70s Joshi on Wednesday: New Footage Wednesday? Beauty Pair vs Queen Angels!

1978.12.XX - Jackie Sato & Maki Ueda vs. Lucy Kayama & Tomi Aoyama (WWWA Tag Team Titles)

K: Queen Angels are the defending champions here. To call this "action-packed" would be an understatement. The match begins virtually immediately with Tomi throwing Jackie straight out of the ring and then beating her up on the outside as the crowd screams their heads off. If the purpose was to establish that although this may be a babyface vs. babyface match, they're not any less determined to crush their opponents, well that opening certainly achieved that. It fits with the pace they're going at each other that the 1st fall is over pretty quickly (I didn't detect any clipping anyway). A difference in this era to now is that the referee doesn't stop a pinfall count just because someone TRIES to break it up, as happened here, you need to actually break it up.

The 2nd fall opens with Beauty Pair trying to keep Lucy in their corner for a bit. When Jackie tags out, Lucy takes the chance to escape and just gets out of the ring and legs it into the crowd. Maki is like 'oh no you don't, come back you here you little shit' and charges after her into the crowd and a brawl starts. I thought that was a cool way to get Lucy out of trouble, even if she didn't come out of it looking that good, but this is corrected somewhat by her taking control of Maki once they're back in the ring with some nice moves. This little period is about a close to a cooldown as we've got so far, but then Lucy tags in Tomi, who then hits Maki with a holy shit level Giant Swing. The speed of it was up there with Kyoko Inoue's version.

The description I'd heard of Beauty Pair is that Maki was usually the big seller and Jackie the hot tag, but it didn't really seem that way from the footage. This match however does very much fit that description and this is the first time I've watched it, so maybe it's more the footage I'd seen till now was unrepresentative. When Jackie manages to tag in things really fire up again. We get a cool little sequence where Jackie bodyslams Lucy and holds her down as Maki is getting to the top turnbuckle to do a frogsplash on here. But then, with perfect timing, Tomi hits Jackie with a dropkick that sends her flying over the top rope to the outside (2nd time Tomi's done that to Jackie), and with Lucy no longer being held down, she's able to move out of the way of Maki's frogsplash just in time. The timing to by all involved to pull that off without any hesitations/making it looking pre-planned was excellent. That this is also the transition that leads directly to the finish of the 2nd fall is a good choice.

To the 3rd fall now. Very early on and we get another moment I liked a lot. Jackie does a snapmare variant on Tomi, it works the 1st time, and then she goes for it again but this time Tomi rotates through landing on her feet and attempts a go-behind, but Jackie blocks it with a guillotine, but then Tomi counters that with a bear hug! Just something I don’t remember seeing before and was an interesting/believable bit of jockeying for position. I won’t go to play-by-play for the rest but this Jackie vs. Tomi section was one my personal highlights in that they switch to grappling and reversing basic holds in pretty interesting ways, it serves to cool things down for when the more spectacular spots are coming but it’s still engaging in its own right.

Things get way too hectic towards the end now for me to go into much detail without play-by-playing everything. The important bits are the dynamic between Jackie and Tomi gets more heated, at one point Jackie gets pissed at Tomi breaking up a pinfall and just drags her to the outside and lays a beatdown on her over the announcers desk. She gets her comeuppance a bit later though when, for the 3rd time of the match, she gets thrown over the top rope to the outside, by Lucy this time, and then Tomi follows it up with an Undertaker style dive OVER THE TOP ROPE straight onto her. It was pretty astonishing to watch that in a match from 1978, when it’s very rare now for women to do dives over the top rather than between the ropes. And not even a rotated one either, just straight up and over. What’s also cool is they make it matter, because that’s the finish. Jackie is so hurt from the over the top rope dive that she cannot get up to return to the ring. Queen Angels retain the titles.

This was a blast. I might rate it higher if the awful video quality wasn’t lessening my enjoyment somewhat. But it is what it is.

***3/4

MD: You have to love that this pops up just when we’re only a match or two off from when we would have covered this organically. Because we’ve been match to match and covering every full encounter we could find, when something like this pops up, which really does feel like a special match, there’s a decent amount of familiarity to it for me. That’s a lot of the point in this sort of immersion. It’s almost like immersing yourself in the language. You just get a better sense of the norms and can appreciate something like this more.

It was face vs face, but absolutely non-stop competition. The stakes felt huge. Passions were inflamed. The Queen Angels ambushed right from the get go and then, with Jackie out of the way, controlled on Maki until Jackie could recover enough to roll in and throw a dropkick. They got quick revenge and Jackie ended it with a downright sick looking reverse suplex (1978 vintage) on Lucy. The second fall was just as brisk and impactful as the first. Things spilled to the outside early and that’s where the Queen Angels seemed to have their best advantage. They were able to take over for a bit but the Beauty Pair had what felt like an unlikely comeback (including Jackie just mowing people down with big kicks), at least until they ran a great spot where the Pair had Lucy set up for a top rope splash only for Tomi to come flying in from off the screen with a dropkick sending Jackie into the ropes and causing Maki to faceplant. Just perfect chaos to end the fall (shortly thereafter with a Lucy gutwrench).

The third fall started with the spot mentioned above and I loved it as well; just a great sense of struggle. Nothing was easy. Everything was worked for. Sometimes it wasn’t pretty but there was a never-ending sense of scrappiness in this one, while still having just enough form to be coherent. Tomi locked in an modified Romero Special early and Maki snapped on a nicer one later. A giant swing in the second fall was followed up by an airplane spin in the third, etc. The Angels’ Queen Rocket plancha was built up early by the commentary and it really did feel like Kidman’s Shooting Star Press or Muta’s (1989) Moonsault, just the thing everyone wanted to see all the time, as if you wouldn’t go home satisfied if you didn’t see it. That sense of anticipation was paid off as they hit it and won by countout. I’m not saying this felt like a dream match but it definitely felt like a big deal, like two top teams facing off for the biggest prize and then having a match that lived up to that level of expectation.