New Footage Friday: SATS~! RED~! BRIAN XL~! QUIET STORM~! FAKE CHRIS DEVINE~! FANTASTICS~! SATANIC WARRIORS~! GREEK CATCH~!

Apoostolos Souglakos vs Giorgos Pefanis/Masked Man 1980s

MD: Phil Lions has done it again with some great research into what Greek wrestling footage is out there. This is from a comp tape highlighting Souglakos and it's pretty fascinating footage. This particular match is a two on one based on a gym mat, in a gym, but with a big, hot crowd. There was some loose set of rules that kept them from double teaming Souglakos constantly, but I couldn't tell you what they were. The mat had a line drawn on it to keep one guy in place for a lot of this but it wasn't like they didn't leave the mat to walk over to the rail to use it as a weapon too. Despite the strange setting, there were a lot of familiar pro wrestling trappings, be it the moves (mares, headbutts, armdrags, etc.), the bs (Souglakos getting the masked man's mask off only for another mask to be underneath!) or the drama of Souglakos having to completely bloody Pefanis to the point where he was out of the match so that the two heels wouldn't interrupt a pin; what he won with was a pretty nasty crab where he grabbed the toes to yank. The fans were into everything Souglakos did, more so than they gave the heels much heat. Souglakos did come off as a superman, if not invulnerable, as he fought off two men at once. I'd love to see some lost match with him and someone like Flair, something like the Jack Veneno one. He was obviously good at being a local hero in a pro wrestling sense. Someone filmed this so maybe there's a lost footage vault somewhere in Greece too.

Fantastics vs. Satanic Warriors NWL 6/22/90

MD: Yeah sure, this was fun. It was a game crowd. The Satanic Warriors were your sort of D-Level Texas Hangmen, but they were goofy and liked to pose and stooge more than the average masked bruiser gimmick. The Fantastics here were Bobby and Jackie and there was a pretty solid FIP. Part of the strength of a southern tag is that you really only need one guy out of the four who knows what he's doing and a crowd that'll play along and it'll almost always work and this had more than that going for it. They were following up from the night before with powder-to-the-face from their manager Rustee Foxx that let the Warriors win, but this time the Fantastics had Bambi to even the odds. The pre-match Satanic Warriors promo was great as you had a guy who obviously wasn't well-suited for this, in English at least, mumble to them "I heard you cheat," and they ran with it from there talking about satanic power. This is definitely something that pro wrestling can be and that it should be now and again. There's always going to be a place for this sort of match on any card in the world.

ER: I'm always going to be a sucker for one of those teams with an incredible name like SATANIC WARRIORS who are just a team wearing black masks who wrestle like twin Barry Darsows. Satanic Warriors are both big guys, one of them worked as Super Destroyer #2 in pre-Extreme ECW, the type of wrestling team that made up a lot of the independents in this era. You know, one of those teams where the guys were trained by either Afa or Johnny Rodz and so they all work like Los Conquistadors. And that's really all you need to be to work the Fantastics in Guam. Warriors used a ton of good looking axe handle smashes on Bobby and Jackie, and had the good timing necessary to bump for dropkicks in quick succession. Jackie was pretty raw here but had that nice high dropkick that gets full extension off the chest of Satanic Warriors, and Bobby was the kind of pro you want to have on a tour like this. His strikes look the best of anyone in the match (so good that sometimes the Warriors do quick back bumps for him, even with the size difference) and there's a great spot where he gets thrown quickly through the ropes and bumps hard to the floor. As Matt said, a match like this really plays anywhere, anytime. You could run this same note for note match in any high school gym this weekend and get a great reaction with it. There's great chaos with Bambi and Rustee Fox at ringside (loved Bambi telling her she was going to yank out her stringy hair) and we got a huge powder finish from Jackie (with the ref counting his pin in the midst of a massive powder tornado), and I will never tire of formula pro wrestling being played in front of crowds who might not know the formula. 

Amazing Red/The SAT vs. Brian XL/Quiet Storm/Boogalou PCW 7/8/01

PAS: This is listed on the video as Divine Storm/XL vs. SATs/Red, and that is also what the commentator says, but that is Boogalou (Homicide's Natural Born Sinners tag partner) in there instead of Devine. This match up was a revelation when it first got run in CZW, and it is fun to see a new touring version of it show up. Boogalou adds a fun twist, as he does some big suplexes, including belly to belly throwing Red over the top onto a crowd on the floor, there also was some crowd brawling which may have been his contribution. You come for the wacky SAT triple teams and highspots, and while a couple of ranas didn't get caught cleanly, you get a bunch of both. XL hits a crazy springboard tornillo to the floor, and the SATs set up a bunch of cool ways for Red to spin kick someone. It has been 25 years and a million variations, but the Spanish Fly is sill a cool finisher, and totally blew my mind back in the day. 

MD: I'll do my best not to wax poetic about this and, of course, the June match which it follows (albeit with some deviation not just because Boogalou is in for Chris Divine). I don't know who reads the blog; sometimes I think it's all just the same people we've been talking to about wrestling for twenty years but that's probably not the case. The June CZW match between these six is something that feels a little bit lost in the annals of time, but it felt entirely transformative to me at 19, watching it in Real Player in a tiny screen because of the heavy compression, back when it dropped and the entire DVDVR board was going nuts about it. There were obviously predecessors to this in 00 and 01 (and even earlier) but that was the one where it felt like everything came together and nothing would be the same, the switch from indy wrestling being Rik Ratchett vs Billy Reil to being something that would take your breath away. I'm not a big proponent of Meltzer's thought that you have to give matches a lot of passes due to their era, as there's good and bad stuff, stuff that builds narratives and stuff that breaks narratives, in every era, but this is one of those spotfests that gets a pass for me. It was just that symbolically important in the switch from indy wrestling to superindy wrestling.

And, of course, the Woburn crowd is full of a bunch of jokers that spend most of the match laughing at one smartass heckler comparing everyone's ring gear to the Bad video. Honestly, there's no reason that I wasn't at this show. It was probably a 20 minute drive from where I was going to college at the time. I have no idea why this wasn't on my radar. Obviously, I must have felt like it was a better use of my time to watch Arch Kincaid against Dukes Dalton or whatever I was watching at Chaotic Wrestling that month.

A lot of words to get to me saying that this was very similar to the other matches of theirs we have (CZW, PR). I don't think they missed a step with Boogalou in there, and if they did, they rushed right to the next step so quickly that no one was going to notice. Lots of tandem spots. Lots of quick exchanges. Nothing overly blown. Oohs and Ahhs from the crowd, even despite itself. Buzz for red especially. Everyone blown away by the tapitia double stomp and the Spanish fly. This had some more crowd brawling, which was an interesting wrinkle. While it seemed obvious that only a few people in the crowd knew what they were about to see (though those people were trying to sell the others on Red at least), it was still good on them for not just working the same rote match but twisting it up a bit. Everything was moving and changing so quickly in 2001 that this might not have had the same impact on people's minds as the version a few months earlier but I know I'm kicking myself now, twenty years later, for having missed it at the time.

ER: This match is from an era that I will always feel nostalgic for, even though it was happening at the farthest geographic part of the country from me. Indy wrestling was still territorial at this point, and my age and increase in tape trading was a perfect time for me to be seeing all the hottest juniors from the east coast while getting to see guys like Mike Modest and Christopher Daniels live (and in 2000/2001 I'm not sure there was any other wrestlers I wanted to see live more than those two). The All Japan/NOAH exodus and the shakeup that caused plus the burgeoning east coast indy scene made me quickly make more wrestling message board fans to trade wrestling with, using my access to TV lucha libre as my in. We're 20 years past the era where this was revolutionary, but I will always be impressed by the ways these guys moved off of and around each other, and can't imagine what the (match-long) heckler in the crowd would have rather wanted to see (maybe there was a Rapid Fire Maldonado/Axl Rotten match he was waiting for?), but I love it. Gimme Red doing crazy spin kicks after being vaulted off another man, Brian XL doing a gorgeous springboard tornillo, lucha armdrags done well by New Jersey youth. It's kind of amazing how good everyone was at catching ranas (sure some didn't land as smoothly, but you can watch literally any given week of CMLL TV and see several ranas that look worse), and it gives their matches an almost Crosswalk Lucha vibe that really tapped into something special. This match also had a fun crowd brawling section that I'm not sure I remember seeing in any of their other matches, plus Boogalou working as a little Taz. I watched so much of these guys in 2001 and 2002, but I don't see ever not getting excited to take that trip back.