70s Joshi on Wednesday: Lucy! Tomi! Queen Angels Explode!

77. 1979.12.11 - 02 Lucy Kayama vs. Tomi Aoyama (All Pacific Title)

K: Lucy Kayama challenges her tag partner in Queen Angels for the All Pacific belt. I guess we got the Black Pair members fighting each other to fit a theme for this show.

Really strong lock up to start. Followed up with Tomi leaping onto the ropes looking for some kind of boomerang move but Lucy avoided it, but Tomi follows up with a couple of big shoulder tackles, but goes to well 1 too many times and Lucy counters with a trip on the next attempt. All this is done with real conviction, physical intensity and a slight bit of sloppiness that just makes it feel a bit more real. That all happened in barely 10 seconds and it's got me invested in seeing the rest of this match.

Things settle down a bit with Lucy going after Tomi's back. She actually does a Liontamer for a bit before settling into the more familiar Boston Crab. There's a couple of backbreakers (the tilt-a-whirl version) but she doesn't get far with it until Tomi gets a comeback with another one of her wild boomerangs off the top. This one managed to land a bit though still looked sloppy, like she didn't have time to steady herself properly but just did it.

We cut out for adverts for a bit which breaks up the flow a bit as when we're back it feels like a chunk of time was cut out. Now Lucy is back in control and is grinding Tomi down. She does two really sick Tiger Drivers, I thought the first one looked a bit reckless but then the second one was basically the exact same motion but with even more force. Just classic Joshi behaviour really.

Aoyama does a bunch of good dropkicks and she uses them more like punches when she's on the defensive as well as to try and establish control. The one I want to highlight though is actually when she gets countered by Lucy sidestepping her and lifting a foot up into her ribs it looked like. Such a simple counter I'm surprised hasn't been copied more.

Unfortunately we get a bit of cop-out finish even if it was quite exciting. Tomi goes for her boomerang off the top rope but falls to the floor and then they kinda take turns to miss dives to the floor heh. We get a countout finish as Lucy holds on to Tomi's leg to stop her getting into the ring so Tomi still looks like the stronger one. There are structural issues holding it back but really good match.

***1/2

MD: Some color to start (as the youtube autotranslate function is finally back). They recently renamed the Hawaiian title to the All Pacific Title, making it more prestigious. The commentators were wondering if they were seeing the end of tag team wrestling between this match, the Black Pair match, and the Beauty Pair having broken up. 

I thought this was great. Some of it was the familiarity the wrestlers had with one another. Some of it was the familiarity we had with them. You could see it early on with Tomi going for her top rope leap back spring board finisher right from the start but Lucy getting out of the way. She still controlled early until Lucy opened up on her back. Kayama had such massive offense here in her two bits of control, double underhook backbreakers, tiger drivers, and towards the end as she was getting more desperate for victory, this awesome backslide breaker where she dropped to her knees and did it over and over. Some of it was a little repetitive at times but she was repeating dynamic things targeting the back. Meanwhile, Tomi had this great way of going to the ropes. At one point she wrapped both arms around them to hug it to break up a pinfall. Just really got over the stakes here. 

Tomi's comeback transitions were great too. The first time, she bounded to the top when whipped to the corner and flew back with a twisting kick to the face. You wouldn't see that anywhere in the world (where we have footage) in 79. Probably not in 89 either. Then, to break up that second flurry of offense, she countered one of Lucy's flying headbutts off the ropes with a picture perfect dropkick to the gut. Perfect timing. Perfect familiarity. 

The finish was so over the top with three huge bumps that I was ok with it. You didn't need a clean winner in a match like this between partners. Tomi wiping out off the top was wild and then both missed their version of the Queen Rocket. Yeah, the cuts were pretty frustrating. We lost the Giant Swing which felt like a huge moment in the match. But overall you got the idea here, including some big transitions, and it felt like something so much of the footage was building towards and paid off quite well. 

ER: One of the best 70s joshi singles matches I've seen, partners explode without it getting messy, built more around learned behavior and learned instincts than blood or overt violence. Aoyama is the champ but Kayama comes off like the real star, from her little purple robed twirl during her introduction and her perfect 70s lady short haircut. She looks incredible, and I find her so much more interesting than Aoyama. Aoyama goes immediately to her finisher (which I love), leaping to the top rope and crashing and burning into the ring. Tomi learning quick that her partner knows all of her tricks. Kayama is so good in all her responses to Aoyama, all the way she takes her offense, and all the cool ass ways the fights back. I'm not a big fan of all of Aoyama's offense, but Kayama makes it look incredible. The impact of Tomi's bulldogs were amplified by the height which Kayama leaps into them, and that's true of Aoyama's so-so dropkicks and other things. Kayama just makes everything pop. 

Someone needs to steal Kayama's backslide breaker, a move I have never seen before. It's pretty common for me to watch any of the French Catch and see something I've never seen before, but most of that is due to a specific kind of creative athleticism that was tapping a different vein than our modern "creative" athleticism (which often just boils down to finding a slightly different way to reverse a reversal of a reversal that has already been established). A Backslide Breaker is something anyone can do and it looked like a cool way to set up an actual backslide (which she did). It's something easy enough that anyone can do it, and yet here it resides in 1979 and nowhere else. Wrestling is funny. 

I thought the count out finish worked incredibly well. If it wasn't Kayama's time to win the title, but it wasn't right for her to lose, then this finish absolutely rocked. Tomi leaps to the top rope just like she did at the beginning of the match and just like when she hit her kick, but this time it gets her shoved off wildly almost into the 2nd row. I shot forward in my chair when she crashed to the depths. But the follow up is even better, when Kayama goes for a big tope and completely misses Tomi, crashing and burning even worse! Kayama is holding her leg on the floor because she just did a high speed dive into nothing, and then Aoyama runs into the ring and completely misses a running pescado. These women are just leaping into nothing over and over and the misses all looked brutal. Kayama holding Aoyama's leg to prevent her narrowly rolling back into the ring did not feel out of desperation, but almost anger in coming so close to winning that in that moment she knew she couldn't win, but didn't want to lose. 

Also check out that Monchhichi ad. I don't think I realize those existed in Japan for so many years before arriving in the States. Backslide Breakers and Monchhichi. A country ahead of its time in every way.