Uprising: Lucha Libre Workrate Report 9/27/14

As best I can tell this didn't air last week, or it just aired at a different pay for play time. Whatever my DVR recorded was some sort of music festival held in the parking lot of a Mexican market. There was a 7 year old girl who was pretty impressive. And a 12 year old boy who had a lot of work to do with his stage directions. He spent a lot of time not knowing what to do with his non-mic hand, and stared down at the stage a lot.

Talk about feast or famine. The last several weeks (for better or worse) we've been getting matches from PWR's most recent 2014 shows. And now we get matches from 2/27/10, almost 5 years ago! You can tell it was another lifetime ago because Brian Cage is at ringside and looks closer to my size than the freakish size he is today. Or, he actually looks like a normal human being than a bloated, gassed up freak.

1. Kafu vs. Vaquero Fantasma

I'll cut to the chase on this match and say that it went 8 minutes and ended in a double count out. Maybe you have a better explanation than me as to why they'd pay money to show a 5 year old match as inconsequential as this. Surely they have better classic matches than this in their archives? You could argue that both of these guys are still PWR regulars, so here's a look back at an earlier match in their PWR career. I could see that. Now, the problem with that is that both guys looked in way better shape here than they currently are. It was especially noticeable in Fantasma, who was not only way more slender but wrestled noticeably better. I've seen him live a couple of times and always wondered why he seemed better on TV than in person, and now I know. The live matches are current, the TV matches I liked him in were all from 2010. It's kind of shocking to see how much he's regressed as a worker, but there it is. He looked really good here, bringing a lot of energy and nice strikes to it. I really loved his body punches and chops, and he leaned into some Kafu kicks nicely. Kafu looked sluggish as usual. Here he was in full faux Brody mode (keep in mind he's a guy who actually said he had never seen Brody wrestle before. He just must have decided independently to wear fur boots, stomp around holding his wrist and yelling "Huss!"), meaning he threw some of the loosest stomps you've seen. Kafu wrestles like a giant power wrestler, with the problem being that he's not very powerful, and not a giant. He's 6'2" tops, and while his physique has never looked powerful, he's also never shown any kind of impressive strength that would still be possible with a meh body. He throws these dinky little clotheslines that look more like little running punches. Just bad looking stuff. So yeah, we get some guys doing stuff, before Fantasma just leaves the ring with Kafu chasing, and we get the double count out. Yay! Here's what Pro Wrestling Revolution themselves had to say about this match:

"KAFU picked up from when we last saw him and became an over night sensation. Vaquero Fantasma is on the same boat but with not the same amount of fans in his corner."

I'm…not sure what any of that means.

2. Pierrothito vs. Ultimo Dragoncito

Pretty cut and dry touring match for these guys. This is not the UD that is currently in CMLL, this guy is little smaller, slightly more stocky. But if somebody told you that you were about to watch a 7 minute lucha minis singles match, you could jot down the framework of this match ahead of time and easily predict 80% of this. We start with some fun comedy matwork, with UD being the aggressor and trying to work power moves like waist locks and headlocks, with Pierrothito tossing him all around. UD locks on some armbars which Pierrothito stands up out of, with UD getting him back down with armdrags into armbars. Pierrothito bumps nicely to the floor and we get two nice big dives from UD, one large crossbody from the top, and another tope through the bottom ropes. Back in we hit some roll-ups, with the weakest looking one (a majistral that looked like it was not easily holding Pierrothito down) winning the match even though Pierrothito clearly kicked out at two, which leads to awkwardness as even the announcers (recording this in post) don't know what to make of it at first. Seems like an odd thing to purposely include in the broadcast.