80s Joshi on Wednesday: Jaguar! Mimi! Masami! Tarantula

Volume 4   

8. Devil Masami & Tarantula vs. Jaguar Yokota & Mimi Hagiwara (WWWA Tag Team Titles) - 1/4/83

K: Well here we go it's the absolute dream team of Jaguar Yokota & Mimi Hagiwara (who hold the two most important singles belts) against tag champs Devil Masami & Tarantula. Devil makes a bit of a ceremony of giving up her wooden sword to Commissioner Ueda before the introductions, in stark contrast to her recent antics when she was fighting him over trying to wield it as a weapon.

The opening is conceptually captivating. Tarantula gets a bit too close to the babyface corner when she's circling the ring, so the first offense is actually Mimi grabbing her on the apron for Jaguar to charge in and double team. It conveys that the babyfaces aren't gonna be goodie-two-shoes tonight after all the shenanigans we've seen this heel team commit over the last year (they main evented last year's 1/4 show). 

Naturally, the babyfaces are less experienced in these tactics so it doesn't immediately go their way. In fact, Tarantula is able to pretty quickly dodge and escape the double team attempt, and also pulls out a pretty cool spinning trip to take down Jaguar and send her to the outside to set up a double team for their team. But Mimi is on it, runs over to fight Devil before a double team can happen, so the babyfaces end up winning the opening skirmish with the symbolic throwing onto chairs/table.

I'm sorry if that was a bit too play-by-play so to sum up what I take from it; it's that we're gonna see feisty babyfaces ready to fight the heels on their own terms if necessary - who may not be as good at dirty tactics - but their determination and fighting spirit may be enough to get them the win. 

The first few minutes are quite hectic and get all this across before settling into something more conventional: long Mimi babyface in peril. Again, she's very good at this. She veers on looking a bit helpless at times, but she fights back just about enough so you don't give up on her. Tarantula takes most of this, at one point she's got Mimi tied up in the ropes while Jaguar protests the referee, and she pulls Mimi's hair across her face to add some extra nastiness to it. When Jaguar gets tagged in she does her usual handstand flip comeback, but this time she does a twisting bodypress rather than a dropkick. Bit of an evolution on what we're getting used to. 

This built nicely into a Jaguar tag and comeback (with some setbacks). The flaw here is that Jaguar's tag-in felt too easy after all that buildup, and so did he picking up the fall. She hits a bridging vertical suplex that didn't feel like a particularly big move, and actually gets a 3 count from it.

The energy heightens for the 2nd fall and the levels of violence escalation. Devil & Tarantula feel like they're setting the pace now and the babyfaces are struggling to keep up. Although they have collided a bit in the 1st fall, when Devil & Mimi square up in the 2nd they give it a lot of gravitas as if this was the first time they’d tagged in against each other, but they’re also long-time rivals (by AJW standards) so it’s effective and there’s genuine anticipation there.  This may be because of direction choices, but for a lot of this it feels like Jaguar has gone missing/been taken out while they focus on poor Mimi. The end for her starts when Devil has her cornered on the outside and is choking her with a microphone cord, and then later uses the microphone itself as a weapon to loud electronic thuds.

When Mimi is pulled into the ring, Devil hits her with this spinning backbreaker where she has her upside down in what looks like a tombstone position for a moment, but rotates her round and down hard onto her knee. Devil has such a huge arsenal it feels like she hits a cool new move in every match. This gets followed up with Devil & Tarantula both lifting Mimi up high to hit a double gutbuster move.

The 3rd fall starts hilariously as the babyfaces pull the referee out of the ring and bonk him on the head with a ringside table while looking very mad. The bell sounds after they do this so it's not strictly part of the match.

Devil is going on a rampage as soon as the match properly starts though. She has Jaguar up in a big military press and throws her OUT of the ring. She's so strong. She's also bleeding, I guess it's from getting hit with the table earlier when she was trying to save the referee. The blood seems to make her even stronger. She throws Mimi straight out of the ring too. She just totally demolishes both of them and... she wins. Wow. The 3rd fall is usually a lot longer than the 2nd but they flipped the switched here to make Devil look unstoppable after her blood was spilled. Jaguar is kicking off complaining about who knows what while the heels celebrate.

This is all really good stuff, the only significant flaw really is that just as they seem to be hitting a higher gear to turn this into a great match, someone picks up a fall.

***3/4

MD: We’ve always seen Jumbo or Omori in the mix and they’re fine, well and good, but at this point, Jaguar and Mimi feel like a super team to me, the best suited to try to take the titles from the Devil Army. Pre-match Masami gives up her boken and I don’t know if that’s a symbolic gesture that this was going to be a fair fight or what. It’s certainly not going to be a restrained one. Jaguar and Mimi go right on the attack, but they have immediate miscommunication as Jaguar punches (a clearly cheating) Mimi (on the apron) by accident. Things spill out and are quite chaotic until they’re able to work Mimi into the corner. It feels like there’s maybe even a bit more intense screaming here than in previous matches as they go at it. 

Most of the first fall is them working over Mimi and it’s all nasty as you’d expect, lots of draping over the rope throat first and falling headbutts by Tarantula. Jaguar comes in hot but has to work from underneath until she nails the bound off the ropes against Tarantula and then barely goes up and over with a body press. That leads to a killer knee attack off the top by Mimi and Jaguar taking the fall with a bridging front vertical suplex done in away you almost never see where she just holds it and gets her shoulder up. 

What stands out to me the most in the second fall is the way Masami took over on Mimi. They locked up and she slowly walked her back towards Tarantula. Simple, right? But the expressiveness on Masami’s face is some of the best pro wrestling I’ve ever seen. She had a deranged, obsessed look in her eyes, lips wide, gritting her teeth, pressing back step after step, leading with her chin. Incredibly compelling, believable struggle that felt inevitable all the same. They took things outside after that, using the microphone cable to choke with Tarantula dangling her opponent off the apron simultaneously. Back in the ring, Tarantula hit her rolling dropkicks (which work so well because of the lack of time between the roll and her having to get up for the dropkick giving everything a frenetic feel), and they finished Mimi off with a double press gutbuster after Devil’s brutal tilt-a-whirl backbreaker.

The final fall starts well for Jaguar and Mimi, as they smack a table into Masami, opening her up. But the Devil Army thrive on chaos and they soon take back over on the outside. That leads to Devil press slamming Mimi from the ring to the floor, the beginning of the end. A bit more mayhem and chaos, and then tandem suplexes back in the ring and even the super team of Jaguar and Mimi fall to Devil and Tarantula’s reign of terror.  

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The Young Man and the Sea: Greco-Malenko vs Bosby

PRODUCE Vol. 3: Azùcar 8/3/26

Karl Greco-Malenko vs Tim Bosby

Generation after generation, the story is the same.

Those who possess youth, strength, vitality cannot help but feel immortal. 

The world stretches out before them. Possibilities are endless.

There is always tomorrow. There will always be another tomorrow after that and another tomorrow after that.

Any mountain can be climbed. Any obstacle can be overcome. Any foe can be defeated. All it takes is hard work and determination.

Time is on their side. 

Success follows success and with success, adulation. Everyone wishes to celebrate the new champion, the next big thing. Everyone wants a piece of the future.

Eventually, the young champion, like every young champion before him, thirsts for a greater challenge.

Eventually, the possible is no longer enough.

Eventually, he seeks out the sea.

And then, to his ultimate regret, he finds it.

The sea is fluid. The sea is endless. The sea cannot be contained.

The young champion is an expert at planting his feet, at controlling his balance. There is no footing to be found in the sea. 

The young champion is lithe, powerful, quick. To traverse the sea is to have every movement hampered. 

It snakes around him effortlessly, with a calm, relaxed ease. The sea is at peace with itself, even if it wages war with him. It batters him with waves. He survives the first and the next comes right behind. There is no rhythm to the onslaught, or at least not one that he can recognize, not one that any youth might possibly recognize. 

But the champion is no simple youth. He tries to snatch at the sea, to lock it in a hold. The sea slips out of his grasp and threatens to drag him down. He survives it, grits his teeth and puts his all behind it. He slips around a wave, tosses it overhead, not once but twice. The water splashes and reforms as if nothing had ever happened.

How do you fight the sea itself?

Surely, as the young champion was battered and dragged and stretched and strained, the thought must have crossed his mind. Hardship tended to have that effect on the youth, to make certain thoughts cross their mind when nothing else could. 

Hardship leads to such thoughts and such thoughts lead to truths and thus wisdom is grown. 

It was never about fighting the sea, never about conquering the sea. The effort is about fighting one's self, against fighting the legacy of all that had come before, all that had themselves fought the sea in the months and years prior. 

Perhaps, once upon a time, the sea itself had battles of its own to fight. The point was to measure one's self against all that came before through effort and determination. The sea was the crucible, not the opponent. The opponent was one's self. 

Yet, the sea threatened to drag him down, his arm stretched, his throat constricted. But now, realization in hand, the young champion knew what he had to do. He hung on to the waters and pulled himself up, dropping them down around him. 

And that's just about when Karl Greco-Malenko had enough of this shit. He's 56 years old. Bosby was born in 2004. His career was basically over before this kid was even born! Yeah, he was fluid as hell. Yeah, he was toned. Yeah, he could take a fall and escape a hold, take a lot and escape almost all of them, but this was getting old, and he knew a thing or two about old.

So he wrapped the lace of boot around Bosby's throat and went for another triangle choke. Time to punch out, say good game, and ice up. Yellow cards? Red cards? Ref can't call what ref can't see. Wisdom. 

Bosby, suddenly realizing that it wasn't the sea at all, just a cantankerous bastard of a warhorse who'd seen it all and done it all, and was about to do it to him as well, lifted up again. This time, he wasn't going to let the sea splash away. Instead, he put his knee down, a surface hard as hell, and power bombed Greco-Malenko down on it. A crash instead of a splat.

But Bosby wasn't just some young champion. He was the new King of Tennessee and feeling his moment, he harkened back to the generations before and dropped his straps. Dropped his straps and walked right into one last wave, a kick to the skull. Greco-Malenko wrapped him back up, shifted his grip from chin to throat, and ended the match. 

Maybe Bosby would have tomorrow and tomorrow's tomorrow, and the tomorrow after that, all the tomorrows he wanted, until he, just like everyone else, ran out of them, but today was over. 

The young champion had faced down the sea itself and survived to tell the tale. A tale worth telling.  

And the old warhorse? He was more like the rushing stampede of a herd of waves crashing over waters that by all rights should have been calm. Challenges accepted, challenges made. He has some tomorrows left ahead of him too.

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