70s Joshi on Wednesday: Mimi! Victoria! Day! Masami!

45. 1979.08.XX2 - 02 Cheryl Day & Tenjin Masami vs. Mimi Hagiwara & Victoria Fujimi

K: This has a crazy start where Victoria Fujimi just recklessly launches herself through the air only to splat herself on the match. Well that set the scene for a wild match. Strangely though, she tags out for Mimi Hagiwara soon afterwards and then barely does anything for the first half of it, and this is a very long one.

There’s little to criticise about the work in the moment here. Mimi’s selling of strikes stands out as particularly good. But this is just way too long and they aren’t able to structure things out for us to have anything to really dig our teeth into. It feels like they keep backtracking on themselves to pad the length out. For example there’s two separate segments where the match spills out into a brawl on the floor, but the 2nd time they do this it’s played out so similarly it’s also as if they forgot they’d already done this. So you don’t get any feel of progression watching it, they’re just doing stuff. It’s never exactly ‘boring’ but it doesn’t exactly suck you in either.

If anyone felt like the weak link here it was Tenjin Masami. She’d go on to be a far greater wrestler than any of these three, and she does clearly have a good presence about her here. But she just hasn’t really figured out how to wrestle properly yet. You won’t hear this said about a young wrestler very often, but she actually seems like she’s less of an athlete here than she’d become several years down the road. She’s a bit stiff in the way she moves, and she doesn’t seem to have the strength to just launch her opponents. Obviously I’m watching this being familiar with her peak and maybe it’d be better if I didn’t think about things that way, but I can’t really help it.

I liked the finish though. Cheryl covers Mimi after a butterfly suplex and Masami dashes across the ring to cut Victoria off before she can break it up. It felt like the finish to a shorter match though, which this should have been.

*3/4

MD: Long tag match that probably would have benefited from being two-out-of-three falls instead of just the one fall tag it was. It went probably around 24 minutes which is as long as just about any tag we’ve seen I think. It was structured with heel offense early after Fujimi crashed and burned at the start, a long heel-in-peril bit in the middle and then chaos over the final third. You could have inserted falls in between each of those segments and it would have flowed better.

Masami was still just showing us the start of who she’s going to become, but she’s weighty and solid here. She hit hard. Her stuff had heft and force behind it. Day had a lot of throat based offense (even her one foot dropkicks) and she struck a bit more like a surgeon. The two of them together, even as things were breaking down in the end, never portray the same sense of mayhem that the Black Pair do.

Fujimi had come a ways since we first saw her. She even had her own cheering section! I like her hefting gourdbuster that she used down the stretch a lot. The middle section here was the two of them working over the legs and Hagiwara is a natural figure-four user. Masami kept trying to interfere and the ref stopped her which was a little odd since usually the heels get to do whatever they want. The biggest chaos in the match actually took place with Yokota, seconding Mimi and Victoria, zeroing in on Masami and dragging her around the ring to inflict violence upon her. That led to the heels finally coming back though by then it was a 50-50 stretch. Day was able to split Mimi and Victoria apart well enough to pick up the win though. I’d argue that this was probably structured backwards and if it was ⅔ falls then it probably wouldn’t have mattered as much, but since it wasn’t, it did. That’s not to say they didn’t fill the time in an entertaining manner though.