Found Footage Friday: HOGAN~! JYD~! ORNDORFF~! ADONIS~! BABY TAKA~! TERRY BOY~! SASUKE~! DELFIN~!

Hulk Hogan/Junkyard Dog vs. Paul Orndorff/Adrian Adonis WWF 8/27/86

MD: Very interesting match from the very first Challenge taping (including Lord Al doing the ring announcing). Both Hulk and Orndorff came out to Real American, though they had very different people to come out with. Hart, Heenan, and Orton were with Orndorff and Adonis though Heenan really was subdued for most of this. 

I saw some people saying it was sloppy, but to me, it was wild and out of control. There were bodies going everywhere at the start and if people seemed out of position at times, that just added to the feel and it certainly kept the crowd going. This didn't feel rote or rehearsed. It felt like it was all over the place because people kept coming at Hogan and JYD from every direction and they just threw fists and anything that moved. I'm not sure you'd want that every night for every match but here it clearly worked. 

Adonis bumped all over the place, including into the corner multiple times in interesting ways. Orndorff stooged like a maniac. After one punch he wobbled around the ring for long enough for Hogan and JYD to switch so he could finally eat a shot and fall down. They ended up working over JYD after some chaos with everyone getting involved again (with Hogan being choked with a cord on the outside so he couldn't stop it).

They had a nice bit where Adonis held down JYD so Orndorff could leap off the top on him, a sort of nothing axe handle type move. Later on Adonis help cut JYD off and got a shot in but didn't hold him down so when Orndorff went for it he met an outstretched fist. That set up Hogan getting back in, Hart getting involved, and the leg falling nonetheless. Chaotic and enjoyable. I'm glad this one showed up. 

ER: I'll trust Matt that people were saying this was sloppy, but I wouldn't trust anyone saying that because this felt much more like an out of control fight, with Orndorff and Adonis cutting off JYD and Hogan getting absurdly loud reactions the whole match, especially when he wasn't in the ring. The Hartford Civic was packed and loud, because these people had sat through three Challenge tapings and were finally getting a real match with a megastar. I'm sure the Moondogs/British Bulldogs tag had something memorable, but this tag was on another level. Great Hogan performance throughout, and a reminder that my favorite kind of Hogan match is when you can tell he's having fun, and it would be impossible to not have fun with this crowd behind you. 

Orndorff and Adonis were real assholes. Bobby Heenan was at ringside as a red herring, seemingly out there to do nothing but make people think he would be getting involved in the match when actually it would be Jimmy Hart doing that. I don't remember Heenan getting involved in any way, but as Orndorff attacked with the kind of elbowdrops and fistdrops that made me say "THAT'S a wrestler" aloud. Adonis bumped all over, to no surprise, but this was all about Hogan and his massive reactions. He started the match punching everyone around the ring and ringside, but this match gave us a great look at an underrated Hogan: Apron Hogan. When I say it looked like Hogan was having fun, watch him on the apron as JYD is being cut off. He is fueling this large crowd, building the anticipation, playing into distraction spots, before giving them all release when Dog makes the tag. Hogan relishing the hot tag on the apron before slamming the door shut gave me a huge smile, a jacked goofball giving everyone in attendance exactly what they wanted to see. Great tag. 

Super Delfin/Terry Boy vs. Great Sasuke/Taka Michinoku Oriental Pro 1/20/93

MD: This was very early into Teioh and Taka's career and it's definitely an interesting look at their early development. They were matched up for a couple of exchanges before switching dance partners with a few minutes left in the match. I'd say Terry Boy was further along maybe, though some of that might have been that he was framed as the aggressor and had the gimmick to fall back on. Their first exchange was primarily young lion matwork, but it got more interesting from there. I do think Teioh was more explosive and just struck at things a little harder, with Taka a bit more reactive. The punches were over and the spinning toe hold was definitely over (even if Sasuke hit a springboard dropkick to break it up).

Delfin and Sasuke worked well together, very quick matwork exchanges which had a lot of headsprings and kip ups but that still felt competitive. There were a couple of teased dives until they switched partners, at which point Sasuke hit a couple of moonsaults and Delfin crunched Taka with a plancha. Sasuke flew into no man's land on the outside at Terry Boy to set up the finish. Really, them working with Taka and Teioh was mostly a chance for them to hit stuff more cleanly and sharply than against one another, but it was effective nonetheless. Just a fun, well-balanced tag all around even if it was clear that Taka especially was working it all out.

ER: Oh my god if someone can get me an Oriental Pro logo shirt, with that gorilla wearing a singlet, I will pay them real American dollars. Please. It's incredible to me how formed these guys were in this incubatory period. One year later they'd be creating tape trader gold, but they were all already so far along. The flow got better, exchanges got tightened up, but everything was there in earlier forms. I came away so impressed by Terry. He's surely the most underrated of this Mpro group, and that might be because his highs are less consistent than the others. I think, at his best, he might rank as the actual best of the group, but I also think that Taka, Togo, Kaz Hayashi, maybe even others had highs they hit more consistently, but on any night Terry could look like the best of them. Early in his career he was much more blatantly lifting from every great Mid-South worker. He's doing Junkyard Dog headbutts in a way that shows he studied every frame of JYD's delivery (since we just watched and wrote about a JYD tag before this, it was incredibly easy to see how accurate his was) and all the Funk aping, but it was his gorgeous Dibiase fistdrop that made me react out loud, the same way you'd react to taking the first bite of a really great meal. If it's possible to learn to throw a fistdrop so perfect so early in one's career, then it's an indictment against every wrestler today than none have. My reaction to his piledriver was similar. 

Everything was much more clean than I expected. I mean, Sasuke's occasional clumsiness is baked into the overall charm of Sasuke, as he may stumble but he will always see something through, but the overall tightness impressed me. They didn't all have the same speed or snap as they would, but their mastery of the basics stood out and elevated the craziest spots. Look at how perfect Delfin/Terry's vertical suplex/crossbody combo was. No two Armstrongs ever hit one finer. This match was incubatory for what was to come, but you really could see everything that was coming.  

Yoshihiko Abe vs. Katsumi Hirano Oriental Pro 1/20/93

MD: They say styles make fights, and Katsumi Hirano's style was to get kicked in the face. That sums this up pretty well. It went two rounds before Hirano's corner literally threw in the towel and it was a minor miracle that he survived the second round. His great hope here was to catch Abe's kicks and take him down and do something, but every time he tried either the bell rang to end the round or Abe ended up in the ropes or it just didn't work and Hirano ate more strikes. Really a mauling with Abe coming in at every exchange guns firing and Hirano having no answer. Abe wore a gi and he lost it between the second and third rounds. That was a prelude to him just pressing Hirano in the corner with strike after strike until his corner gave up. Post-match was almost more interesting than the match itself as everything got chippy with the seconds and Abe but even that petered out pretty quickly. 

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Found Footage Friday: NJPW 85~! DANCING ANDRE~! CAPTAIN REDNECK~! INOKI~! BACKLUND~! SHARPE~! ADONIS~! HIRO~!

NJPW 5/18/85

Masked Superstar vs. Kim Su Hong (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbKieuAaBEQ)

MD: Kim is a South Korean wrestler who shows up on these NJPW cards now and again. I can't say that he stands out much. I love Eadie, love him, one of my favorites, but in New Japan he is so often a gatekeeper, just an incredibly credible wall for people to push off against. He takes 90% of this. Still some neat small things like losing Kim early and then claiming he was oiled up. That sort of being alive within the match. All of his stuff looks mean and credible with both a killer neckbreaker and then a twisting drop down into a front facelock. He also whacks him with something outside of the ring to big effect. Kim does come back late and his stuff is middling, some good, some bad. Superstar drops down on him and nails him with a clothesline to end it.

ER: We don't have Hashimoto/Sano, or the Canek/Enrique Vera tag, but we have Masked Superstar throwing Finlay level clubs to Su Hong's chest and killer knees to the side of the head. I liked how Superstar held the ropes to block a single leg and just went right back to clubbing. Superstar kind of jams Su Hong up on his small pieces of offense, running too hard into dropkicks that really shouldn't have moved him but looked worse with how he treated them. His clothesline looked like a match finishing clothesline and there's a good chance I won't watch a Kim Su Hong match the rest of my life. 

Super Strong Machine vs. Tony St. Clair (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pADWavSmgM)

MD: Just a credible back and forth match. I wouldn't say any of the transitions were particularly interesting but everything looked good. SSM is a tank and St. Clair can hold his own. They traded advantages and holds. Machine had a nice leaping headbutt off the ropes and a killer clothesline. St. Clair turned a headlock into a backbreaker (by slipping out, not a Robinson backbreaker). Good finishing stretch where St. Clair got a nearfall on a sunset flip in but Machine was able to get a German for the win. Wakamatsu got involved pre-match even though Machine wanted nothing to do with him and then tried to attack SSM post match only to get thrashed for his trouble. Added a little spice to what would have otherwise been a meaty but straightforward midcard match.

ER: This crowd is so fired up for Super Strong Machine. He was getting clapping Misawa-type chants during his entrance. I wasn't expecting Tony St. Clair to look larger than Strong Machine. My mental pictures don't always give me accurate reads but both are 15-20 pounds in the opposite direction I picture them. Made it look good when Tony started hitting Machine. SSM can work real tough and St. Clair looked like he was moving him good with his back elbow and uppercut, sharp front chancery. His dropkick pushes up under the chin and he makes a whip into the buckles look like it made all his limbs go briefly numb. I like the way these two hit each other. St. Clair is great at leaning into lariats while selling how much he doesn't like taking them. Strong Machine has one of my favorite German suplexes. Both of them work exactly how Bret Hart would have worked New Japan in 1994. 

Kengo Kimura/Seiji Sakaguchi vs. Adrian Adonis/Dick Murdoch (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bqyZdnuwVU)

MD: Honestly, this is yet another all time Murdoch performance, and on a house show too. Granted, the stuff I loved here was stuff Meltzer wouldn't have liked anyway but what are you going to do about it. For instance, there's a moment in the middle where Sakaguchi's on a rampage. He takes out Adonis and then goes to the apron to get Murdoch and Murdoch moves to the other side of the post and the crowd cracks up. It's great. But it's such a tiny little wrestling thing. His reactions are great throughout. The way he takes the Inazuma leg lariat by covering his face like he'd just lost his nose is amazing. Dick Murdoch. Captain Redneck, or as they call him in NJPW, the Super Rodeo Machine.

This had a great heat on Kimura where he kept almost coming back and Murdoch and Adonis would just make a quick tag. Eventually, instead of going for a hold, he threw a dropkick instead and made it to Sakaguchi. They did another bit of heat on Kimura and then a big hot comeback. Everything ended up thrown out. Post match they had both a great bit with a chair and being afraid of it and an even better one of double elbowing the ref. Great stuff.

ER: Great Dick Murdoch handheld matches are the best, because not only do you get to see Dick Murdoch being the greatest pro wrestler, but it makes me think of DEAN. To take us back at least 15 years, the moment I always remember from Segunda Caida Radio - something I am not sure exists online anymore, but was loved by all the real SC Heads - was DEAN making fun of Meltzer for thinking Dick Murdoch was a guy who only worked for the cameras. By then we had a lot of handheld footage and had all seen Murdoch wrestling exactly the same as in all of his great matches. DEAN had seen Murdoch live. We were all talking about how great Dick Murdoch was, but DEAN was the one who saw him live and knew how good he was off camera. I always think about DEAN doing a bit as Murdoch, where he's dogging it in Korakuen and does a Don Knotts reaction when he sees a Japanese guy in the crowd with a huge 1985 camcorder.  

This is the only match on this show that doesn't have a listed cagematch runtime, and I didn't realize it would be the longest match of the show. And in that time, Dick Murdoch kept putting on a performance that grew in elegance the longer they went, arguably peaking two minutes after the count out when he got cheers for beating up the referee and then running shenanigans around a chair swinging Kengo Kimura. The match goes long enough that we get several momentum shifts and each one peaks the action and story and Murdoch grows with the story. I think my favorite part was when he had been worked over for awhile and got to tag out, and he stayed in the ring shaking out and rubbing his arm after tagging in Adonis, not participating in but watching Adonis lay a beating on Kimura. The cattle branding looked like a wild rapids ride, his punches matched the energy at all times, and he sold Kimura's like they were the stiffest punches of the match. The fans treated him after the match like a charming folk hero. 

The Cobra (c) vs. Hiro Saito (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIud5l0HlGc)

 

MD: I am not at all a Cobra guy. I think some of his Rocco matches are really bad, for instance, as he tried to fill a post-Tiger Mask gap and ended up with the worst of two worlds. A lack of substance and not even all that much style. Action for the sake of action and the action tends to frankly just be okay. This was great though, and so much of that was on the contrast. Saito is the prototypical cruiserweight bully and he gave everything weight and heft as the two of them threw everything they had at each other.

 

That meant that when Cobra was going to do an unnecessary backflip charging at Saito in the corner, Saito would come back and take his head off with a lariat. Or if he'd get pushed off after a kick and do another backflip within the ring, Saito would dropkick him out and crush him with a dive. They worked it like a title match starting with holds and going back to them, building to big spots and exchanges, with meaningful momentum shifts usually based around a big reversal/mistake/missed move. As time went on they traded some really great pile drivers and the dives you'd expect. Saito got a German mid match but couldn't put away with it and down the stretch Cobra finally escalated to a Tiger Suplex for a win. Very good lost Jr. Heavyweight Title match.

ER: We don't really talk much about how cool Hiro Saito is, and for how long he was cool. He's cool in all the eras. He was cool when I started getting New Japan tapes in 2000, and he was a bleach blond black beard surf punk with a tight bod, punk groupies and surf licks. Cobra feels like a throwback in 1985 by comparison, and it's punk scum vs. Mil Mascaras. Cobra's Mil hits hard, and Saito keeps spiking Mil with martinetes. The crowd was real into Saito's grounded piledriver when Cobra tried standing out of a headscissors, and they kept coming alive when they see how tough and well worked. I knew it was really good when Cobra's cravat into a stump puller and how Saito slowly powers out of it by eventually digging into Cobra's mask and hitting a GREAT fistdrop. Direct, hard. His piledriver after is perfect. Two kids in the crowd invent TomK's famous Dueling Chant 15 years before he did while Saito takes a crazy bump getting dropkicked to the floor. Cobra's kip up to dropkick is as beautiful as anything by our most graceful lucha legends. Saito hits a massive tope that is what you want a tope to be. I was going to write about how Cobra's flying offense isn't as good as his matwork and hitting but then he hits a piledriver so good that I felt I shouldn't harp on his lesser offense. Hiro Saito is so good. He's such a hard bumper, and strong, and fast. His forceful kickout just after 3 is the exact right energy. 

Andre the Giant vs. King Kong Bundy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0kntbQ5SjUs)

 

MD: I wasn't going to cover this one since it was already out there, but it's pretty remarkable. My gut says that this was during the period where Andre was really breaking down, before his surgery and the switch to the singlet, but also before he really figured out how to work his late era style. So he was left in there against Bundy not entirely sure what he could or couldn't do. And what he ended up doing was being as entertaining as humanly possible. Yes, they did the bit where Bundy walks up the ropes to try to escape a hold and gets dropped, but Andre's mannerisms and little dance moves in this one are all over the place. Little shuffle steps. Hand motions. Weird faces. Outright dancing. He doesn't do the Fargo Strut but basically everything else you can imagine. And the fans do respond to it. I mean, who knows. Maybe he was just ribbing, maybe he was drunk, but I've only ever seen him do one or two of these little crazy finger motions or screw around like this, not build a whole match around it.

ER: I think every single Andre match I write about has me talking about some little thing I've never seen Andre do before, and I always mean it. But this Andre is an entirely new Andre. This is a house show taped by some saint, and without it I'm not sure we ever get to see Andre as a dancing babyface. It's incredible. I've seen Andre do something that could be considered sassy before but never a full match of him working as Dusty Rhodes. It's incredible. It doesn't start right away, but when it starts it does not stop. It feels like it's going to be your standard great Andre performance, smothering the humongous Bundy, muscling him into corners, hooking him in heavy sleepers, and I was excited about how he was going to sell for Bundy's comebacks. But when things take a turn, they really take a turn. I certainly was not expecting Bundy to walk up the ropes like Bret when Andre had a sleeper locked on, a real Dig Up mentality, and when Andre just drops the big man flat the crowd erupts. 

That's when Quirky Andre comes out. He makes the cuckoo sign, twirling his finger around his ear, and then does a kind of soft shoe routine, a little tap dance with a hard final step, like he's letting everyone in on his bit. If he'd had a cane and top hat it only would have made more sense. He keeps it up. While holding Bundy in another standing choke, he floats some butterfly steps, skipping in place in a movement that I have not once seen Andre do. He becomes Dusty Rhodes, flip flopping and flying. Bundy himself seems confused, he doesn't seem to understand the timing of the dancing and the strikes, leaning out of Andre's first punch after a perfect dance, so Andre has to catch him even harder with a backhand. This is truly an Andre I've never seen. Bundy takes a huge bump over the top to the floor and eventually just leaves, but not before more Andre dancing. How does history's greatest wrestler keep raising his stock? You think you've seen everything the biggest spectacle in wrestling history has done, but he keeps bringing out new tricks. This is no different than if a dancing babyface Stan Hansen match had just been discovered. It's bizarre, it's great, it's nothing you've seen. It's Andre.   

Bob Backlund/Iron Mike Sharpe vs. Antonio Inoki/Tatsumi Fujinami (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsW8GclZnt4)

 

MD: Honestly, I was here for Backlund vs Inoki and we really don't get that. What we do get is very good though. A lot of it is Sharpe being as vocal as humanly possible in a ring but entertaining and credible. Most of the rest, though, is Fujinami vs Backland and of course they match up so well. They matched up well years earlier and they match up even better now that Fujinami is a credible heavyweight. Right place, right time, smooth, slick, imapctful. And yes, they do a great short arm scissors sequence leading to the Gotch lift, just like you'd want. I just wanted a little bit more Inoki in here though. 

ER: I went into this wanting the most Popeye noises ever heard in one wrestling match. This was our chance. I wanted to hear Backlund and Iron Mike Oh-Whoa-Whoa-Whoaing all over the ring in the only time these two ever tagged. But we didn't get that. Backlund ceded the constant vocals to Sharpe and Sharpe ran with them. Backlund was shockingly silent. 1985 Backlund is interesting. It's his first year at sea after his long reign on top. I wonder what drove him to wrestle that year, seeing how much he pulled back for several years after. He surely could have been working regular Japan schedules had he wanted to, so he clearly just didn't want to. He only worked this one short New Japan tour and now we have another small piece of it. Sharpe vs. Inoki is an amusing footnote. You look at this tag and you've never seen a more obvious Taking the Fall guy than Iron Mike. Backlund's matwork with Fujinami was something I could have seen a lot more of. The crowd was so into Backlund's slow powerful reversals, but most of this tag felt like it was just about to kick into gear and never really did.

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WWF 305 Live: Earthquake! Adonis! Tugboat! Atlas!

Adrian Adonis vs. Tony Atlas WWF 1/11/86 - VERY GOOD

ER: You might be shocked to know that fans in Philadelphia didn't react warmly to Adonis as The Adorable One. But Dick Graham and Lord Alfred really could not get over what this was supposed to be, and the commentary over half this match is them literally chuckling over the phrase "out of the closet" and then referring more to Adonis being out of the closet. They couldn't get enough of it. They were fascinated by it. They didn't know what to make of it, but they knew that they explicitly wanted to laugh about it. Except Adonis leans into every part of it and relishes the heat, and it's great. And he uses that heat and runs with it and doesn't lock up with Atlas for the first several minutes. He walks out, he gets slurs yelled at him from every side of the ring, and he looks like he's loving every bit of it. This man knew how to lean on the ropes and get a reaction from the littlest gestures. When the blows start coming, Adonis sells for Atlas's big headbutts, always spinning into the mat or bumping it like a brutal clothesline, once even flying into and getting tangled in the ropes. When he wasn't selling for big Atlas headbutts, he was hitting Tony with avalanches and the nastiest diving elbows. Both guys took hard bumps into the turnbuckles, with the Adonis bump especially memorable. Adonis gets crotched on the top rope and it gets treated as a huge crowd reaction moment, and I think I'm just going to have a soft spot for these matches that include a couple big bumps with some good crowd heat. High floor. 

Earthquake vs. Tugboat WWF Superstars 2/8/91 - EPIC

ER: This was short - just over 3 minutes long - but it was a fantastic big man sprint that felt, ahem, bigger than its length. There was belly bouncing, big collisions, and the most incredibly brave trust in ring ropes you've ever seen. Nobody runs the ropes like John Tenta. He's the greatest rope runner in wrestling history, throwing his full ass and hip down into the middle rope with 100% pure faith, the faith of a man being wheelbarrowed on a tightrope across Niagara Falls. Whenever I see a wrestler of a certain size hit the ropes at full speed, the ONLY thing that I thing about is one of those ropes snapping and sending a beautiful giant to an even shorter life. It's the only thing that crosses my mind when Andre throws his whole body backward at the ropes, and John Tenta hits those ropes every single time like a man who has never once considered the possibility of those ropes snapping like power lines in a storm. 

It's a beautiful thing to witness another human as they're showing 100% trust, in anything. Trust is a funny thing. We aren't always consistent in who or how we trust. We all consciously choose what things in life we trust. I don't 100% know what kind of meat was in any of the hundreds of fast food cheeseburgers I've eaten over my lifetime, but it's a risk I've taken with no second thought those hundreds of times. It's not heroic, we just all get to draw our own Trust Map whether we want to or not, and John Tenta has no time to let one single ring rope live rent-free in his head. There is nothing that will keep Tenta from hitting the ropes so hard that his perfect frame goes completely over the ring apron, bicep draped over the top rope as if he's leaning out the passenger window of his friend's pick-up, the happiest eyes you've seen telling you just how much he loves running those ropes. 

He hits two incredibly satisfying clotheslines that send Tugboat flying down in two great ring shaking back splashes. Earthquake runs through Tugboat with full confidence, clubs at his back, and hits a fun jumping kick to the stomach. Tugboat gets to hit a big avalanche and gets to show off his underrated talent as a babyface who can fire up a crowd. The match breaks down when Jimmy Hart interferes, in his resplendent airbrushed Earthquake blazer, gets lifted to the top rope by Tugboat and held there by the lapels, standing in the middle of the top rope. Earthquake nails Tugboat with the megaphone in full uncaring view of the ref. Earthquake is DQ'd and refuses to let that DQ get in the way of his good time, hitting a full thigh legdrop and Earthquake splash. Earthquake is a man who gets value out of his DQ. This is the kind of quick starburst spectacle you want to see from two clashing Kodiaks, a type of wrestling we won't ever see again. 

COMPLETE AND ACCURATE 305 LIVE

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WWF 305 Live: Adonis! Swede! Moondog Spot! Hogan!

Adrian Adonis vs. Swede Hanson WWF 6/22/85 - VERY GOOD

ER: You don't often get to see large man billed as a Swede, also wearing a confederate flag shirt, but here we are. That's why we do this. Gorilla Monsoon makes sure to note that Adrian Adonis was just back from a tour of Japan and had clearly not missed a meal while on tour. Hanson was retired from wrestling for good not long after this, but I would have liked to see this match a year or two later, after Adonis had continued not missing meals (and in fact, likely added MORE meals) and was the larger of the two. Here, Swede was the bigger man. And, the match we did get was super fun, with Adonis putting over Hanson's strength and then firing back with a vengeance on his way to winning. Swede had some nice arm control stuff to start, working a hammerlock and driving his weight into a downed Adonis. Adonis is good at flopping around and looking like he can't get away from Swede's hammerlock, and I thought Adonis's offense when he finally worked through it was awesome. He hit some very hard elbows and chops on Hanson, then kicks him in the stomach (Hanson sold the stomach kick as if he had just been hit in the gut with a dodge ball), dropped a couple of great elbowdrops on the side of Swede's head, hit a perfect kneedrop to the temple, knocks Swede to the floor, all great stuff. On the floor Adonis throws a sick left at Hanson's neck - the kind of shot that flusters Monsoon on commentary - then gets a wooden chair to attack him with. Hanson stops Adonis's swing, and this whole match really got great in the home stretch. Adonis hits an awesome middle rope elbow to finish, after Swede caught knees on a splash, and I love that they at least matched Swede up with some big guys during his odd run. 

Hulk Hogan vs. Moondog Spot WWF Championship Wrestling 3/29/86 - FUN

ER: Moondog Spot gets a title shot on a Saturday morning! Spot is a good Hogan opponent, as he's a big guy, but not the typical huge guy that Hogan went against so much, and he bumps like a lead weight. Seeing someone with the Masa Saito body get bumped around and just thwack to the mat is always going to look cool. The only drawback, which is the same drawback as a ton of matches from this era, is that it's only a 2 minute match. There is only so much you can do in 2 minutes, and a number of these feel like they could have been especially memorable with 2 extra minutes. We got what felt like a surprising amount for the short runtime, and it's because this era works these 2 minute competitive matches as full sprints. So you get both of them throwing hard closed fist punches across their foreheads, an axe bomber followed by Hogan's great elbowdrop (still don't know why Hogan stopped using his very good elbowdrop sometime after 1986), and I loved Spot's load of bricks bumps. Hogan came out with taped up ribs, so we got a lot of Spot throwing heavy arms at Hogan's midsection, and Spot had this great corner slump after taking a lariat. Hogan actually breaks out the vertical suplex to set up the legdrop, and it's way cooler to see him hitting a vertical suplex on Spot than just having him run into a big boot. 

COMPLETE AND ACCURATE WWF 305 LIVE

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New Footage Friday: ARKANGEL DE LA MUERTE!!! MR. NIEBLA!! TEXAS HANGMEN!! RODDY PIPER!! ADRIAN ADONIS!!

Roddy Piper/Tim Brooks vs. Adrian Adonis/Ron Starr PNW 3/31/79

MD: About ten years ago, I went back and watched all of 79-82 Portland and there are very few pro wrestling pastimes more fulfilling. This wasn't part of that collection and I think it's because it was part of the syndicated show as opposed to the live (or delayed) Saturday night one. It seems like every other match we're watching these days is "before its time," but the shine here absolutely was. Starr and Adonis basically pinballed themselves around the ring in interesting and coordinated ways to land upon Brooks' leg. Meanwhile, on the apron, Piper showed ass by bumping himself in reaction or because he tried too hard to reach for a tag. The structure was interesting here. It was absolutely heel in peril, by definition, but it didn't wear out its welcome. Part of that was because Piper never made it in, so it wasn't the babyfaces dominating both heels, which is something you never see. Right when Piper did make it in, he launched a few "karate" cheapshots and the heels took over, controlling the ring, distracting the ref, etc. They had a double clothesline behind the ref's back lead to the heel's first fall win but a dodged one led to the finish and that's the kind of callback that always works for me. So yeah, it's cliche, but this was before its time, but then a lot of things in Portland were, tag wrestling especially. If nothing else, this is worth seeing for babyface Adonis.

ER: I really love the Portland wrestling scene of the 70s and 80s, and I wish that kind of thing were sustainable today. The crowds were always really great from the footage we have, and this kind of match seems so unique to PNW. Loved Piper's extended bagpipes squawking, and it's wild to go from minutes of bagpipe practice to minutes of Tim Brooks' knee getting ripped apart. Brooks is a guy who shows up in a lot of territories and is immediately the worst guy in the territory, but I really dug the Piper/Brooks team and thought Brooks was a great addition to the match. He had this great veteran taunting rope running to before the bell, hitting the ropes too close to Adonis and Starr under the guise of warming up. Adonis and Starr had some real heavy leg work on him, both of them flying high and landing on Brook's leg. Starr even comes off the top rope onto it! Babyface Adonis is a real treat, with his feathered hair and 100 lb. lighter frame. You can see his potential for being a chubby boy, but here we get him looking like the lead singer of Grim Reaper and it rules. Piper has become one of my absolute favorite wrestlers over the past 5 years or so, someone that was hiding in plain sight for so long. His style is so great and I can't believe he wasn't recognized as a greater in-ring guy, as he's really someone with a super extended period as an excellent worker. His Portland work has such a manic energy to it, always infectious. This got a lot of time and at the end of it I wasn't left feeling that the guys had done a ton of "big" stuff, but they all knew how to nail small moments that the match just kept sustaining.

PAS: I was shocked at what a great babyface team Adonis and Starr were, for a pair of guys who rarely worked babyface and didn't seem to have a long run together, they had a bunch of smooth double teams and great shtick. I loved all of the early leg work including some great fast takedowns from both guys, and a lot of leapfroggy drops on Brooks' knee. The Russian legsweep/superfly splash combo they used to win the second fall was dope, as was all of the taunting of Piper. The in ring breakdown of heels in the match was about 80/20 in favor of Brooks, which is suboptimal. Piper is really fun getting aggravated on the apron though. Any new Piper footage is a mitzvah and this had some really nifty moments from him.

Texas Hangmen vs. Carlos Colon/TNT WWC 11/3/90

PAS: Standard southern tag match, with the added addition of a wild start and finish. I loved Puerto Rican baseball stadium brawling, and the Hangmen jump the faces in the infield and they go after each other. We even get TNT smashing a Hangman's head into home plate. The in-ring stuff was solid, including Colon getting opened up. TNT is a fun hot tag too, love his spinning kicks. Finish goes back to the dugout with El Profe running to the locker room to grab bullropes and the locker room emptying. We could have cut five or so minutes in the middle, but otherwise this was good stuff.

ER: I'm always going to love the atmosphere of a big Puerto Rico baseball stadium brawl. I'm happy with 20 minutes of punch and kick as long as you have those great visuals of rowdy people in a bleacher, people standing up from their folding chairs on the infield, you get scenes of Ferris wheels and carnival rides out past the outfield, and it's just the best wrestling vibe. The first 12 minutes of this match are just TNT and Colon beating the Hangmen pillar to post, just the Hangmen stumbling around the stadium and ring getting punched into position. TNT has a bunch of spinkick variations, a big heavy swinging leg that he uses a bunch in control and during a late match comeback, his big leaping kick, big savate kicks and superkicks, punches with dramatically long follow through, and the Hangmen served as great punching and kicking bags. Colon is a ball of energy that is impossible to root against, too easy to feed off the crowd's reactions to him. Every time he or even TNT got any kind of a strike against the Hangmen, the crowd exploded. Colon is an animated puncher, a violent take on the classic dancing babyface, someone with a good foot shuffle and leapfrog to lead to a big coconut crush headbutt, and the fans losing it for all of his movements makes it so much better. Colon gets busted open, the Hangmen (Bull Pain among them) are good kick punchers themselves, and the match gets even more electric when they roll back out to the infield. Castillo and Los Medics running in front the outfield to break up Profe's bullrope choking was a spectacular wrestling moment, we get a great pull apart with the locker room, all of it is pro wrestling eye candy.

MD: I thought this had a great atmosphere, with the stadium crowd being up for almost everything, and bookended by the wild brawling out of the ring. Right from the start, we have Colon slamming a Hangman's head into home plate which is maybe the best way to start any match in the history of wrestling. I loved how TNT and Colon worked together for merciless shine. I've seen Abby in this (very Memphis) role as the absolute extreme of a partner Colon can unite with, but TNT brought the crazy kicks and mobility while keeping all of the manic unpredictability. Meanwhile, Colon was running around with a fork, preemptively, like he was Abby. It's Puerto Rico so both transitions involved low blows, but the Hangmen's control section was good, even if they were more sound and solid than violent and brutal like the match probably warranted. TNT's hot tag was cut off and cooled down a bit since they had to wait for Colon to recover and set up the end brawling. The bullrope beatdown and post match with the faces trying to keep Colon and TNT from going after the Hangmen off the field all really worked for me. Just good PR spectacle with a solid foundation.

Mr. Niebla/Oriental/Tsubasa vs. Arkangel De La Muerte/Zumbido/El Engima CMLL Japan 8/13/98

PAS: CMLL Japan was such a fun promotion, with a bunch of cool 90s luchadores just going all out for short Nitro lucha matches. Man it is easy to forget what an absolute athletic marvel young Mr. Neibla was. He was just flying all over the ring with really impressive pop and height on everything he did. Loved his feint into an over the turnbuckle tope, great vertical leap, would have loved to see what his combine numbers were. Zumbido and Arkangel were really great rudos (Zumbido shows up in shows around Denver and still fucking rules) and I always loved the way Zumbido's mullet would spin along with his dives. Enigma (who we think is a young Mazda) has some nice moments, but almost dies on a tope when his feet get caught. Good stuff, and I am looking forward to digging into more of the new stuff they are uploading.

MD: 9 minutes of all action, big dumb lucha spectacle with no real narrative but lots of bodies flying around. Of these guys, I think I'm least familiar with Enigma and I thought he comported himself well, in his opening exchange with Tsubasa and then eating all of Oriental and Tsubasa's tandem stuff. Plus he had the makings of a rolling Northern Lights Suplex sequence. Zumbido was charismatic as ever. There's not a lot you can do storywise in nine minutes though I guess I did sort of appreciate the 30 seconds of Arkangel putting Niebla in holds before a micro comeback and the dive train/finish. It's amazing what you can do with even the tiniest bit of glue.

ER: Love CMLL Japan, Phil is right that it's always sprint Nitro lucha, and it's always filled with guys who had enough fun spots to fill a Nitro lucha match. Niebla was such a king during the late 90s, super graceful height on everything and a willingness to die on dives and bumps. He jogs lightly around the ring to laughs from the crowd before slingshotting himself effortlessly over the top in a wild torpedo of a dive. Zumbido is a top 20 favorite luchador for me, a great rudo with huge bumps and spectacular highspots, whip crack strikes and tight rolling. His mullet flows in mesmerizing ways while his tassel pants are among the best in wrestling history, making every Zumbido roll through look like a crashing wave. Arkangel does rudo in Japan well, and here he's the big bumper in a match filled with them, taking a super high backdrop from Niebla, crashing on arm drags, and taking dives. We get several big dives to the floor: Tsubasa hits an Asai moonsault that flattens Enigma, we get a sloppy-but-reckless fun dive train with Enigma catching feet and faceplanting, Tsubasa almost breaking both ankles flying over Zumbido with a somersault senton, Zumbido hits a wild dive on Niebla that sends him face first into the 2nd row, Enigma mans up a mere 15 seconds after crashing on his dive and sinks a perfect catch on a big Oriental moonsault to the floor, all action that feels wholly like CMLL Japan. I love when stuff shows up there, always a must watch for me. 1998 was the first year I got into lucha so this era and these guys have major nostalgia for me, and it's always great to see how it holds up.

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