Lucha Worth Watching: Dick Riviere!

Dick Riviere/Akuma/Nitro vs. Aguila Blanca/Magia Blanca/Oro Jr. CMLL 5/28/19

ER: What a surprising little Tuesday CMLL treat. Riviere and Aguila are two lanky as hell French geeks who perform up to the crowd's standards and get a real fun, enthusiastic reaction the whole match. Riviere wrestles like a Quackenbush trainee but embraces the fact that he looks like a background coder on Silicon Valley. He's not a nerd pretending to be a comic book hero, he's a nerd who flexes his tiny muscles, has a shitty goatee, Dudley "Booger" Dawson hair, builds to a very funny shirt removal spot, and gets wrecked on a powerbomb while attempting a rana. He brings a fun sniveling heel charisma to CMLL and I hope he stays longer. Aguila Blanca is a flyer who works like a less polished Soberano Jr., but it felt like the crowd wasn't expecting a lot and were then pleasantly surprised once he hit a big springboard splash to the floor and a big 450. I've seen a lot more seasoned guys come into CMLL and not blend in and adapt, and these guys looked good. Akuma has turned into a Demus clone, which is a cool guy to be a clone of as I won't ever object to a fed having more than one guy who works like Demus. He rushes hard into tecnicos and takes those embellished headscissors from Blanca like a good base junior. I love these kind of no frills undercard weeknight matches, they always have a chance at overdelivering because the stakes are so low, and they can take chances like putting a couple of French goofs in a match.

Dick Riviere/Star Jr./Starman vs. Hijo del Signo/Akuma/Nitro CMLL 5/29/18

ER: I enjoyed our French dweeb so much in his CMLL appearance last week, so I sought out the only other lucha matches he's showed up in the past couple years, just for a little bit more of the story. Here we get to see him as a tecnico. He's even more of a dweeb, as he's wearing superhero cosplay but still has a dumb Shaggy goatee and a snaggletooth. But it's fun seeing him as a tecnico. The Quackenbush vibes are still strong, but in a good way. He has a lot of nice high arcing armdrags, hits a crazy Asai moonsault that hits well and sends him flying into the barricade, and leans into some big lariats. I like this weirdo! Everyone shows up for this one though (Star Jr. has a notably awkward moment but leans into strikes well), Nitro throws the hard lariats I mentioned, Signo is arguably the most professional guy to not break out of the undercard, Starman is maybe the smoothest tecnico to break out of the undercard, and Dick Riviere still does the shirt removal spot as a tecnico and it still works! This was a really fun match that nobody would have possibly gone far out of their way to see, but I just had to see more Dick!