Otto Wanz Recent Upload Challenge 1: Dave Barbie and Don Leo Jonathan

MD: Rarely, relative to the other guys, do I get a request to cover something. I'm not on twitter, etc., but hey, if someone wants me to cover anything, generally I'll find the time. Tim Evans caught me on DVDVR and wanted me to take a look at the recent German Catch uploads involving Otto Wanz. A lot of these were out there either in a more clipped form or broken into multiple videos, so they're not quite NFF material. I'm going two at a time and starting with the older ones when I can, with the exception of the Slaughter match since there's a longer one that'd been out there for a bit longer that I'd like to see too.


Otto Wanz vs. Don Leon Jonathan (1980)

MD: I think this is from '80. DLJ is up their in years, of course. Wanz is younger, certainly more spry than he'd be just a few years later. He already had the crowd. This is heavily clipped but you see a lot of cool stuff, so it's fine. DLJ has great presence and timing, great strikes that use his reach and height and size. He hit a dropkick at one point and did the rope-assisted backflip to get out of an armbar, as well as solid little bits of mat wrestling. Wanz was a force here, impressively launching a couronne escape (up and over, this time with a heascissors takeover) to an armbar and another bridging headscissors takeover to get out of a standing toehold. Towards the end, he hit three rolling sentons and a great Oklahoma Roll. What stands out almost as much as that agility was his fire and intensity; he really came at DLJ in his comebacks. He was like an out of control steam engine. A lot of the Wanz I've seen before feels like it's two decades later than this (when it's generally just a few years later), but it's easy to see how he won over the crowd and earned emotional capital to cash in later with younger performances such as this. This, unlike the Barbie match, was too clipped for me to get any real sense of it as a narrative however.


Otto Wanz vs. Dave Barbie (1985)

MD: This is clipped too but I wouldn't say heavily. Considering most of the other Wanz matches go closer to 30 and this is a little under 10, it could be more complete, but you got the ebb and flow of it pretty well. Barbie was a mid-80s WWF enhancement guy who worked a few other places like Stampede. He looked like a guy who could lay in a good clubbering and at times here he did. It's a joy to see how over Otto was, especially considering our current lack of live shows. They kept this simple, with Barbie leaning into his foreigner's lack of understanding of the German rules to do damage and keep advantages. Early on they played with breaks, with Wanz breaking clean and Barbie not, but that meant when Otto finally body blocked him in the corner a few times, it got a big pop. Barbie was able to slam Otto no problem, which you think is something that should be more protected. His jabs and clubbering  looked good for the most part as I suspected. I'm also surprised he didn't get carded as he insisted on late elbow drops and choking in the ropes. It got him a little bit of heat, but the crowd really just cared about Wanz. Otto's comeback involved some nice revenge battering on the floor, including slamming Barbie's head into a table, before it went back into the ring for a piledriver, clothesline, and slam for the win. The crowd was elated with Wanz almost subtly conducting them at times. It was almost ritualistic. In general, I thought Wanz was fine here. I might have shifted the order of the finishing stretch and I'm not sure he always got his revenge at the right moments, but I'm ok watching more.