Found Footage Friday: LAWLER~! DUNDEE~! TAYLOR~! RAPADA~! GORO TSURUMI RIP~! LLPW vs AJW~!

Goro Tsurumi/Animal Hamaguchi vs. Great Kojika & Motoshi Okuma IWE 11/3/77

MD: Goro Tsurumi died last week and the IWE tribute channel released a match that we hadn't had before, for the All Asia Tag Team Titles. I'll admit that I've seen all of these guys older but not necessarily a ton of their 70s work. There was a lot to like here, though. It was a long 2/3 falls match and that's with us coming in at the ten minute mark. My guess is that we primarily missed a lot of matwork because for a title match, this didn't have much. Kojika and Okuma were in green and Hamaguchi and Tsurumi in red and both felt like real teams. Kojika and Okuma were heels, de facto or otherwise. They tried to cut off the ring and were quicker to go to eye rakes, for instance. Hamaguchi had big energy and a very pronounced way of wrestling, with Tsurumi maybe scrappier. There was a sense that they had the general idea of what they were trying to do but the execution didn't always work. You got the idea though.

The first two falls were fairly back and forth, with the champions cheating and taking an advantage and the challengers coming back and then punishing them for their transgressions. The first fall ended in a Hamaguchi airplane spin and then the second started with a great near-fall off of one from Tsurumi. The end of the second fall was Tsurumi getting stuffed on a roll up due to cheating and eating a diving headbutt from Okuma. The third fall wasn't long but it was pretty great, as they opened up Tsurumi with a posting on the outside and really targeted the wound with chops and punches and especially headbutts as he desperately tried to fight from underneath. Good blood, good fire, great woundwork. Good hot tag and comeback. The finish was a little wonky as Kojika broke up a pin with a knee off the top and immediately scored a pin of his own when there was no way he was the legal man, but no one seemed to blink at it. The great stuff here was really great and the rest was good in concept even if not always in execution. It's a good tribute match for Tsurumi for some of the dominant offense and that bit of fighting back bloodied.

Suzuka Minami/Bat Yoshinaga vs Rumi Kazama/Yukari Osawa LLPW 5/11/93

Sebastian covered this over at his blog and it's really worth a look. He said that this made the LLPW vs AJW feud the joshi equivalent of NJPW vs War and it's not far off. Hokuto was ringside here and this is all leading up to her facing Kazama (LLPW president) later on. As best as I understand it Yoshinaga was generally banished to weird Inoki-ism style matches against athletes on the AJW cards but as LLPW wrestlers were presented as shooters, she was brought into the limelight to face them. She certainly made the most of the opportunity and everything she does here is worth watching. Here, she's got swagger, a bullying presence, a toughness, a meanness, a chip on her shoulder. It could be anything from the way she drives in a double axe handle to set up a pile driver to the way she absorbs kicks  and stares down her opponents. Osawa, who is dressed like the world's most violent Christmas elf here, is not afraid to throw brutal, brutal kicks. At one point, Yoshinaga has Kazama in a half crab and Osawa comes in. Yoshinaga stares her down to the point where she starts kicking and absorbs and absorbs until the ref has enough and pulls her back to the corner. Later on, a real point of transition has her absorb until she gets fed up and lays in on Osawa (letting Kazama recover enough that she gets a roll up and can make a tag a bit later). Their advantage leads to Osawa putting a half crab onto Minami; Yoshinaga comes in and with one kick practically sends Osawa across the ring in a lovely moment of contrast. Kazama, shortly thereafter, put on a bit too lackadaisical a cover on Yoshinaga, so she just lifts her arm up, hand outstretched, and gets out of the pin by locking in a devastating iron claw. It's the sort of thing you wish Miro would steal. Ultimately, this does go quick and there are spots a plenty but never once do you lose the sense that they're trying to cause one another severe bodily harm so it's sort of hard to complain.

Jerry Lawler/Mike Rapada vs. Bill Dundee/Terry Taylor NWA Main Event 6/2/2001

MD: It's Lawler vs Dundee so we have to cover it, but there wasn't a lot of Lawler vs Dundee here. Some weird things with this one as the audio cuts out early in the match but the announcers (including Bart Sawyer) talk over the footage. You get the whole thing but have no idea how the crowd is reacting audibly. It also has one of the weirdest, most counter-intuitively set up turns I've ever seen but more on that in a bit.

I like Taylor and Dundee as partners in 2000 because Taylor plays into Dundee's natural corniness and, at the same time, makes Dundee look more credible and like a killer. Just Dundee's punches and stomps (and one brutal double stomp) during the long heat on Rapada are great. Taylor's offense looks ok but he always had that patina of hokey; it works when he's taking Lawler's punches on the comeback but less so when he's in control. You do want to see him get punched, granted. Lawler works the apron for a lot of this but we get another example early on on how he throws his head back into the turnbuckle when taking shots in the corner, which is one of those all time great things he does. Dundee and Taylor have funny tandem bits where they'll set something up and the payoff won't be all that impressive. Again, it's a lot more impressive when Dundee's just laying it in.

The finish is bonkers with Rapada taking and taking and having a couple of hope spots and finally getting the tag but then choosing to pile drive Lawler out of nowhere when the ref is distracted after the fist drop. If they had built up tension where Rapada thought Lawler wasn't doing enough to make the tag or there was some miscommunication where Lawler accidentally hit Rapada or if it was a ruse all along and Taylor and Dundee were only pretending to hurt Rapada or if Lawler was the one playing face-in-peril it might have worked, but as it was, it just seemed bizarre that he got beat on so much by Taylor and Dundee (and so meanly by Dundee especially) only to care more about nailing Lawler for no reason when they were about to win. Match overall still probably registers as fun though just because there's a real novelty to Dundee and Taylor working together and because Lawler's really good when he is in there.