80s Joshi on Wednesday: Jackie! Nancy! Rimi! Romero! Ripper! Masami!

Disc 1 

10. Chabela Romero, Monster Ripper & Tenjin Masami vs. Jackie Sato, Nancy Kumi & Rimi Yokota - 5/80

One of my rules for making this set is I tried to get at least 1 trios match for each year. I'd be surprised if anyone picked one of them as their favourite match (though I've been surprised before), they're more used to build towards a blowoff/give the top stars something to do in between rather than trying to be a great match. But capturing the overall vibe of 80s Joshi was one of my aims, so these matches need to get featured.

It was also common for a trios match to be 2/3 falls if it was the main event of that TV taping. 
So this is mostly about Team Jackie vs. Team Monster. They're building to another title match between these two on 8/8/80, which we won't cover because unfortunately the footage is missing. It's probably because of that their interactions are going to be limited. We do get quite a lot of Masami and Yokota though, who even without the benefit of hindsight I think look like the most promising junior babyface and heel prospects on the roster.

When we do get Jackie vs. Monster in the ring together, Monster is pretty decisively dominant and Masami behaves like a nasty pest on the outside getting her shots in. She makes the mistake of getting in the ring to try fight Jackie instead, and gets hit with a really forceful Irish Whip into a strike. I wish more wrestlers would do Irish Whips with the commitment and conviction Jackie does here. There's also a great little moment where Monster is on the apron facing the crowd yelling at them, which annoys Jackie enough that she comes over and just shoves Monster off the apron to the floor. I found it funny how nonchalant Jackie was about it. 

I also liked the sense of camaraderie from the babyfaces here. Like, Yokota is too small to really put up a fight against Monster on her own, but she's skilled enough to confuse and distract her while Nancy Kumi gets into to hit a dropkick or something. Masami on the other hand, tries to make up for her obviously (in kayfabe) deficiencies as a wrestler but just being crazy and bringing chairs into the ring (only to fail most of the time).

To start off the 3rd fall, we got a fun spot I still see used today. The heels attempt an ambush, but it backfires when they all get trapped in the corner by Jackie & Nancy while Yokota hits them with two consecutive dropkicks. Heel team looking a bit silly again. There isn't much more of this, soon after Jackie Sato hits her awesome vertical suplex into a backbreaker move on Masami for the win.

I guess the other thing I should comment is that Chabela Romero was extremely forgettable in this, ha. Wasn’t bad or anything but felt like a servicable passenger in a good match.

***1/4

MD: I’m always fascinated by where the flowers come from. It’s really only with Japanese wrestling and it’s best when you get a wrestler that interacts with them somehow, like Hansen. We are informed they’re from the Yamanouchi Line Tourism Association, so that’s good to know, right? No? Probably not. You will be glad to know however that Monster Ripper DOES chuck them into the crowd after the kid gives them to her. What a champ. Only other thing of note pre-match is that Yokota has a superhero type eyemask that she takes off on being announced.

This was 2-out-of-3 falls with fairly short falls. They kept it moving. Nancy started. I feel like we haven’t seen as much as others, but she looked good here. Yokota was far smaller than everyone else in the match in a way that was impossible to miss. She came in and got swept under almost immediately, but took all the offense (especially Ripper’s) extremely well. They cycled Jackie in eventually and things were obviously heated throughout between her and Ripper. There was a moment where she reversed a whip where the whole world seemed to change for everyone in that crowd. Just an ace being an ace. 

When they cycled back through again and it came time for Yokota to get press slammed by Ripper once more, she actually managed to land on her feet, which set things up for the babyfaces taking the first fall. Ripper was pretty much able to singlehandedly equalize things though especially once things spilled out to the floor. She had a great torture rack samoan drop that I hadn’t seen her use much before this. Third fall started with everyone holding Ripper in the corner as Yokota pinballed off of her with dropkicks in a nice visual. The heels worked together to have Ripper come off the turnbuckles at people right until that backfired. From there the faces didn’t look back with Jackie winning it with a suplex into a backbreaker which is another new one as best as I can tell. 

This had clear momentum shifts and accomplished a lot in fifteen minutes or so. Everyone felt like they belonged, including Masami who was sufficiently malicious and Romero who had big powerful looking offense. And it kept things moving towards an eventual Ripper vs Jackie rematch. 

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70's Joshi on Wednesday: Sato! Ueda! Romero! Kumano!

4. 1978.06.XX - Chabela Romero/Mami Kumano vs. Jackie Sato/Maki Ueda (2/3 Falls, Date Approximate guess based on when Romero was in Japan)

MD: It’s amazing how much they fit into thirteen minutes over two falls here. It’s not even that it’s a sprint. I wouldn’t call it that. It’s just so dense. It’s not even back and forth. There are momentum shifts. It’s just that whatever team that is on offense is filling their time with a ton of stuff. To start, it was the heels controlling on Maki. They had some double teams but the best part of the early going was when they were yanking her arm out of her socket; Romero was especially good there. Eventually Sato made it in but things would frequently spill to the floor and it became like a lumberjack or handicap match with everyone getting involved.

The end of the first fall was full of interesting stuff. Mami had the flip out powerbomb and an attempt at calf branding. Both of the Beauty Pair would use this sort of slingblade type hair yank down. Maki had a butt butt and I really like her standing vertical suplex which has the hand between the legs to make it almost a hybrid power slam. And then Sato, after leaping off the top with a splash, ended it with this crazy high angle belly to back.

Interestingly, even though Romero got pinned, they let Mami start the second fall; that’s different than France, Houston, or Portland when it comes to two-out-of-three fall matches. The match shifted here as she started to play hide the object with a spike and then actually hung both of the Beauty Pair with the dangling hangman’s choke like she was Brody King trying to murder Darby Allin. Sato and Ueda would fight their way back in and set off a finishing stretch that included a thudding drop out of a belly to back suplex position without going down from Sato and an very unexpected giant swing from Maki, before things spilled out again and Maki slipped in towards the end of the count to score the win. There’s a match in some year in some place where they just kept working and working Maki’s arm until a hot tag, but it wasn’t here. This had a feeling of just being everything and more, a constant battle that shifted from one style of match to another: it was that dogged southern tag and then became a brawl on the floor and back in the ring to be a sprint and then a hide-the-object Memphis heat segment. Just wild stuff.

K: It looks like we come into the match in progress, but from how everyone's positioned it's possible the tape just starts a few seconds after the bell rings or something. A neat thing I'll just note is the Japanese rolling text at the bottom is an advert for wrestler tryouts, giving requirements that applicants must be aged 16-20 years old and at least 160cm (5 feet 3 inches) tall. Part of what makes AJW an unusual company is, at a time when wrestling was mostly an "invitation-only" closed business, they were just openly advertising to millions of fans on TV how to enter the business.

This is our first look at Chabela Romero. She's a veteran Mexican wrestler (debuted 1955) who pops up in this era of AJW every now and then as a foreign heel. It's also the first time we're seeing Mami Kumano, who by this point will probably have taken Shinobu Aso's spot as Yumi Ikeshita's partner in Black Pair (hard to say for sure with the dates being unknown).

Right at the start Mami and Chabela are inflicting a relentless beatdown on Maki Ueda. Lots of double teaming that the referee tries to get a handle on but fails, but he also turns a blind eye to Jackie coming in to even the odds for a moment. Chabela gives us a bit of focus targetting Maki's right arm, and Mami follows along. There's a nice move where she stretches Maki's arm out and then headbutts her on the shoulder. Someone should steal that. The hot tag is a little weird. Chabela has Maki in a kind of hammerlock and is pushing her towards the ropes for Mami to hit her, but Maki turns her over, does a backwards roll towards her corner to tag in Jackie.

Jackie's a real good hot tag. Great dropkick. At this point all hell really breaks loose as they're fighting on the outside and people are getting slammed into tables. It's hard to follow what's going on exactly.  We're soon back in the ring with Mami dropping Jackie with a powerbomb like move, except instead of driving her down she just drops her to the side. Jackie has a really cool thrust kick move, where it looks like she's pushing someone away from her with her boot rather than trying to actually hurt. It looks disdainful. That gets followed up by her great proto-slingblade move, which the commentary call a "neckbreaker." Mami takes it high angle on her neck.

The pacing of this is so constant. Even when Chabela tries to get away for a moment Maki goes chasing her to the outside and we get another outside brawl with people getting choked. It always gets a double countout but they're back in at 18. Jackie does the move Nanae Takahashi would call the 'refrigerator bomb' in the 00s, but here they call it the 'Beauty Special'. Jackie follows this up with a great backdrop suplex that drops Chabela right on her neck to get the pin on the 1st fall.

We get a bit of a rest period in between the falls, which is really the only time in the whole match we get any chance to breathe. Once the bell rings Jackie flies straight at Mami hitting her with suplexes and her neckbreaker, then pins in Maki who unloads in the same way. The tables are turned though when Yumi Ikeshita comes to the outside and does some kind of distraction which allows Mami to whack Maki in the face with a wrench. Jackie is furious and goes to rip her head off but gets knocked down by the wrench as well. All the while Mami is hiding it from the referee in kinda comical ways, but the crowd sound very angry. She keeps changing direction while choking Jackie with the wrench so he can't see even though he's clearly aware something nefarious is going on. When hiding the wrench clearly isn't going to be possible anymore Mami just hands it back to Yumi on the outside and then things get totally deranged as she starts swinging Jackie & Maki one at a time by the neck on the outside in a not exactly safe looking way. Lots of screaming going on throughout all this and Yumi is throwing people around at ringside if they look like they're trying to stop this madness.

Eventually Beauty Pair manage to isolate Mami and double team her a little bit before Jackie hits a really nice backbreaker. Ikeshita tries to run in to interfere (I don't know where Chabela is right now in this chaotic scene) but gets taken out. Maki hits a Giant Swing on Mami of all things before we get another wild brawl on the outside with more throwing people into chairs and over tables who aren't even in the match. Maki Ueda gets the win by countout to give Beauty Pair the 2-0 win in this very hectic match.

My overall thoughts are this is both the pacing and the chaotic nature of this feels like an escalation on what we saw from Jumbo Miyamoto a couple of years earlier. A hotter crowd also helps. You might compare this to the Abdullah The Butcher & The Sheik matches happening in All Japan around the same time, I imagine there is some influence with the hiding the weapons spots. But there's a feeling of things going off the rails here that those matches don't quite reach, and none of those are as frantically paced. The flaw here though is the spots don't always flow together, and it feels like there's a lack of payoff for certain elements. For instance there's never really any comeuppance for using the weapons, and their use doesn't really escalate throughout, they're just thrown in. It's not a bad thing as such, but there's more than could be done with it.

This is the first match we have where I feel there's enough to give a star rating, which I generally do when reviewing things, so here goes:

***1/2

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