SLL's All-Request Friday Night 3/27/2015

An unforeseen pasta emergency has abbreviated this week's edition of All-Request. Fortunately, the fact that I have a few other half-written reviews should mean a king-sized outing next week. Unfortunately, it only means I have this one completed this week...but it is a doozy of a match.

Kana vs. Meiko Satomura (Kana Pro, 2/25/2014)
Requested by donsem43

One of the most unusual and fascinating matches of last year, played under blue lights with Kana in one of the trippier wrestler get-ups this side of Alebrije and some dude jamming on a traditional Japanese string instrument throughout the whole match. Seriously, what's it's closest relative? That Jarrett/Mantell match with the percussion orchestra? Kana should be NXT's next hire as a dual worker/producer. I wanna see the weird shit she and Jimmy Jacobs come up with together.

First part of the match has the girls trying to match the trippy setting with equally trippy matwork. Meiko with the reverse figure four breaker? Kana chains the stretch muffler into an ankle lock? Is everything about this match delightfully weird? Eventually, we transition into the "Meiko killing the fuck out of people" phase of the match. Meiko, as always, is great at dishing out a beating, and Kana is great at eating a beating and sneaking in comebacks and hope spots, including a really big German suplex.

Uh oh, the music is getting intense! Their health bars must be low! Seriously, they've both been kicked to shit by this point in the match - even though Meiko has been the big aggressor, Kana has chipped away at her enough that you buy her being worn down, too. Meiko with the cartwheel that ends with her kicking a downed Kana in the head, because Meiko even makes cartwheels devastating. I am glancing at the index of nominees for PWO's Greatest Wrestler Ever project, and I'm noticing Meiko hasn't been nominated. I should probably amend that when I'm done writing this up. I have no idea what my ballot for something like that would like right now, but pretty much single-handedly making an otherwise dead genre of wrestling still somewhat worthwhile for 15 years seems like a resume worth considering for something like that.

They start fighting over sleepers. Manzerman is thrilled, I'm sure. In all seriousness, though, it's really well-done, the sleepers are impressively varied, and most of all, this is the rare three-act match where all three acts are very different from each other, but all seem to fit together regardless. In summary, you want all this.

NEXT WEEK: Los Thundercats vs. Monterrey Robocop. If that doesn't bring 'em back for more, I don't know what will.

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MLJ: Sin Salida 2010 Final: Maximo vs Taichi [cabellera vs cabellera]

2010-06-06 @ Arena México
Maximo vs Taichi [cabellera vs cabellera]

4:54 in

This is a fitting capstone for this mini project for a couple of reasons. I'm higher on Maximo than most people seem to be. That might be because it's refreshing to have so straightforward a tecnico in modern CMLL or it might just be my lack of seeing a lot of exoticos but he has a sort of physical confidence and spryness which combines with very dedicated character work. There's a reason he's always generally over with a crowd that tends to boo half the tecnicos.

He was also in one of the first matches I reviewed. There he was teaming with Porky. Here he has Porky as his corner man for an apuestas match and at that point I didn't even know their relationship. That was a little less than a year ago. Finally, maybe due to cuts, maybe due to my lack of language skills, I actually lost the flow of this match when watching it and I'm not entirely sure how Maximo won the segunda. So that's fun.

Fun's a good word to describe this match in general. Look, you know coming in you're not going to get an expert matwork demonstration and you're also not going to get a crazed bloody brawl. Maximo is fun. Taichi is crummy. At best what they were going to present was an enjoyable, story-based, character driven romp where Taichi got his comeuppance and lost that stupid mane he was always flicking around. That's pretty much what we got and I'm absolutely not going to complain.

The primera was straight to the point. Taichi (whose corner man was Okumura not surprisingly) came in aggressively with a double leg takedown and punches. Maximo ran circles around him for a minute before doing the same. Then he started to get cocky and tease and taunt him and ultimately, because he wasn't taking the match seriously enough, walked right into Taichi's lame looking Emerald Flowsion.

The segunda is a mystery to me. You'd expect Maximo to get beat up for a bit and then hit a roll up out of nowhere, which would lead to a reset to start the tercera. That's how these usually things go. I didn't see that. Instead, the comeback pretty much consisted of two topes, so we're going to be generous and say that Taichi was counted out during one of them. Ultimately, it doesn't matter, because this isn't the sort of match where there was a long beatdown and a meaningful comeback. Modern CMLL Apuestas matches are pretty much all tercera, though this did give the weird illusion of a segunda that felt like a tercera, until I figured out what was going on.

The point is, I liked the tercera. The selling didn't entirely feel earned, but it occurred after two pretty big tope suicidas (topes suicidas?), so in that regard quality overcame quantity. Taichi had the advantage for most of it, with a number of pretty good near falls. Nothing was overly complex but it really shouldn't have been. The biggest one was another flowsion too close to the ropes. Maximo finally started to fight back, hitting one of his multiple jump planchas into the ring, only to have Taichi pretty hilariously fake a foul off a near ref bump in order to score a roll up. That's how Maximo took Emilio Charles Jr.'s hair a few years before, btw. The fans were really into it.

I like it when Maximo turns on the physicality, as he's big enough to have just won the Heavyweight title, for instance and he did so here immediately thereafter with these boots.

There was one more roll up by Taichi but Maximo stood tall, hitting a powerbomb reversal for a fairly effective kill shot. You rarely see him do something like that, so it meant something when he did. For a match where I have no idea how the segunda ended, this was perfectly enjoyable for what it was. I'm not sure I'd main event a big show with it, but I'm not CMLL.

A Proud Papa: 

So much Glitter, so much Shame: 

Alright, so that's it for 2010. We're deeper into the Hechicero/Lucero feud on Monday and then the rest of the week is up in the air. I'm hoping to start delving into a comp, but we'll see. I have a lot of 90s Negro Casas to watch too before I start up with either the Mistico/Casas or more likely, the Rush/Terrible feud.

I think I will make a dash towards the Anniversary show in 2010 at some point later, though. There's enough going on that I still want to see more of it, and I'd like to do that with more Hector Garza. He was, and this is no exaggeration, one of the two or three most charismatic wrestlers I've ever seen. I think I got a little gif heavy by the end, but that's because his reactions to every little thing going on in the ring were worth capturing. I'm glad that I have so much of the rest of his career to watch and I'm sad that there won't be more to come, especially so this week, of cousre.

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