Found Footage Friday: BABY MISAWA~! ONITA~! SATO~! INOUE~! TENTA~! KABUKI~! JIVE TONES~! CADETES~! MISIONEROS~!

Mitsuharu Misawa/Atsushi Onita vs. Mighty Inoue/Akio Sato AJPW 12/08/82

MD: This is, I think, the earliest Misawa match on record that was identified in a handheld cache from a couple of years back and that's now online due to our new friend in Japan. We have some Goto vs early Kawada matches that we'll hopefully take a look at in the next couple of weeks too. A lot of this was putting Misawa through his paces with the basic spots you'd expect from someone in the system at his age. There was one point where he seemed a little lost on a whip and there were some things he did, like a big backflip off the top that you couldn't quite attach to the wrestler he'd someday be. In general, it was a good showing for his experience level, generally competent. Onita had that electricity that made you think that 82 Randy Savage vs 82 Atushi Onita would be the most interesting match in the world. He drew the eye with everything he did because it stood out so much to everyone around him. And it's not like Sato and Inoue were slouches. These two had as good a finishing combo as you'd see in 82, with Inoue's fireman's carry gutbuster, two flipping sentons, and Sato's wind up hook kick. 

ER: This was mostly simple juniors stuff, a lot of armdrags, some grounded headlocks, and some movements that seem destined only to ruin knees. You see Onita leaping off the top rope to the floor and landing on his feet, just to back off Inoue, and you think about how his knees were pure bone dust less than two years later. Inoue and Sato work over Misawa's knee (Sato had a really nasty grapevine kneedrop that did not prevent Misawa from backflipping off the top rope late in the match) and has a cool backbreaker. Misawa gets to show some spunk with a hard back suplex that gets paid back shortly after. I loved how the match built to a wild Inoue/Onita exchange, with Inoue hitting his high cross block and then FLYINF over the top to the floor after missing the immediate follow up, giving Onita the opening to fly into him with a great tope. The Misawa/Inoue stuff was nice and spirited, with Misawa missing a cool leaping crossbody off the top and getting his insides rearranged with a gutbuster and two fat flipping sentons. Misawa was only 20 years old here, but you could really see how high his floor was just from his young boy work. 

The Jive Tones (Pez Whatley/Tiger Conway Jr.) vs. John Tenta/Great Kabuki AJPW 9/2/89

MD: Jive Tones were generally supporting Abdullah (who was building up to his big, heavily promoted singles match with Baba) on this tour. We get them in some six mans but it's nice to see a straight tag match with them doing their thing. Tenta was winding down on his way to the WWF, having not been utilized all that much in 89. Kabuki, of course, would jump between lower card matches like this and being a second or third guy in Jumbo vs. Tenryu main event trios matches. Maybe that's why it was so enjoyable to see him goof and stooge about with Conway and Whatley here. There was a beautiful exchange where Conway escaped a headlock by dancing this way and that and Kabuki answered by mocking his little dance. The crowd was definitely into the act, popping for each bit of oscillation or jiving that Conway or Whatley pulled out. You never quite got the sense that they were going to win, between the hierarchy of it all and Tenta's sheer size, but they definitely irritated their opponents along the way. That made the post match dancing and strutting around the ring of Tenta and Kabuki all the sweeter after their victory.

ER: Matt really has a strong grasp on the kind of matches that will lure me into writing late on a Friday night. I didn't know the Jive Tones worked an All Japan tour, let alone in a featured tag match, so I was going to be here for this. You see, it's the way Conway shimmies Whatley's white jacket down his arms and shoulders, really taking his time, wiggling his partner free. He will continue wiggling his way through the match, but building to some surprising stiffness and a cool story. I would have enjoyed this if they had kept the early match vibes, like Kabuki barreling out of control doing rope running with Conway, leading to him eating an armdrag and dropkick, or how Tenta swung super low on a clothesline and then caught Whatley's high crossbody, only to go down in a heap from Conway's Thesz press. 

I thought this would settle down pretty quickly into Tenta and Kabuki dominating, and the fun twist in the match comes when Conway gets manhandled into the wrong corner. This is clearly where he was about to take a long beating, and instead, wins a punch out with Kabuki that turns into a nice heat segment on Kabuki, even giving us a Conway butt butt off the ropes. One of Tenta's best traits as a wrestler is how good he is at looking Actually Mad in the ring. He has great body language and is good at selling, but he's so good here at looking genuinely pissed off at Whatley's antics, coming off like someone who was upset that the Jive Tones weren't treating Professional Wrestling with enough Respect. It's so cool seeing such a big dude get knocked around by Conway and Whatley, and my favorite part of the match was this excellent last second pinfall save by Conway, flying into frame with a stage dive that Charles Peterson should have captured in black and white. Kabuki barely gets the win with an inside cradle as Tenta is getting smashed into the ringpost on the floor. Negative points to the cameraman for not giving us more of Tenta and Kabuki's celebratory in-ring strutting. 

Solar/Súper Astro/Ultraman vs. Black Terry/El Signo/Negro Navarro Primer Festival De Lucha Libre Regia 3/21/10

PAS: Always cool to see a new match from Navarro and Terry when they were in their mid 50s and smack in their prime. Terry was the greatest brawler in the world in 2010, but this was more of a Navarro vs. Solar style llave exhibition, which was fun but not revelatory. Everyone kind of hit their beats here, pretty heavily matched up, so we didn't see much of Navarro or Solar doing their things with the other guys in the match. We did get a nice Super Astro tope and some flips from him, and I liked how they teased the traditional Solar vs. Navarro double pin finish, only to switch it up and have Solar win by submission. 

MD: This felt like these guys playing the classics, especially with the initial exchanges, but they're classics for a reason and even though we shouldn't have been surprised by it, because we have Solar vs Navarro even a number of years later, it's absolutely impressive on paper. It was a lot of fun seeing Super Astro use Signo's sheer size as an absolutely literal base to use to bound around the ring. Navarro and Solar had a lot of time and they used it to the fullest with one interesting tricked out hold after the next, holds that almost no one else in the world could make plausible but them. Things opened up a little on the second or third set of exchanges and that let Black Terry unleash some of the shots you'd expect out of him from this time and it gave things some variety, but they snapped back to old form shortly thereafter. Past the action itself, my favorite bit of this was the audio of someone explaining to their kid who each tecnico was based on the color of their gear. It was matter-of-fact and wholesome, spreading the love of these guys across generations.