New Footage Friday: Andre Catch!! Hashimoto!! Rugged Ronnie!! Jake the Snake!!

Jean Ferrer vs. Andre Bollet French Catch 12/8/68

MD: I loved this because it was such a combination of rote and predictable pro wrestling and something absolutely extraordinary. The hinge point? Andre. Even so young, he was an attraction and larger than life. You put him into something that is traditional and it becomes completely refracted in a hundred ways.

They do a lot of comedy matwork and chain wrestling with Bollet getting increasingly frustrated and increasingly prone to dirty tactics. This is something we've seen a hundred times, but because it's Andre as the foil, it really felt like it stood out. You could watch him do a rowboat wrench to Bollet's leg or do a body scissors butt crash again and again and it'd still somehow be novel and entertaining. Bollet was amazingly giving and multifaceted, which didn't hurt, of course.

It also didn't hurt what they were trying to do that this was an Andre that both could and would eat headlock takeovers, for instance. This might be one of the only times I've ever seen Andre not entirely work to his size. Even in the 70s, when he was still quite agile, he was doing that. Here he was almost more of the world's best 1997 Paul Wight. A fall ends with Bollet's cheapshot tactics paying off and allowing him to hit two slams on Andre like it was nothing at all. Anyway, it all ends with Andre catching one last cheapshot kick in the corner, hitting a top of the head atomic elbow, and one last slam.

Post match, Bollet is pretty hilarious trying to get Andre to beat up celebrities. If you can't get enough of him, here's his single with Roger Delaporte. No one else will offer you that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAVyTkq3Vm0

PAS: Unusal match, with Andre working as a regular catch guy who just happens to be a little bigger. Pretty crazy to watch Andre do leg stretches and takedowns and go behinds. His agility is really impressive as is his technical skill. Still it is a little like playing on a pickup team with a 6'7 guy who only wants to shoot threes, motherfucker you are huge, go down in the post. It isn't the Andre match I wanted to see, but it was still a real pleasure, and I am just delighted that stuff like this is showing up. I did really dig the first part of the match where Andre would just stand up to his full height to break up headlocks and over head wristlocks.  I thought Bollet was great, he looked like a French Killer Karl Kox, and was great at stooging around for Andre and sprinkling in some badassness. There are so many great French wrestlers we have only a couple of matches of. I had never heard of Bollet before, and now I want all the Bollet.

Jake Roberts vs. Ronnie Garvin Georgia 4/7/84

MD: This was a match that absolutely worked. It worked extremely well. You can't look at this, and especially listen to it, and say it wasn't effective, that they didn't know exactly what they were doing, even that they should have done a single thing differently. I personally wish that they had done things a little differently. There's so often the argument that a match was the right match for the moment or for the building and that we can't compare it with other matches with 2019 eyes, even if we're comparing it against a bevy of other 1984 matches from the same territory or whatever. Generally, I think that is absolute bunk. This might be an exception. Maybe not, though. This was a crowd that wanted this finish, that wanted the last few minutes, that was constantly buzzing throughout. Maybe if they had tweaked things it could have been even more over the top.

So, what would I have preferred? First, more of a shine. A huge brunt of the 16 or 17 minutes of the actual match was Jake bearing down on holds. Past a bit of fun clowning with Jake's height, the shine was basically just an extended Garvin legscissors leading to the payoff of Garvin's punch. After that it went into Jake's holds, the chinlock, the armbar, the tape-choke headlock. Jake was always on and in between these, instead of real hope spots, there were hairpulls and him peppering shots in, but it was suffocating. They needed to either break it up more or dive in more firmly to a singular focus. This wasn't a World Title match, it was a TV Title match, meant to go less than twenty minutes. The possibilities and the pacing are different there.

The solution? Late in the match, Jake pulled off Garvin's head bandage and opened him back up. That should have been the focus the whole way through. That's especially true since the finish was set up with Garvin having enough, getting a chair and whalloping Jake with it (amazing blade job on the way down, by the way) as the crowd went wild (they went around a loop one more time after that until Garvin finished him off with a huge punch as Ellering leaped in to try to stop the inevitable - Jake was leaving the territory soon after). If the entire match was focused on the wound, on Garvin being bloody, and then on him getting his bloody revenge to set up the win and the title change, the place would have been even more electric. Instead, it was sort of a droning constant buzz of the crowd before they became unglued at the very end. It was effective. It probably could have been even more so, and a better, more timeless, match as well.

Shinya Hashimoto vs. Michiyoshi Ohara NJPW 12/3/93

ER: This was a main event of a house show, worked as violently as if they were main eventing the Tokyo Dome. Ohara has a posse of guys in purple gi, Hashimoto has Hase and Kensuke Suzuki in slick NJ track suits, and they go to war like it was interpromotional! And really, if we're being children about this, Hashimoto started it. You knew these two would work stiff, but you didn't necessarily know that Hash would bust open Ohara with a headbutt and then throw two cruel punches right at his cut. And that's really where this gets turned up several degrees. Hashi throws evil kicks but Ohara is able to surprise with big chops and headbutts of his own. Ohara really comes off tough standing up and toe to toe with Hashimoto, but Hash is one of those guys who can overwhelm, and it's a joy seeing him hit his big rolling spinkick and the best DDT in history. He purposely busts open Ohara even further just to punish him, and the finish has not just literal color but some storytelling color as well. Hash hits an absolutely finisher worthy DDT, but Ohara surprisingly kicks out. Hash hits another and refuses to pin, challenging Ohara to get up from that. You think you're gonna kick out of MY DDT? Go on then, stand right up. Ohara eventually does stand, only for Hash to grab him in a rear naked choke for the tap. We threaten a potential unprofessional breakdown between purple gi and jogging suit, tension boiling, and the whole time you're thinking "this is what these two lunatics did on house shows??"

MD: Look, we have such stuff to show you guys in the weeks to come. Yes, there's lucha we haven't looked at. There are WWF house shows that barely anyone has examined. Mostly, though, there are Japanese handhelds. We've got a Liger vs Eddy match queued. There are way more matches from 1977-78 Japanese TV. We've got three or four great matches from this 6/4/91 AJPW show (one has the State Patrol). We have Aoyagi trying to Stop a certain someone. The Network just keeps overwhelming us though.

I come into a lot of this stuff blind. You never know for sure what'll be novel or interesting or amazing until you watch on these shows. While I thought the early part of the match where they were staying close and grabbing limbs was well worked and competitive if not overly complex, when this match turns on a dime, it turns hard.

Hashimoto's skull creates a blast of red where none had existed before, and they don't look back. The holds had been mean; after this, they become meaner. It's the strikes though, that are absolutely unrelenting. Hashimoto becomes laser focused on the wound and it's all Ohara can do to fire back, no matter how desperate he is, no matter how furious he might be. He can slap Hahsimoto five times, kick him as hard as imaginable, but Hash just has to get one shot back into that cut and he's back in control. He's a bull. He sees red. Ohara stays in it, but in the end, Hashimoto DDTs him twice, the second time with such impact that it's more or less right on the cut, and locks in a choke for the win. Whatever Ohara got paid for this one, no way was it enough.

PAS: Heisei Ishingun matches were stuff that totally got overlooked when I was collecting tapes in the 90s, easy to get seduced by the flashy juniors stuff and skim over the lumpy dudes in pajamas. Big mistake on my part, this stuff absolutely rocks, for some reason just giving a bunch of midcards guys matching outfits really amps up the whole presentation. Jesus Hashimoto is not a guy you want to irk, he maybe the best ever at changing the temperature in the room, two sick short headbutts a line of red dripping down Ohara's skull and we are off to the races. You could tell Ohara felt out of his depth, he did his thing, had some nice looking offense, but he struggling over a salmon with a Grizzly bear. Loved the choke finish and the Hash stare down of the crew after the match, just a perfect bit of wrestling business, Ohara looks tough as fuck absorbing this pummeling, Hash looks like a killer and it sets up nicely whatever revenge HI was going to embark on.