Tuesday is French Catch Day: Gordon! Bordes! Frederico! Kato! Mercier! Montreal! Magnier! Fuji!

Elliot Frederico/Kato Bruce Lee vs Flesh Gordon/Walter Bordes 7/9/83
 
MD: Now this had some heat and was all the better for it. They did about ten minutes of exchanges before Gordon missed a dropkick and they went into heat and comebacks for most of the rest of the 30. In the first fall, that meant two or three hot tags too, one of which set up by Gordon catching a kick and driving forward with a trip that worked really well. The heels were more fresh and kept in control though. They used ref distractions for double teams so that even as the stylists came in hot, they got knocked back down. It finally built to a big sequence where they were able to work together to end the fall. The heels took back over in the second fall though, winning with a double team and this continued until the third when chaos would ensue with a giant dive to the outside (and then back in) by Bordes.

So that was the structure, always a welcome one. The details were good too. Gordon had come into his own with the new character, fast and fiery with sympathetic selling and that star nature of always coming back at least a little from underneath (plus that great flip around mare finisher that people badly need to steal). Bordes, older, some hair going n the back of his head, continued to pick up new tricks. They both seemed to integrate some of those headlock flip about tricks that only Petit Prince had done previously and Bordes had a really cool double hand on the mat block to an arm wringer throw. Kato Bruce Lee showed no signs of working a character named like that and was more of a Mike Sharpe style bruiser. Frederico had leather, a bald head, a mustache, and a pretty cool lifting choke towards the end. You watch this and it's hard not to think that they couldn't get a few more years out of what they had. Gordon came off as a solid heir to Leduc, Corn, Corne, Mercier, Ben Chemoul, Bordes, the last of which was still going strong. The heels were competent and compelling, and sometimes they got the structure exactly right to build the crowd to a fevered pop. We're into 1983, but this one simply worked.

SR: 2/3 Falls going about 25 minutes. Flesh Gordon debuts. And France would never be the same! In all honesty though, this was really good. Young Flesh Gordon was a pretty good technico, no kidding. Really dug the luchariffic rhythm of the early exchanges. And Bordes as his maestro partner was just ridiculous, even hitting a plancha to the outside. Most importantly, this felt like it had spark. It also had the kind of recognizable southern structure that people can recognize. Frederico & Kato Bruce Lee won‘t set your world on fire if you‘ve seen Anton Tejero and Albert Sanniez, but they knew how to beat someone up and make it not boring.

Guy Mercier & Marcel Montreal vs Fred Magnier & Yasu Fuji 7/30/83

SR: I have a suspicion that this is from the 70s due to the way it‘s filmed, but Fuji is listed as only having come to Europe in the 1980s. But what do we know. Anyways, this was pretty mediocre and brutally long so you don‘t really want to watch it.

MD: Sebastian got here first and had me worried. Overall, I'm not as low on this as he was, though I agree that it's a bit long for what it is, and it's also missing certain elements. There really isn't the sort of mat wrestling and in-and-out holds that you'd expect from almost every French Catch match we've seen so far. What we do get is generally from Mercier, as the heels are all stomping and hammering and leaning, with just a bit of power moves out of Fuji (primarily a lifting drop onto the top rope). And they do control a lot of the match. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Montreal takes a lot in the second fall, but when he's in control it's sitting in a headlock as much as anything else.

I do think Fuji brought a different presence at least. By this point he'd been active for quite a while and he was still a year or two off from being Super Strong Machine #3 but he had size and reach (especially stomping from the outside). Magnier is a doughy cheapshot-spewing stooge, a sort of poor man's Gastel, but it was still nice to see him again. And yes, Mercier still did all the hits, the spin out takedown (blocked once by Fuji but hit twice), the headstand headscissors takeover, grinding the knee and the nose at the same time, etc. The heels distracted the ref well at times and it made the two big comebacks in the match matter more, but again, it was all a bit lacking. You wanted more heel miscommunication spots and more dumb bits with Saulnier as ref and just more wrestling overall. There were still things to like here; it would have just been a lot better if they stopped at the end of the first fall. It was one of those.