70s Joshi on Wednesday: Ripper! Fujimi! Tsumaki!

17. 1979.01.XX2 - 05 Masumi Tsumaki & Victoria Fujimi vs. Monster Ripper

K: I believe Masumi Tsumaki is Victoria Fujimi’s sister. There’s not much information about her. She’s better known as a masked wrestler called ‘Silver Satan’ who tagged with Mariko Akagi as Silver Pair. They both retired together later in 1979.

We get a bit of stalling to start this off including Yumi Ikeshita punching the referee to a little chuckle from the crowd, perhaps a foreshadow of what’s to come? Victoria is the smaller of the two, she tries to use her speed to keep out of the way of Monster’s attacks, which works the first couple of times but once Monster lands a hit then she’s knocked down easily. When Masumi she actually tries a takedown, and despite her being a bit bigger than Victoria that approach has even less success.

There’s an odd moment where Black Pair on the outside trap Victoria’s feet over the ropes, and then Monster comes over and after a senton just keeps picking Victoria up by the head and just dropping her. There’s something really ‘primitive’ about her offense, it sometimes feels like she’s just making it up as she goes along with her brute strength rather than actually having moves. I read the purpose behind these Monster Ripper matches as putting her in different situations where various members of the roster have to come up with a way to take her down, and thus far we’re seeing none of them succeed, or at least never for very long. She just seems unbeatable as she’s so much more powerful than anyone else.
The match does drag a bit in the middle where they start getting repetitive with the ‘Monster is too strong for this to work’ spots that it gets a bit redundant. Things heat up some more when the sisters start double teaming her and have things spill to the outside. We get to see Mariko Akagi throw some shots when the brawling starts, which was nice. But Monster just bashes everything in her path and soon gets the win.

**


MD: This was 2-on-1 but the rest of the Black Army (or Black Trio) were out there and so were a bunch of red-jacketed allies of Tsumaki and Fujimi. They seemed to call Victoria and Masumi the “Tsukisaki Sisters," which Kadaveri has maybe explained. This more or less had tag rules though it got more chaotic as it went and started with Fujimi and Ripper. Victoria went through her legs a couple of times but quickly got caught and all it took was one shot and one toss.

A couple of normative things. At first the Black Army would only interfere when Ripper already had a clear advantage and basically just to set up Ripper jumping on her opponents by holding them in the ropes for leverage. Then they’d interfere when Fujimi and Tsumaki were trying to get an advantage with a double team (like a double crab). Then finally, they’d just do it when one of them had gotten over on Ripper, like when Fujimi had been able to get a toehold on. Likewise, Ripper had a tendency to more and more hide chokes behind the refs back.

In general, Ripper looked more developed than she had previously, but she still had a ways to go. At one point, Tsumaki ran in trying to pick a leg and Ripper just lifted her up into an over the shoulder backbreaker. But later on, she didn’t seem sure what to do so she just did it again. On the other hand, at one point, she jammed them on a snap mare attempt and it looked like the most foreboding thing imaginable. She’d just crash down with vertical Earthquake splashes again and again too. The amount of chaos that ensued here, with a half dozen people getting involved on the outside and Ripper just fighting off everyone like she was King Kong felt like an escalation from what we had seen so far. Just a new level of chaos. In the end though, this was inevitable and Ripper just slammed one on top of the other and pinned both.