New Footage Friday: ROCK N ROLLS! MX! DANDY! PSICOSIS! REY JR.! PANTHER! SUPER CALO!

Rock and Roll Express vs. Midnight Express NWA 9/7/86

MD: Pretty rare RnR vs MX match from WCW Sunday Edition featuring Dusty on commentary with Tony. It was what you'd want, flashy opening stuff that didn't at all wear out its welcome and a couple of heat segments with all of the roll-up hope spots you usually get from the RnR. Everyone looked great but Eaton looked like one of the best in the world, feeding big, hitting huge offense (the Alabama Jam here was used to cement the first bit of heat and really give the Express control, for instance), and doing tiny things like taking out a leg with a small kick to stop a block on a suplex. There were a couple of cuts due to commercial breaks but they didn't mess up the flow. We saw the transitions clearly, including them using the replay to take us back after a break. The finish was wonky with Dusty literally causing the MX pin to be reversed, but the post match with him sacrificing himself to a Bubba splash was good pro wrestling. It made me want to see a six man at least.

ER: Outside of the finish, I thought this was great, and a real strong Loverboy Dennis showcase. Everyone was part of this showcase, though, Dennis just had a performance that made him look like one of the toughest men in wrestling. A big chunk of this was MX taking apart Robert's leg in real sicko ways, and even though it didn't actually lead to anything, it was work I loved to watch. Condrey has a ton of fascinating work out of half nelsons and 3/4 grapevines, so good that I want to see the entire alternate timeline of Condrey working shootstyle in Japan once his stateside gigs dried up. Condrey's Alabama U Style, where are you? He really knows how to tie up Ricky and Robert on the mat, and the pins he forced them into with his leg grapevines looked impossible to escape. And when he wasn't tying up their legs to work headlocks and pinfalls, he was dropping his knees into Robert's thigh, into his shin, violently twisting his ankle, and then handing it off to that savage Beautiful Bobby! At one point Bobby is hyperextending Robert's entire leg over the edge of the ring apron. Robert is on his stomach, and Bobby is slamming the front of Robert's femur into the apron, then pressing and forcing his leg down over that edge, truly disgusting legwork. Cornette adds one of his all time great racket shots to the match, flying in from offscreen with the handle of the racket aimed straight at the jugular. HHH always looked like a dweeb for using the handle of a sledgehammer as his weapon of choice, but Cornette really looks like the master of making a short handle look like a deadly weapon. Hell, in the post match melee, Cornette even shoulderblocks Ricky Morton through the ropes to the floor, like a man tripping another man into a fountain display. Rock n Rolls looked great and matched strikes with the fierce strikes of MX, and even with the actually stupid Dusty finish, this whole thing was classic stuff. 

El Dandy vs. Ray Gonzales CMLL 8/26/95

MD: A lost Dandy title match. Interesting primera here. Gonazlez controlled with fairly simple armbars, with Dandy working from underneath with a few hope spots, only to get cut off and contained with the arm again. I don't know if they didn't trust Gonazlez to do more complex matwork or not but it still worked because Dandy was working so hard to sell everything. I know on paper, that doesn't sound like much, but you don't often see a primera in a title match worked like this and I'm not sure there are many guys who could have done it quite like Dandy, so it stood out. The segunda was quick with a short bit of revenge with Dandy working over the leg and then a beautiful Northern Lights Suplex. The tercera had some back and forth and chicanery but eventually settled down to them returning to what worked in the primera, Gonzalez working a bodypart (the leg) and Dandy selling. They rolled out of the ring on a figure four and both got counted out and it ended up pretty anti-climactic. If this was building to an apuestas match, it would have worked but it seems like this was the end of the program. Still, a good look at just how great Dandy was at selling.

PAS: A new Dandy title match on paper is really exciting, this was a miss though. Gonzales is a guy who got pretty great in Puerto Rico later in his career, but he looked way out of his depth here. There was one of the worst clotheslines I have ever seen and Dandy really had to dumb it down for him on the mat. His little heel struts and stuff looked bush league too, just a zero of a performance. Dandy had a nice moment or two, his selling of the leg in the tercera was cool, and I like the figure four roll to the floor spot, but you are hoping for a missing gem when this passes by your youtube feed and this wasn't that.

ER: I had no idea Gonzalez ever showed up in CMLL, even though just a few years after this he became the reason I started trading for Puerto Rico tapes. The Ray Gonzalez I traded tapes for was not the Ray Gonzalez here, and many of the flaws in this match look like they could be blamed on miscommunication. I think Phil tuned out early on once Gonzalez hit that flying "clothesline" but considering Gonzalez follows it up with a crossbody block using the exact same form he used for that "clothesline", I assume it was just a spot that wasn't supposed to happen. It's amazing how much poise Ray had just a few years later, that was mostly absent here. It was a mistake to work this as Gonzalez trying to fit into Dandy's lucha setting, as while he had a nice missile dropkick and a couple decent bumps to the floor, he couldn't facilitate the level or speed of work Dandy was capable of. The most interesting this got for me was the beginning of segunda, where we got a glimpse of what could have made for an excellent title match. Ray got rudo heat during the break between falls, and knew it. The fans were rejecting him and it looked like he was going to really run with that, approaching Dandy with an extended right hand, left arm tucked behind his back, and a telegraphed double cross kick getting caught. Bringing some Puerto Rico rudo bullshit into the elegance of a skilled tecnico lucha title defense would have made for a great style clash, like a southern US heel just punching his way through a match opposite Blue Panther. But almost right after that Gonzalez falls back into line, and the rest of the match is worked like the boring end of the Flair vs. Terry Taylor spectrum. Dandy really did a lot to try to make this work, but it's hard to deny that Dandy could have likely had a better singles match with any wrestler on the CMLL roster. Let's all just go back a few days and remember how cool "El Dandy vs. Ray Gonzalez" looked on paper. 

Misterioso/Rey Mysterio Jr./Súper Caló/Volador vs. Blue Panther/Heavy Metal/Piromaniaco/Psicosis AAA 8/11/95 - FUN

MD: Not your average atomicos. You had Rey as captain, Signo as Piromaniaco, maskless Volador, and Calo in hatless, sleeves-only shirt, dancing glory. The story was Rey vs Psicosis, first delaying it and then paying it off. As they cycled through the pairings in the primera, Panther made sure to intervene and rob the fans of that first Rey vs Psicosis exchange. After a mini-beatdown, Rey would mount a comeback and allow the tecnicos to take the primera. The bigger beatdown came in the segunda, and watching Heavy Metal toss Rey around made me really want a 95 singles match with them. In the tercera, Rey came back again and we finally got a killer little Rey vs Psicosis exchange with a spectacular finish. Piromaniaco looked good using his size to bully tecnicos and eat their stuff, but the gimmick had no legs. Panther didn't do a lot but everything he did (the aforementioned cut off, choking Misterioso with part of the ring, ripping up what I choose to believe to be an anti-Tirantes sign, stooging with Psicosis on miscommunication spots) was very good. At times this was fast and loose and all over the place. The camera work missed half the dives. It's really hard to go wrong with cleverly building a match around Rey vs Psicosis though.

PAS: I thought this was mostly pretty forgettable outside of the Rey vs. Psicosis stuff which was incredible. I kind of enjoyed Signo adding some 80s style bumping and brawling to more 90s style lucha, but it didn't really lead to any exciting moments or anything. Psicosis taking the segunda caida with a brutal top rope guillotine was great though. The tercera exchanges between Psicosis and Rey were the highlight. Rey at this point was as elusive and fast as anyone ever, Psicosis was his perfect dance partner, and the finish top rope spiked spinning DDT was awesome. Is that a move they only broke out once, or is there a WCW Pro match which ends in it too?

ER: I was really excited for this one just to see Signo as Piromaniaco - a hood I've never seen him under and one with next to no footage of - and he did not disappoint. In fact, most of the guys in this didn't disappoint, but none of this really turned into anything that felt like a full match. Things were a little disorganized and a lot of the threads got abandoned, but there were plenty of individual moments to make this an easy, fun watch. Obviously, with these names there are going to be some moments. Heavy Metal worked fast and a little reckless, lead to a few moments of clear miscommunication and awkward repeat spots with Super Calo, but when Heavy Metal ran into someone with that speed it looked great. Volador had this fantastic huge hair, like Stefanie Powers in Hart to Hart, and based on the crowd reaction we missed a big late match plancha and bump off the top from him (This is AAA, my friend). I liked Piromaniaco working like El Brazo was great, using his status as stockiest man in the match to absolutely run over Rey a couple of times. He even no sold a Rey missile dropkick by acting like a cartoon kissed him, then did a silly dance. We got a decent dive train with Calo hitting a high quebrada crossbody and Misterioso getting out quickly, and of course all the Rey/Psicosis moments were what you'd want. The tornado DDT with Psicosis on the middle and Rey swinging from the top was wild, with such a high starting point it landed them past the middle of the ring!