MLJ: Casas vs Santo '95: Corazon De Leon, El Hijo Del Santo, Último Dragón vs Emilio Charles Jr., Negro Casas, Satánico

1995-09-15 @ Arena México
Corazon De Leon, El Hijo Del Santo, Último Dragón vs Emilio Charles Jr., Negro Casas, Satánico

I had to watch some older stuff I hadn't seen before and decided to hone in on Emilio Charles, Jr. Why? Well, mainly I wanted to watch more Silver King but I don't have a good sense of what to watch there and I know they have a big, well-received singles match. So why am I watching this, with no Silver King? It's just easier to find Charles, Jr. stuff, and I thought I'd tackle it that way. This was the first match of his we had online in 1995, which is when I decided to start looking.

So why then is this a Casas vs Santo focus? Well, that's what the match gave me. When picking a random trios match from twenty years ago, you don't often get to decide what the focus is going to be. The good news is that most top card CMLL trios matches do have a focus, which plays into the whole build/payoff thing I harp on about so much, but you don't always get to choose. I haven't seen any of green Jericho in Mexico yet so I sort of wanted to see that too for morbid curiosity's sake.

Still, I could have just watched this and moved on to the next Charles match, right? I could have but it was really heated and I haven't seen the September 95 Casas vs Santo match. I actually haven't seen all that many of their singles matches. That goes back to my intent in doing things the way that I've done them up until now. I wanted to get as much lucha under my belt before watching what were considered the truly great matches. I've peppered them in here and watched some on the side, but there's still a chunk I haven't seen. I don't think that Casas vs Santo match is considered one of them, but any time they match up one-on-one it's a big deal. I'll get to that next and then try to find four more focused Charles matches before going back on to Dragon Lee. I do find it amusing that I was looking at this for a Charles match and Tim, who posted it, posted it as a Satanico match.

I have no idea why Santo is so pissed at Casas. Actually, wait, I have access to the WONs from this era. Let me take a quick look: Ok, so Santo had just come back to CMLL at this point. Casas had been a tecnico and he and Hijo del Solitario were in the semifinals of a "sons of wrestlers/juniors" tag team tournament at Arena Mexico. They had ended up against Rayo and Santo, all four tecnicos. Casas "went wild and aggressive against Santo" leading to the DQ and a Casas rudo turn. Apparently it was a Joker/Batman thing where so long as Santo was outside of the promotion, Casas could be good, but the second he got back, the old ways returned. Interestingly, they have that singles match in September, but at the Anniversary show, it's a trios right in the middle of the card with Casas and Los Hermanos Dinamitas vs Santo, Dos Caras, and Rayo. If there's a blow off match they were building to here, it wouldn't be for a while. They wrestled a year later at the Anniversary show after all.

Anyway, the match started with Santo ambushing Casas with a dropkick during the announcements and it didn't really let up too much. Casas immediately rolled out and sold the moment for what it was for a few minutes as Satanico complained before really starting things against Jericho. The best thing I can say about this, and about Jericho's role in general is that the nature of lucha is such that when someone messes something up, it's fairly easy for someone as good as Charles or Satanico to recover, and they do a few times here. Jericho had a lot of energy but didn't entirely seem to know what to do with it. I thought Dragon was more effective and dynamic in his role and I don't always love him in these matches.

The real story here was Santo and Casas. Anytime they were in the ring together it was electric. Casas in 2014 could just stop time and draw all eyes whenever he and Rush got in there and it was a lot like that. Early on he got a revenge dropkick out of nowhere on Santo. Then, Santo fired back with a bunch of knees and went for a tapitia. The rudos came in to swarm and that started the beatdown. Given the rudo side and the fact Santo is Santo, it was ultimately good, in that Santo kept trying to fight back against Casas and got taken out by the numbers game. The big problem were the other two tecnicos. Prolonged heat segments against one tecnico are sort of rare. Usually guys are in and out of the ring, cycled to help rationalize why the tecnicos don't just charge the ring. Here, the focus had to be on Santo. With more seasoned tecnicos, that's generally fine. They know to keep busy or to hang out outside the ring, or to feed into some shots from the rudos to justify why they aren't in there, or to make it seem like if they ran in, they'd get swarmed as well by only keeping one person on the apron, etc. There are dozens of ways to make it work. Here they didn't really use any and were just standing around and it showed. After a few minutes of this, they just ran in anyway, dropkicking Casas, who had been working on Santo's mask, off the top and hitting a few moves (lionsault/rana) to end the caida.

The segunda had more of the same, with a flourish of tecnico shine (including Jericho doing a bunch of Stuff including a funny show off delayed vertical that he did just because he was young and because he could) followed by more Casas vs Santo, with the rudos helping Casas keep Santo down. It was very solid, very heated, and served its purpose well, right up through the point that the ref dq'd the rudos for it. Santo won the match but Casas won the battle, and it was all solid enough that it left me wanting more, enough so that it made me change my plans, so I bet it sold some tickets as well.