[1990-06-30-AJPW] Jumbo Tsuruta & The Great Kabuki & Masanobu Fuchi vs Mitsuharu Misawa & Akira Taue & Tsuyoshi Kikuchi

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I'm really liking these mid-1990 6-mans for how you can see them doing so much experimentation in the characters and the spots right in front of you. With this one, I found the beginning teases and set-ups for the awesome Misawa/Jumbo confrontation almost as interesting as the confrontation itself. Crowd is great for this since this is the Misawa and Jumbo's first match back since the 6/8 upset and there's clearly a lot of intrigue in what happens. That experimentation also a bit of a negative here as Kikuchi spends the first half or so trying to work 50/50 with Kabuki and Fuchi and it doesn't really work. Things pick up massively when Jumbo wrecks Kikuchi and he gets a brutal FIP section that sees his nose blooded. Up to this point, I'd always thought the Kobashi nose angle in the October 6-man was just a shoot that they went with, but now I wonder if it might have been planned after seeing how well it worked here. People in the thread for the 8/18 6-man saw that as the big coming out party for Kikuchi but this feels like the match where it was actually established how great he was at getting his ass beat. Anyway, Misawa is an awesome hot tag and it never gets old seeing him destroy people with elbows. It's a little weird seeing him elbow Jumbo off the apron without Jumbo losing himself in burning rage, but points like that where they're stills working out the kinks of the formula also serve to make it interesting. On that front, we also get some sections where Taue tries to imitate Misawa, even nailing several dropkicks over the course of the match. Hot stretch run and seeing Kikuchi do a missile dropkick with blood dripping into his mouth was a great visual.