jdw Posted July 25, 2015 Report Share Posted July 25, 2015 Well, I was praying to the altar of Volk Han, Tamura and Khosaka about 15 years ago... Yeah... people were on Han's cock at the time. Yohe was praising him from close to the start, and there's probably a letter of his in the WON pimping him as well. Even Dave praised him at the time, and lost his shit over some of the stuff after Tamura jumped. The "purity" of Fujiwara is a good one. It's akin to Lou Thesz always working straight and serious, which Thesz himself the leading proponent of the meme. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jdw Posted July 25, 2015 Report Share Posted July 25, 2015 - When you watch these matches do you feel like you are watching pro wrestling? Yes. It's worked wrestling. Worked wrestling comes in a lot of forms... Can you flick from something like this to a normal US-style match or, say, an All Japan match without feeling jarred in any way? We did at the time. We'd watch All Japan, All Japan Womens, UWFi, Rings, AAA, WCW, WWF, SMW, FMW, etc. We might not have liked all of them, but you get use to flipping around. - Why would you watch this over UFC? UWF-style isn't UFC. It's never really been about chosing to watch UFC over Pro Wrestling, anymore than chosing Fake Wrestling vs Real Boxing was an issue once I started enjoying fake wrestling. I watch UFC over Boxing, and it competed with my sports watching time. Now it competes with my movie watching time. Ma Williams and I use to kick my dad out of the TV room on Friday and Saturday nights when I visited and watch movies. Since 2006, we've been kicking my dad out to watch UFC on Friday and Saturday nights. I was thinking that she was getting burned out last year, but the past three times I've been down she's loved every show we've watched. Considering UFC 189 is on tap the next time I'm down, I don't think the streak is going to end. Pro Wrestling competes with Entertainment watching that I do. UWF-style was just another fun pro wrestling item in the mix. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Death From Above Posted July 25, 2015 Report Share Posted July 25, 2015 This is more of a general comment than anything, but I wish one of the earlier more successful shoot style companies had used U-Style's ruleset where they had the 15 minute time limit. It really encouraged a lot of action and, despite being a company that was basically built around one guy and never really went anywhere, produced decent matches. (Note: I've seen very little RINGS on the whole, so I may be off the mark that no one else was doing this.) My biggest criticism of UWF-i is that there are way too many 20 minute plus matches that basically have a 10-12 minute legwork sequence that really means absolutely nothing, goes nowhere, and is pretty boring on the whole. The U-Style time limit discouraged this sort of match structure quite heavily. This isn't to say I don't/haven't enjoyed UWF-i, as that wouldn't be accurate. There's lots of great workers and matches there (and it's a much, much better overall company than U-Style was, which is honestly a relatively minor and unimportant company in the big wrestling picture), but I do think it's a valid criticism that a ton of those legwork sequences really blur together if you watch like 10 UWF-i shows at all close together. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pol Posted July 25, 2015 Report Share Posted July 25, 2015 Were there any great works in Pancrase, PRIDE etc? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tabe Posted July 25, 2015 Report Share Posted July 25, 2015 Were there any great works in Pancrase, PRIDE etc? None that I can think of in Pride. There were works but no great ones, off the top of my head. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pol Posted July 26, 2015 Report Share Posted July 26, 2015 Why did the UWFi collapse when Takada was such a huge star? Does it really all come down to the Anjoh/Gracie incident? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
donsem43 Posted July 26, 2015 Report Share Posted July 26, 2015 Weren't they a huge mess financially. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GSR Posted July 26, 2015 Report Share Posted July 26, 2015 Were there any great works in Pancrase, PRIDE etc? There were definitely works in the early days of Pride and I'd be suspicious of anything involving Takada from back then. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tabe Posted July 27, 2015 Report Share Posted July 27, 2015 Why did the UWFi collapse when Takada was such a huge star? Does it really all come down to the Anjoh/Gracie incident? That certainly didn't help. Also, they had no top stars after Vader left. They went from Vader headlining to........ Joe Malenko. Then they made the ill-fated decision to work with New Japan. They got buried in that feud and it killed the company. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pol Posted July 27, 2015 Report Share Posted July 27, 2015 I'd always got the impression that they went hat-in-hand to New Japan because they needed something hot to prop up business. Like they would have died without it anyway. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tim Cooke Posted July 27, 2015 Report Share Posted July 27, 2015 The LA Gracie thing started the spiral but they also had failed to create any new stars so Takada/Vader III was a disappointment box office wise. The next logical step was Takada to do a real fight but since I think he knew deep down that he wasn't a fighter, the New Japan inter promotional deal gave the company new legs for another 8 months. As for great works in Pride or Pancrase, there aren't many "great" matches. Shamrock/Hume is worked but it isn't extra special. Takada/Otsuka from Pride 9/12/99 is worked but it is well below what Otsuka was producing in BattlArts at the time. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
El-P Posted July 27, 2015 Report Share Posted July 27, 2015 Takada should have gone to All Japan in 96. Those dream matches we'll never ever have… Choshu royally fucked UWF-I, but they made shitloads of money in the short run. And Eric Bischoff got the one good idea that made himself a career from this. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tabe Posted July 27, 2015 Report Share Posted July 27, 2015 Takada should have gone to All Japan in 96. Those dream matches we'll never ever have… Yes, he should have. But he wanted a million bucks to do a Dome show against Misawa and Baba wasn't willing to pony up that cash. Wish that had somehow happened. Instead we get Takada throwing away his wrestling career in return for paydays from Pride. Damn you Nobuhiko for robbing me of 10 years of matches in return for 45 minutes of fights from Pride. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PeteF3 Posted July 28, 2015 Report Share Posted July 28, 2015 Why did the UWFi collapse when Takada was such a huge star? Does it really all come down to the Anjoh/Gracie incident? That certainly didn't help. Also, they had no top stars after Vader left. They went from Vader headlining to........ Joe Malenko. Then they made the ill-fated decision to work with New Japan. They got buried in that feud and it killed the company. Also on top of that, Takada lost a great deal of face when he more or less announced a retirement so he could run for office a la Inoki and Hase, then almost immediately reneged. He had already developed a media reputation for being indecisive for whatever reason, and that just added to it. His failure to issue a challenge to Rickson Gracie arguably hurt more than the Anjo incident by itself. Of course there was nothing Takada could do with Gracie, but from the casual fans' perception it wasn't seen that way. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cheapshot Posted July 28, 2015 Report Share Posted July 28, 2015 Here's a link for people who want to get in to UWFi but find the Japanese a barrier to entry. All 75 Episodes of Bushido: The Way Of The Warrior that was shown on Sky Sports UK from 1995 and then again on Bravo a few years later: http://www.scientificwrestling.com/public/department72.cfm Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
El-P Posted July 28, 2015 Report Share Posted July 28, 2015 Thanks for the link, that's pretty terrific (although I enjoy my UWF without commentary better). I remember watching a few episodes back in the late 90's. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
elliott Posted April 11, 2016 Author Report Share Posted April 11, 2016 Reading the 9/1/92 WON covering Meltzer's trip to Japan and I found this awesome bit when he was giving a rundown of the best matches/cards he went to: "Best card (overall production) - Rings on 8/21 at Yokohama Arena. Of all the cards I saw, the two that will stick in my memory the longest are this show and the 8/17 JWP show (more on that below). Whatever one might think of things Akira Maeda has done in the past or said in the past, he has to be given credit for the fact he is one of the great self-promoters and wrestling promoters in general that this business has ever seen. He largely has taken a group of people who aren't even wrestlers and put them in something that he doesn't even want to be associated with pro wrestling, and has turned it into a high class version of something that most definitely is pro wrestling. No, this would not work in this country. At least not without the same five year education process that Japan went through in the mid-1980s largely due to Maeda's self-promotional abilities. But many of the concepts used as part of the show would give those in this country so many new ideas on things that can be done to make pro wrestling seem more of a higher class activity and more respectable. The souvenir lines were incredible. The beginning of the show with the laser light show, opening ceremony and promotional pre-show video showing everyone in dramatic form prior to the card (the pre-show video, for some reason, is done in English rather than Japanese to give it an international flavor showing men training in Bulgaria, Graziya (formerly Soviet Union), Japan, Holland, etc. as "the toughest gladiators from around the world being brought together to form RINGS" gave it an aura that probably couldn't be understood by anyone who didn't see it live. Another plus is that Yokohama Arena, which, unlike most arenas in Japan, is a state-of-the-art complex reminiscent of Madison Square Garden. Maeda didn't sell his summer spectacular out like he would have routinely during the peak of his drawing power with the UWF, but drawing 14,700 paid with ringside at $160 and elevated ringside at $120 with a troupe that consists of almost nobody who had ever wrestled professionally before (which actually works to his advantage because they are all fresh and "untainted" so to speak) except himself says more for his ability as a promoter than anything. As for the matches, well, if you're in the building and feeling the atmosphere, they're okay. Some were actually embarrassing judged by pro wrestling standards, but it really doesn't matter because it's a different product and not supposed to look in the ring like pro wrestling. And it doesn't. Are the matches shoots like they've got their audience believing they are? How many times in boxing does somebody get knocked down four times and then immediately come back to win? In Rings, that's the classic match story that gets the biggest pop for the finish. The martial arts guy knocks down the submission wrestler four times (five knockdowns is an automatic knockout and ends the match) and then the submission guy gets his big hold on in the middle and gets the submission. In many ways, Maeda's Rings is both the farthest thing and the closest thing to the WWF." I thought that last line in particular was really interesting. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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