Found Footage Friday: LAWLER~! KEIRN~! HOGAN~! PATERA~! WRESTLING FROM RAINBO~!

Jerry Lawler vs. Steve Keirn IWA 3/24/90 

MD: Nice little lost TV match here, with Lawler defending the Unified Title and Keirn the PWF title. It's exactly what you'd expect from heel Lawler from this period. Stooging, hiding an object that may or may not existed. Obviously, it's masterful if not particularly groundbreaking or complex. The timing is perfect. The crowd is up for it. Keirn knows how to play against it and make the most of it and make himself look as good as possible. The finish put over Keirn without giving him the more prestigious belt and theoretically built to some sort of gimmick match where the fans have every reason to believe he has every shot at it. As a bonus, there were some fun moments on commentary between weirdly mustachless Lee Marshall and DDP who is surprisingly anti-Lawler in this one.

Hulk Hogan vs. Ken Patera WWF 3/15/85

MD: Clipped but new with a pretty unique point of view, both backstage and down the ramp trailing Hogan to start and then at ringside looking up, like a far less talented Black Terry, Jr. Except for it's Hogan and Patera in 1985 in Miami. You get a lot of the match and a few pretty interesting things, like Hogan hitting a school year trip on Patera out of the corner, followed up by a JYD style headbutt on all fours or some of Patera's great expressions as he reacts to the crowd and stooges. It looked like the heat (of which we only saw bits and pieces) consisted of a front facelock, a chinlock, and later on a bearhug, but Hogan's drenched, exhausted selling is a lot of what got the crowd so into his comebacks. Here, he won by getting a leg up in the corner on a charge and then hitting the legdrop. We saw some signs of him staring down some of Patera's shots earlier on but less of an actual hulk up towards the finish. What we definitely see, however, is the sheer elation of the fans when he wins. Nice close up look of a Hogan that hadn't yet become complacent. 

Don Arnold vs. Ed Francis Wrestling from Rainbo 10/30/52

MD: We get the last seven minutes of this. It's interesting to compare and contrast this presentation with the Russ Davis Chicago footage we're more used to. Arnold had taken the first fall and we're JIP into the second. Arnold's leg and arm manipulation is top notch as is Francis' subsequent selling and stooging. Francis milking the clean break and the handshake before sneaking in a gut punch and taking over with over the shoulder eye gauging is timeless (and well-timed) heeling. The bumps out to the floor that follow are pretty nasty and Francis makes Arnold's shoulder block look great before they go into the airplane spin and the finish. I don't think we have a ton of Ed Francis outside of being an old man in Hawaii so this was good to see.

Bobby Ford/Robert Rouche vs. Ali Pasha/Tommy O'Toole Wrestling from Rainbo 10/30/52

MD: This joins late in the first round (which went twenty minutes or so) with Pasha vs Rouche and Pasha leaning on Rouche. Apparently Pasha had a deal where he used his beard to scrape people's eyes. He wins it fairly quickly with a cobra clutch that Griffith actually calls as a "cobra hold" which is pretty crazy to have already been named in 1952. Second fall had a lot of jockeying over a hammerlock between Ford and O'Toole with Ford carrying the advantage and both sides pulling hair liberally. When Pasha and Roche made it in, Roche got his revenge with mares and dropkicks and a quick pin. Third fall had O'Toole and Pasha leaning on first Rouche and then Ford (who had done some heroic apron work). O'Toole could really sneak in the inside shots and he won the thing with a 1952 Oklahoma Stampede. For a match that went 40 minutes, it probably needed a bit more of a finishing stretch but the work was all good.