I Can't Wait Until The Give-Up! - the failure of TV Asahi's 1987 attempt to retool NJPW TV

[KinchStalker]

[Credit to this Igapro article for most of this information.]

Flagship NJPW program World Pro Wrestling entered a turbulent period in 1983. As Tiger Mask departed and unmasked in August, after he and manager Shunji Koncha had disagreed with the plans for a coup, the ratings began to fall under 20%. The UWF and Japan Pro Wrestling departures followed in 1984; the latter chunk was so devastating that TV Asahi had to hold a press conference to make it clear that World Pro Wrestling would continue. The popularity of the Machine Army and the acquisitions of Bruiser Brody, Shiro Koshinaka, and Kevin & Kerry von Erich had brought some hope, but AJPW’s return to prime time and the end of New Japan’s WWF partnership were a devastating pair of blows. While the NJPW/UWF feud is now regarded by puroresu fans as a creative high point of Showa period New Japan, and partnerships with Calgary booker Tetsunosuke Daigo and Bill Watts’ Mid-South brought new foreign blood into the company, by the autumn of 1986 there had been talk of dropping the program outright.

This was tempered by NJPW chairman Hiroshi Tsujii and managing director Takahira Nagasato. Both men were TV Asahi executives who had received those seats in the network takeover of 1983, and both mens’ careers were deeply linked to World Pro Wrestling in particular. In 1969, when the JWA sought a second network deal to sabotage the chances of the Great Togo’s tentatively named National Wrestling Enterprise, Tsujii was the executive they approached. Nagasato, meanwhile, had overseen the program as the head of the network’s sports department. It was agreed, though, that change was necessary. World Pro Wrestling was shifted to the same time on Mondays, a timeslot it had previously held for much of its original run as a Japan Pro Wrestling/JWA program. The change began on October 13, 1986, but would only last six months.

The program was preempted by other programming on several occasions, which had not been an issue on the Friday timeslot. Masa Saito’s first match in NJPW since 1984, a singles bout against Inoki, was thrown out due to the interference of a hockey-masked pirate. This angle had been set up when Keiji Mutoh was attacked by a man in this costume in Tampa, but according to the kayfabe-breaking book by referee Mr. Takahashi, Victor Manuel had misunderstood his assignment and handcuffed the wrong man to the rope. It was a disaster.

By this point, the network agreed that “major surgery” was necessary to save the program. World Pro Wrestling received a grand, 90-minute sendoff on April 6 before the new era began, as the rebranded and retooled I Can’t Wait Until The Give Up!! World Pro Wrestling began airing at 8pm the following night. This had previously been the timeslot of the popular variety show Beat Takeshi’s Sports Taisho, and this matter warrants a digression.

An infamous incident involving top TV Asahi entertainer "Beat" Takeshi Kitano (pictured here in 1982) would lead NJPW to a brief, disastrous television experiment.

Beat Takeshi’s Sports Taisho saw the titular entertainer and his two groups of tarento apprentices, the Takeshi Corps and Takeshi Corps Sepia, compete in sports against teams that would consist of audience members, fellow entertainers, or professional athletes. The program had suffered a mortal wound after a December 1986 incident. When a reporter for weekly tabloid FRIDAY approached Takeshi and a much younger vocational student that he was suspected to be dating on the streets of Shinjuku, he sprained her neck and back as he shoved his tape recorder in her face and yanked her by the hand. Around 3am that night, Takeshi and various Corps/Corp Sepia members stormed FRIDAY’s headquarters, brandishing umbrellas and a fire extinguisher and assaulting five employees. As Takeshi awaited his trial, he and his accomplices withdrew from their entertainment activities, and the renamed Sports Taisho was left to make do with the few Takeshi Corps members who hadn’t been involved.

With both World Pro Wrestling and Sports Taisho in decline, TV Asahi decided to retool the former into a wrestling-variety hybrid program in the timeslot of the latter, hoping they could broaden NJPW’s appeal. This new program would be produced by the network’s variety department instead of its sports wing. Response within NJPW was mixed, as Inoki was surprisingly supportive, but Seiji Sakaguchi opposed it. Meanwhile, Weekly Pro Wrestling reporter Fumihiko “Fumi” Saito was brought on as a writer and filter for the variety department’s ideas.

I Can’t Wait Until The Give Up!! didn’t try to ease old fans into the new format. Kuniko Yamada and Kenichi Nagira were hosts, and other entertainers include idols LaSalle Ishii, Togumi Otoko and Kaoru Shimura, as well as actor and wrestling fan Reo Morimoto. The show was set up so that such celebrities could play to a studio audience and provide guest commentary on the wrestling. Segments in the premiere promoted Bam Bam Bigelow with a promo video and a segment comparing his weight to that of audience members, while Masa Saito entered the studio to challenge Inoki. All the while, though, the camera crew favored the celebrities in their close-ups. The backlash was immediate, as a dismal 5.7% debut fell to a 5.0% the next week. The studio and idol elements were soon dropped in favor of studio interview segments. It was after this change, though, that the most famous incident of the I Can’t Wait Until The Give Up!! experiment took place. Yamada interviewed Hiroshi Hase, a Japan Pro Wrestling recruit who had completed his debut excursion but had not yet debuted for NJPW. Kuniko asked a dumb question about whether a bleeding wrestler ceased to bleed when they returned to the waiting room (if I’m parsing it correctly, it seems to imply that she thought they used fake blood), and an agitated Hase snapped at her. While the likes of Inoki and Tatsumi Fujinami understood the difficulty of Yamada’s position, and they sympathized as her awareness of viewer backlash took a toll on her well-being, many others must have felt that Hase had spoken for them in that moment.

In July, the studio element was dropped and other planned variety show segments were shelved. However, this experiment would reverberate in the company for years. When Beat Takeshi returned to TV Asahi, he got involved with NJPW as the head of a faction which played off of the Corps, Takeshi Puroresu Gundan. And while one member of that group, Leon White, had been scouted by New Japan before the I Can’t Wait Until The Give Up!! experiment, the Vader gimmick and helmet prop, were vestiges of an idea from that period to create a gimmick that would appeal to shonen fans. (For those unaware, the Vader costume was a Go Nagai commission.)

While his debut came months after I Can't Wait Until The Give-Up! had been abandoned, Big Van Vader was partially its offspring.

Edited October 1, 2023 by KinchStalker
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