traditional pleasure of NJ juniors is its hybridity. I believe on some level that Mando Guerrero v Greg Valentine would be a style mismatch and might turn into a mess but I know that I will enjoy Fujinami vs. both. Fujinami stylistically has a mish mosh of different elements ( a lil of what Mando does, a little of what Valentine does, etc.)

 

At point in late 90s that tape watching fans are invested in indies that are fully comitted stylistically, the appeal of mish mosh style lessens. It can come accross as watered down, not fully one thing or other.

 

Flik mentions Naruse and Murahama. Naruse is a guy who was an ex-RINGS worker and ex-Battlearts worker. He has a lousy record with RINGS once they turned into a shoot. He came into NJ in 02 and won the belt, tags with El Samurai v Kikuchi/Kanemura.

 

Takehiro Murahama is an ex-kickboxer with a winning record from when RINGS was a shoot, was super fun as worker for Osaka Pro lucharesu fed. I think he may have also been in the really bad UWfi restart tourney with Shinjuku Shark.

 

Naruse is a guy I want to see in a worked shoot fed or some kind of Mach Junji Muga-ish fed. Murahama is a guy I want to see in lucharesu fed. Either of them in NJ as full time workers where they have to play down their strengths inorder to play up "well rounded" hybridity holds far less appeal.

 

I still really dug NJ juiors at end of 90s begining of 00s, but I think the success of stylistically coherent indies in attracting tape watchers hurt Nj juniors appeal. At some point while eating at the great Turkish/Korean Barbque fusion restaurant, you're going to find yourself saying "This kimchee tabouli is great, but I just want a chicken shwarma"

[TobyNotJason]

This is my first post. Skip to "To the point", bolded below, if my background doesn't matter/you want to see how badly I screw the pooch. I found this board via the Where the Big Boys Play podcast which in turn I found when searching for information on something I was watching on a bunch of Mid-Atlantic discs I bought 5 years ago but only got around to watching in the last few weeks. I've spent the last few days reading some fascinating debates over absurd (and awesome) minutia (see Bret v. Flair thread and references to other megathreads therein) that's made me equally happy and sleep-deprived.

 

Anyway, this topic caught my eye as I guess I always sort of wondered to myself what had happened to the mid-90's "shine" of the NJ Juniors. Lemme back up to explain where I'm coming from.

 

I lurked a little on rspw (Seeing the words "Head, Tennis Racket to the back of Ricky Morton's" in 1994 in a college computer lab was one of my first glimpses that there were other reasonably intelligent people who harbored a love for the thing I hadn't watched since 1990 or so but for whatever reason was perusing on usenet), bought tons of puro and some territories stuff from barnett/lynch/mcadams/etc. in the middle and late 1990s, read the DVDVRs in their infancy, etc., but I really haven't watched anything new since dropping out after the botched invasion angle in 2001 (although I did see most PPVs from the early 2000s in a lump a few years after the fact).

 

Anyway, around 5 years ago an old wrestling buddy lent me a tape of one of the first ROH shows and I went "oh yeah, I forgot, I LOVE pro wrestling". I bought the first five years of ROH DVDs (and found it incredibly frustrating in myriad ways, at times boring, but still enjoyable overall) and watched it in no time. I joined the DVDVR board and went apeshit buying territorial stuff and comps., converted all my old tapes to DVD, watched everything Mid-South that was out there (I don't think the Houston set was around yet and I haven't seen that stuff), then came up for air and wondered where the last two months and my money had gone. I consequently spent the last 5 years or so ignoring the existence of 1000+ unwatched (but very well organized!) DVDs I'd just bought and went back to real life.

 

A few weeks ago, for no reason I can identify, I decided I should at least watch all the territory-specific dvds I'd gotten, even if frequently on fast-forward. (Because how much Ole Anderson can I take? Not. Much. Georgia became an absolute CHORE once the Freebirds turned baby, save for when Piper or Flair was in and on the stick... except that I actually found things to like about the CWG era, which seems to get shit on. Thanks to my internet wrestling blackout I'd never heard of the Devil Blue stuff, but HOLY HELL! And I almost didn't stop FFing when Ron Starr wrestled the first time, but I now know that would have been foolhardy indeed. Dude's AWESOME.)

 

So that's the probably relatively ignorant and from the seemingly-likely-consensus viewpoint of this board somewhat unreconstructed (but still old-school respecting) smarky place I come from.

 

To the point: What I remember re: the decline of the NJ Juniors is that at one point when I was getting Barnett's Japan comps the NJ Juniors were the thing I was most stoked on. And juniors stuff is absolutely the stuff I started off being the biggest fan of: the Super J and the War Super J were the first two complete show tapes I bought, and I actually found 6/3/94 kind of boring when I first watched it on one of the old RecTapes (which in my defense was like 3rd generation and looked like total shit). Anyway, sometime in '97 the NJ Juniors started to get vaguely samey to me in an "I don't quite want to admit to myself that I'm not digging this the way I used to way". I kept thinking it would turn around: Takaiwa seemed pretty cool and was "different", at least. But I didn't love him, and then there was Kendo Ka Shin. Oof.

 

Looking back now, I think what happened was that the booking and the work was samey, at least as compared to AJ at the time. Lemme s'plain. At some point on the third or fourth or sixth viewing, the classic 93 and 94 AJ stuff on the rec tapes I had (and the 95 AJ stuff on Brian Socha's Best of 1995 Series if anybody remembers that dealer) just clicked for me in a "what horsehit drugs was I on!??!" way.

 

AJ's booking was deep. It was smart. It was evocative and it was epic. Not only were these guys throwing "holy shit" bombs (of the kind everybody at the time dug regardless of context), portraying distinct, believable and engaging personae, telling an in-ring story in the basic "body part-and-selling" way, and wrestling incredibly tight and mechanically-sound matches, but the Whole, including the macro-narratives in which the ring work was everywhere bound up, was consistently both greater than and inestimably more important than these (cool) parts-as-such.

 

Meanwhile, NJ Juniors was being presented (on two if not three levels) as being little more THAN the parts (some of which were admittedly pretty bitchin' parts). Not only was the "basic" in-ring booking/selling/storytelling not on AJ's level (thus the "NJ juniors often just do pointless matwork, then do highspots, trade finishers, then its over" critique), but the very fact that NJ Jr. matches were always being shown JIP and/or clipped didn't exactly help me as a consumer engage with what I was seeing as anything more than (relatively) undifferentiated go-go-go, regardless of my intellectual recognition that this was a just an editorial/promotional decision and not one I ought to let affect my perception/enjoyment.

 

And of course, the clipping/JIPing is part and parcel with NJ's overall (lack of) push of the Juniors, which very much affected the way NJ crowds viewed and responded to Juniors matches, which obviously affects "our" enjoyment thereof. The workers might be doing better stuff than the average unmotivated NJ late 90's Heavyweight match, but it goes without saying that the most basic in-ring NJ match - say, Choshu/Vader 8/90 - is how much more awesome than it would otherwise be when the audience is engaged by the "importance" of what's in front of them. And regardless of resulting heat, perceived "importance" affects everybody, even smart internet puro fans, then or now. You can be listening to loud music while you watching a match so the heat per se doesn't matter, but if you know the match you're watching is storyline important, that affects how you process what happens. How do you get anything like that engagement when its obvious that nothing you're watching Really Matters, which is what JIP presentation, NJ's non-pushing, and less than perfect in-ring booking/style added up to?

 

(Incidentally, reading/listening to this whole Flair/Lawler/Funk/Bret-as-a-jumping-off-point GOAT thing [and by the way: Again, I'm in awe of the beautiful nerdery on display in these forums], I was struck by how much Flair benefits from his own variant of Bret's Best Ever gimmick or Shawn's late period "guy who has good matches gimmick", albeit in a roundabout "the people there at the time had laser-focus on what was happening because of what it Meant because he was Champion and that contemporaneous engagement carries through the tapes and out your screen and affects your current perception of his matches and hence his Greatness no matter how objective you try to be" way.)

 

The facts that (1) the Jrs. could and did do the flippy go-go inherently-entertaining-and-it-gets-a-pop-so-it's-inherently-tempting-to-put-a-bunch-of-it-in-the-match spectacle spot stuff they were doing/innovating at the time and (2) the Jrs. were not the focus of the promotion and never headlined or came near headlining and thus weren't going to be presented with gravitas and weren't going to be a Big Deal to their live audience meant they were never going to get anything like the deliberate, "deeply story-driven"/long-term narrative arc programs NOR even so much as the in-ring booking the AJ heavies were getting, and you kind of knew that, so why keep watching religiously?

 

If Liger'd somehow tried to book it "deeper" and in doing so had sometimes dialed back the go-go, the deep booking would probably just have been lost on the crowd, and the people who weren't really there to see the Juniors anyway would have had even less to pop for. How do you do slow builds in front of a crowd there to see something/someone else, and how do you call back to stuff people forgot about because it was never the focus of your bosses/promotion? I know, I know, it's not like they had never done call backs in the Juniors, nor like they still didn't do basic call backs. But they weren't what the average Japanese fan was focused on and their stories were never going to be presented as truly Important. And without deeper stories/arcs, the go-go shit burned me out to some degree.

 

By the same token, sure, today on a "mix tape" broken up by other stuff or in youtube doses I could totally enjoy a shit-ton of (this is an analogy) Benoit/Eddy/Dean/Ultimo/Liger/Lynn Nitro/Saturday Night/Pro/WorldWide matches from the period when they basically didn't have a program or when their programs/belts were a total afterthought. But in the 90s that stuff got less and less interesting over time, to the point that I wondered why I was bothering when the in-ring match was anything less than absolute top-drawer. How much more intrinsically compelling were Benoit and Eddy's WWF matches when they Meant Something Big and were booked (in every sense) that way, including in-ring?

 

Also and again: Kendo fucking Ka Shin. I fucking HATED that guy, and he was everywhere. Is that an opinion that's seen reevaluation? I know when I rewatched some of my tapes when converting them to DVD 5 or 6 years ago I found him less offensive than I'd remembered, but still, he was everywhere in the stead of guys like Eddy and Benoit, and that's a bad trade.

 

So yeah, the one omnipresent new guy getting the mega-push seemed to suck some of the remaining fun out. By the time Wagner Jr. got there... I dunno, it had been enough disappointment under the bridge that he didn't do anything more for the overall NJ Jr. product than make it a little more "watchable". Things were still JIP and clipped and never "authentically" meaningful. I mean, there were 25 minute+ title match tags that came across (at least then... maybe re-eval. is in order) as merely... long. I mean, I fucking love watching Condrey and Eaton destroy Tommy Rogers or Bobby Fulton with comparatively rudimentary offense for 10-12 solid minutes at a time on a one-camera no-commentary Mid-South house show, but the crowd cares and you know what's going on at any given moment ("they're showing them up"/"they're killing him and savoring it") so you stay "in it". NJ Juniors got to a point where it just felt like "they're wrestling a long match because the title is on the line and that's what you do, but nothing happening here feels like it matters much since they're just going to hit a bunch of finishers at the end and EVERYBODY knows that, and moreover nobody gives much of shit since they're constantly reminded in every imaginable manner how Less Than Important the Juniors are."

 

I find it interesting to read here that no one was keeping up via comm. tapes anymore at the time, since I remember placing a $600 order with Lynch for nothing but unclipped commercial AJ stuff (EP speed for value!), with a handful of Michinoku (and maybe super-early Toryumon) as the only concessions to my former Junior love. I'm guessing what ditch said is true re: lots of solid stuff. Late 90s juniors would likely be well served by a yearbook based re-eval where the NJ Juniors are allowed to be "merely" fun little matches amidst a sea of whatever else instead of never important or vital, as it seemed at the time.

 

Yes, large blocks of anything get samey, but when the matches you're watching all necessarily lack gravitas, internally and externally, that's a problem, and I think the booking/positioning of the Juniors-as-a-whole contributed to late 90's puro-watchers moving on to other things.

[Ditch]

Kashin was a step down in terms of quality compared to the rest, but he had enough ability that tags with him involved were fine.

 

Interesting take re: how great can a midcard match really be. That definitely held them back somewhat. However, when they put together a really great match bell-to-bell, the crowds often got plenty involved. They could have put more thought and effort into the early matwork, done more storytelling to add depth, etc, and failed to do so for the most part. Considering the talent involved and willingness to bump and being in front of huge crowds, the upside was tremendous, and yet I don't think '90s NJ juniors produced that many legit MOTYCs by '90s standards. For instance, Loss has gone through 6 yearbooks, and has 8 matches from NJ juniors in the top 10 *just from Japan* across all those years, let alone globally.

 

What I don't get is, people in 2001 when I got started on puro were still pimping J Cup and so forth, and even something like Best of Super Juniors '97 was passed around a lot... then it's like the division fell into a black hole. I can somewhat understand late '90s being *less* traded, but there was like zero discussion and trading. If the early-mid '90s stuff was so earth-shattering for some people, why not stick with it? I think that speaks somewhat to how good the earlier stuff actually was. I think it got a lot of superficial appreciation, but wasn't connecting on a deeper level. Whereas, people stuck with AJ and got every comm through '99 despite an obvious drop-off.

[TobyNotJason]

Interesting take re: how great can a midcard match really be. That definitely held them back somewhat. However, when they put together a really great match bell-to-bell, the crowds often got plenty involved.

Absolutely they did. Just like crowds did in mid-late 90s WCW with smaller dudes they weren't "supposed" to care about. But that kind of "holy shit this is cool" heat just isn't the same as what erupts when there's a buzz of anticipation before the match because of What We're About To See, and similarly I doubt the appreciation I or any other smart fan has watching the former often touches the feeling we have when we know match X is a blood feud or for a title the promotion builds around or a mentor/student thing or whatever and it fucking delivers.

 

Granted, there's a different and savory satisfaction when you appreciate the salient beauty of some random studio squash or WorldWide 8 minute thingee or Nitro match Bischoff is talking about the NWO over or, indeed, 1999 NJ Jr. tag match that doesn't mean shit to the crowd outside of "ooh ahh" (nor to the office, at all), but does that really measure up to the fully satiated expectations that can only result when you go in knowing the match "should" be Momentous?

 

So yeah, pre-match perspective matters, and WRT the late 90s NJ Jrs., eventually even if something ended up being extraordinary from a purely in-ring standpoint, it still began its life, to me, as "OK, here we go with the three NJ Junior matches Barnett pulled from the otherwise crappy NWO-centered NJ TV this month because the dudes involved can at least fucking go." I'm guessing this subconsciously happened to a bunch of other people who were buying/pimping, and that affected what trickled down to 2013. (It was subconscious to me, at the time, to be clear.)

 

For instance, Loss has gone through 6 yearbooks, and has 8 matches from NJ juniors in the top 10 *just from Japan* across all those years, let alone globally.

You're saying out of 6 full years, there are only 8 matches in their respective yearly top 10s, and that's only if you limit the pool of candidates to Japan? That's just tragic considering the talent involved. With better booking (both in and out of the ring) and something at least resembling a company-wide push, the core NJ Jr. dudes should have been BIG TIME. (And for a promotion constantly concerned with its legitimacy, you'd think NJ could and should have pushed their weight divisions with something at least vaguely alluding to parity, especially in a country that produces and respects the shit out of boxers fighting in weight classes most Americans have never heard of.)

 

Come to think of it, maybe that's why I came to prefer the Mich Pro/Toryumon stuff: at least those guys were the reason for the show I was watching. The people in the crowd were there to see them settle their issue. They were kings of their mountains and I "knew" that and it affected my perception, even as I also knew those mountains, like all mountains in any promotion anywhere, were kayfabe terrain.

 

What I don't get is, people in 2001 when I got started on puro were still pimping J Cup and so forth, and even something like Best of Super Juniors '97 was passed around a lot... then it's like the division fell into a black hole. I can somewhat understand late '90s being *less* traded, but there was like zero discussion and trading.

That's really interesting. If somebody had asked me about puro any time after 1998 or so I can see giving them a highly qualified referral to the Super J as a "hook", but there's no way I would've been like "this is the best stuff". And since I never picked up any Juniors other than TV after 97 because I chose to spend $$ on other things, I wouldn't have been able to discuss or trade. Maybe lots of other kids were in the same boat when you were looking in 2001. I mean, the last puro I bought was 2000 or so and at that point it had been four years since I'd specifically sought out NJ Juniors stuff. I picked up a few more Toryumon/Michinoku Pro things and liked it fine, but evidently the NJ Jrs. stuff I'd seen in TV form didn't pique my interest. I think I can safely say that's because: the heavy drama, it was lacking.

 

I don't know if I'd call the way I felt in 95/96 "superficial appreciation", but I get what you're saying and agree that to a significant degree movez/innovation is why Juniors stuff was hot when it was hot on the internet. Lots of people were like me in 1995: 20-ish, hadn't watched anything for several years... naturally you gravitate to stuff that makes you say "holy shit" instantly. Thus the contemporaneous love for early ECW. There's also the fact that Otani and Kanemoto were fairly fresh, and fresh is always better than "two years later". And Otani fucking ruled it.

 

But there absolutely was not a "deeper level" to the NJ Jrs, was there? I mean, forget AJ deep. There wasn't even the basic depth of Kevin Sullivan and Austin Idol wanting to murder each other dead in the Spring of 1980 in Georgia or Bret and Shawn visibly swallowing bile in the WM 12 build. Minimally, any compelling storylines there may have been never came across to non-Japanese speaking me from the ring work. There were factions, and I appreciated certain dudes dickishness or smugness or whatever, but on a big picture level... And if I'm overstating that circa 1996, there's no way I am by 1998.

[ohtani's jacket]

Welcome to the board, TobyNotJason.

 

I think that feeling of "sameness" was a problem for all of the major promotions by the end of the 90s, largely because they'd ran the same match-ups for so long and the only way to keep them fresh was to keep adding spots and trying to make the matches more and more epic. The biggest problem, as far as I can see, is that there wasn't an entirely new generation of workers to push like there was with Misawa/Kawada/Kobashi/Taue, Muto/Chono/Hashimoto, Hokuto/Toyota/Kyoko/Yamada, and indeed Ohtani/Kanemoto/Samurai. There were some decent rookies, but not in the same numbers as previous generations, and I'd argue that the reason for that was that after the major feds lost prime time TV coverage there was a major drop-off in exposure. This combined with the declining population, the sudden rise in popularity of football as an alternative to baseball, and the young generation rejecting the ethos upon which dojo training was based led to a decline in the numbers interested in becoming a professional wrestler which reduced the overall talent pool from which to draw from. The only alternative to the same yearly match-ups was to co-promote, but after a while they milked that cow dry.

 

As far as juniors perception goes, I have never met a hardcore Japanese fan who believed that Liger was as big a deal in Japan as he was in the States, though this may be a false perception that he was a bigger deal in America than he really was. It's also contradicted by the type of crowd responses Liger typically drew. The only conclusion I could really draw was that hardcore Japanese fans were a bit funny about juniors.

 

I seem to remember there being some interest in '98-99 juniors. I think it's important to remember that it was something that happened "live" for most of us, as opposed to getting a backlog of tapes from years prior. I remember following puroresu news at the time through Arnold and Quebrada and 1Wrestling and reading Herb Kunze every week. I also remember downloading '99 juniors matches on whatever that prehistoric downloading program we used to use was called. There was a bit of a shift around that time in that some of the older fans stopped watching and the newer fans were interested in the name shows. Tapes were so expensive that you either bought the most highly recommended shows or you got custom tapes made. I never bought weekly TV, ever. I rented it from a Japanese video store and dubbed it for Stuart when he was first kind of starting out, but in the main I think people of my ilk were still buying the major stuff. And as noted above, the juniors got stupid in 2000. I remember being in Arnold's chat for the J Cup that year and it fell so flat.

 

I feel there were storylines during the peak years. Liger's booking was praised a lot during that era. Going back and watching some of the '98 stuff Loss asked about, Ohtani still felt fresh to me even if realistically I can't have seen his schtick going past the '96-98 mark without getting old. There was a whole faction feud in '97 between Liger and Samurai vs. Ohtani and Kanemoto and other examples of quality booking either in the title match scene or the tournaments they staged. Liger was probably a bit too giving in terms of the jobs he did instead of being the top guy like in the old territories, but it wasn't quite as slight as I feel is being made out. You couldn't follow it commercial tape to commercial tape like the All Japan stuff I suppose, but it wasn't substanceless. It did get kind of boring I suppose, which may have been why Toryumon and BattlARTs were the big things at places like DVDVR, but those "fads," so to speak, didn't last more than a year themselves.

[Ditch]

Battlarts at DVDVR lasted a lot longer than a year... it was more a matter of the promotion collapsing. Toryumon on the other hand... definitely a 'fling'.

 

I agree with OJ that the '97 juniors booking was good. Liger did an excellent job of balancing parity/"anyone can beat anyone" with also making the important matches and finishes feel important. Given that the tour-to-tour division was essentially 6 guys, it's remarkable that things didn't get incredibly stale by the end of the year.

 

Toby: There was no way to make juniors seem anything other than a step down from the heavies in relative importance. That said, NJ definitely could have done more to put big juniors matches higher in the card, book more junior/heavy interaction (other than casual heavyweight squashes), and most of all grow the size of the division. That happened eventually; by '99 you had Wagner and Minoru Tanaka. But the 'six relevant guys' era of the division must have come across to fans as the promotion doing the absolute minimum.

[ohtani's jacket]

Okay, I don't really remember 2000 BattlARTS being spoken about nearly as much as the '98/99 stuff, but it probably was.

[TobyNotJason]

Welcome to the board, TobyNotJason.

Thank you sir.

 

I think that feeling of "sameness" was a problem for all of the major promotions by the end of the 90s...

Definitely was. But the juniors, for all the reasons of presentation/booking I stated as well as for the simple fact that there were so few of them, started feeling that way to me sooner. I should clarify: I was never thinking "gee, NJ Juniors suck now." It just didn't grab my soul and make it feel warm and special anymore.

 

As far as juniors perception goes, I have never met a hardcore Japanese fan who believed that Liger was as big a deal in Japan as he was in the States...

I've never met any Japanese fans, so I have no perspective, but by that time I'd sort of figured out "waitaminnit... 'we' all think this dude is a superstar and have this notion that the blessed Japanese respect smaller guys, but how come they're never near the top of the card and the crowds are never visibly/audibly stoked on matches in the way they are for top-level heavyweight stuff with big angles/heat/pushes backing it up? Oh. Because they're kind of marginally more over than WCW Cruisers... just more established."

 

I seem to remember there being some interest in '98-99 juniors. I think it's important to remember that it was something that happened "live" for most of us, as opposed to getting a backlog of tapes from years prior. I remember following puroresu news at the time through Arnold and Quebrada and 1Wrestling and reading Herb Kunze every week.

Well, I was getting Barnett TV comps pretty regularly. (All the TV, but he'd cut out the Baba comedy matches and lots of pedestrian NJ heavyweight stuff.) I was certainly behind "live", but it was hardly a question of watching too much at once, if that's what you're suggesting. And getting several months of TV at once didn't affect my enjoyment of anything else in the same way.

 

I totally read the same stuff. Herb Kunze was where? I remember that name well but can't place it.

 

Tapes were so expensive that you either bought the most highly recommended shows or you got custom tapes made. I never bought weekly TV, ever.

Well, like I said, I was kind of a fool, costs not withstanding. I figured Barnett would give me everything I "needed" from the TV, and I'd get 8 and 6 hour EP tapes from lynch with 3-5 smaller tapes on them for... was it $25 each? The quality was still ace since it came from his masters. But I never did "match pulling" comps.

 

Liger's booking was praised a lot during that era. Going back and watching some of the '98 stuff Loss asked about, Ohtani still felt fresh to me even if realistically I can't have seen his schtick going past the '96-98 mark without getting old. There was a whole faction feud in '97 between Liger and Samurai vs. Ohtani and Kanemoto and other examples of quality booking either in the title match scene or the tournaments they staged. Liger was probably a bit too giving in terms of the jobs he did instead of being the top guy like in the old territories, but it wasn't quite as slight as I feel is being made out.

Sorry if it came across like I was saying "Liger's booking sucked." I understood the rivalries and factions and it was all fine. But it wasn't exactly the height of (happy-making) hate-y-ness, nor of (AJ-ish) professional rivalry/contempt. I was just saying it was inherently limited by some structural things. The in-ring booking was limited because high spots requiring nobody be "too injured" were required at the end, making the mat-work of dubious import. And they just weren't a big deal to the fans or the office, and you knew it, and given that AJ had spent 5 years presenting tons and tons of The Biggest Deal Ever, I ended up drawn into that.

 

Regardless, I'm totes busting out some Barnett TV from 98 and watching the Juniors matches just to see how they strike me today, when I haven't watched any puro for years and years.

[TobyNotJason]

Toby: There was no way to make juniors seem anything other than a step down from the heavies in relative importance.

I'm not saying there was a practical historical possibility the Juniors could've been "booked big" given all the circumstances, and that NJ dropped said ball. Rather, it's just that I was reading the comments here re: "WTF happened to the NJ Junior in the late 90's" and thinking, "Yeah, what DID happen, because I was there and loved them and then I didn't so much, so let me think about why."

 

Maybe my ideas re: booking (esp. in-ring booking) have nothing to do with the decline of interest or "objective" match quality (if there was such a decline). I absolutely agree the small size of the division perforce tempted staleness, and I think your observation that the 6-man roster would also lead to a perception issue (how can this be a big deal when there are only 6 dudes) is spot on.

 

They certainly screwed the pooch royally with the heavyweight squashes. A few flash pin stunners here and there and you could have had semi-mains for big cards featuring return matches. And why there couldn't be regular Jr/Heavy vs Jr/Heavy tags I just don't know. Man could tasty stuff be done with that.

 

BTW, I forgot to comment before re: OJ's comment about Liger booking himself as a "less-than-fully-ace" ace. I could be totally remembering-out-my-ass wrongly here, but yeah: I absolutely felt like it was a bunch of mostly equal guys just trading wins with whatever hierarchy there was being booked insufficiently strictly. Another reason I gravitated more and more to AJ. Another thing I should rewatch to see if my "feel" was wrong. If it was, I wonder what's responsible for that. Maybe I just wasn't paying enough attention?

[ohtani's jacket]

Herb Kunze was some kind of University math professor who wrote a column called Herb's Tidbits. Folks used to eagerly await it each week to read him ravage the WWF product. I remember being bitterly disappointed anytime he was late with it.

 

No need to apologise for your comments. Liger's booking may have been overrated or lacking in some department. I've long felt that 90s New Japan needed re-evaluating. I suppose it's getting that to a certain extent with the yearbooks, but they can only go so far. Workrate was king in the 90s whereas story has been king for a while now among fans, so juniors stuff was bound to take a hit in the same way joshi puroresu has. I don't know if that's universally true as the internet is a big place and I'm sure there's people who still love the go-go-go style, but it is a real turn off whenever I go back and look at that stuff.

 

I forgot about the Barnett comps. If he was taking that from terrestrial TV then it can't have been much more than clips.

[khawk20]

Parts of Kunze's tape lists still exist online, FWIW. Only place I've ever seen a listing for video of an April 1984 tag tourney press conference, featuring Brody-Hansen at the PC along with Greg Gagne and Jim Brunzell (they wrestled each other in that tourney).

[Dylan Waco]

This is an aside but the last time I remember a junior having a real buzz surround him was with Minoru Tanaka. Obviously I'm talking about within "my circle" when I say that, but that's still a long time. And I really can't think of anyone I'm forgetting.

[TobyNotJason]

This is an aside but the last time I remember a junior having a real buzz surround him was with Minoru Tanaka.

It's a bit revelatory that he's also last NJ Junior I - a guy who hasn't watched any current product in 12-13 years ago - remember having a buzz. At the time it felt like "maybe he's the guy to snap the division out of its funk". Obviously, then, that didn't come to pass. Sad.

[Ditch]

The number of NJ juniors matches in the top *20* for Japan in any of the DVDVR votes done for 2000-2009 is just 12, and a good portion of those are interpromotional (ie. NJ vs NOAH) or a reach (ie. AKIRA vs Kanemoto from February 2000 was promoted as junior vs heavy, with AKIRA as a heavy even though he isn't). Straight-up NJ junior division matches would be a mere 6. The division floundered so, so badly in the 2000s. Tanaka and Kanemoto went through patches of not seeming to 'get it'; too many overlong matches; Tiger Mask, Taguchi, Wataru Inoue and Jado/Gedo have serious consistency issues; Liger is over-the-hill; several promising talents (Shibata, Okada) got moved to heavyweight; gaijin talent has taken a big step back from the '90s. Though they COULD have pushed Danielson and never pulled the trigger.

[Loss]

If you could make a four-hour comp of Liger matches February 2003 forward that would represent him well, what would you choose? I've seen the Hashi match from NOAH, which I thought was outstanding, but not much else. I'm sure he was less consistent, but I'm guessing there's some good stuff mixed in.

[Ditch]

From Feb '03 onward it's really slim pickings for someone as highly-regarded as Liger. Especially after '04.

 

-March '03, Liger/Kanemoto vs AKIRA/HEAT

 

-June '03, Liger/Kanemoto vs Marufuji/Kotaro Suzuki

 

-Stuff from the June/July '03 NOAH tour climaxing in Marufuji & KENTA vs Liger & Murahama on 7/16, which created the GHC junior tag titles and was the big 'coming out' match for KENTA.

 

-August '03, Liger/Murahama vs Black Buffalo/Tsubasa, in Osaka Pro. Clipped in half, which is frustrating because the finish is huge and heated

 

-2/15/04 vs Momota. Liger is smart enough to be a bully despite being at home in NJ facing NOAH's Momota, because Momota is old and the son of Rikidozan.

 

-6/5/04 w/ Sasaki vs Minoru Suzuki & Tiger Mask 4. All about character and roles; a 'small' match but it has a really fun finish.

 

-12/11/05 vs Minoru Tanaka. Under-the-radar match that is, for my money, the only 'big match'-style singles bout Liger really pulled off in the decade.

 

-April 2010 vs Marufuji, where Liger's bombs stand in stark contrast to Marufuji's schtick.

 

-May 2010 vs Negro Casas, mostly for Casas.

 

And maybe the '04 match in ROH vs Danielson, and the TNA match vs Joe ('05? '06?). MAYBE that would be enough in total to hit 4 hours.

[ohtani's jacket]

His CMLL tour in 2010 was well received.