Found Footage Friday: DOUBLE DOG COLLAR CAGE MATCH~! ADNAN IN IRAQ~! GUERREROS~! CHICANA~! LA FAMILIA MARKUS~!

Adnan Al Qaisi vs. Ian Campbell Iraq 1970

MD: Long 2/3 falls match that ends 1-0 for Adnan at the time limit (either 45 or 60 depending on clipping). This had been out there in parts but is newly clipped together in a welcome effort. You get a real sense of the imperial pageantry here, officials and a band and parade feel, even though the same footage of a few fans (out of the very many) is interspersed now and again. Let me put it this way. Campbell knew what was good for him here, knew what was safe and what wasn't. They weren't going for heat. They were using this as a showcase for Adnan's technical superiority. As such, it was a pretty effective dog and pony show.

Campbell had a size and strength advantage, but Adnan had an answer for every hold. Towards the last fifteen minutes, the answers were a little harder to find and Campbell could press harder with a full nelson or chinlock, but even those ended quickly enough by prying off an arm or pulling out a leg. In return, Campbell could use his strength to escape Adnan's stuff, but he'd find his way back in sooner than not. It meant that individual exchanges could be interesting, but that the total picture was a bit toothless. At times they'd break out into strikes. This first happened around the ten minute mark as Campbell was starting to register some of the damage to his arm. He had a great little bit where he trapped the arm behind his opponent's back with a hammerlock and tossed in a nasty forearm, but even there, Adnan fired back with a flurry and a jumping elbow smash soon enough. They repeated this a few minutes later and that's when Adnan got his one fall.

Considering the locale and the one repeated shot from the crowd of someone sweating profusely, it was probably sweltering there and Campbell was a big, hairy guy, but they kept a pretty good, competitive pace throughout. They'd go from a handshake to mean shots and back to a handshake so things were never going to come close to boiling over, but as they got towards the end of the time limit, Adnan increased his intensity, using leg kicks and just tossing Campbell out over the top repeatedly. That made it seem something of a moral victory for Campbell that he was able to survive to the bell (whistle?) even if he was a fall down. It was wrestling as celebratory propaganda, but as such it was fairly fascinating to watch, just maybe not 50 minutes worth of fascination.

Sangre Chicana/Gran Markus Sr./Gran Markus Jr vs. Chavo Guerrero/Hector Guerrero/Mando Guerrero CMLL 9/18/87 

MD:  Roy's back posting, always a good thing. This was from the 54th CMLL Anniversary show and at the very least hasn't been streaming online for quite a while, if ever. The bits in between falls are clipped out so it moves at a fast pace. The announcer also gets Mando and Hector confused for a good part of this and almost psyched me out, but no one moves quite like Mando. Primarily, it's another Sangre Chicana match in his prime, so that's exciting, but he's more of a dodgy chickenshit here, throwing shots now and again but mostly on the run. He gets slammed onto the floor right as this ends, so that's some comeuppance but it's more about everyone else. Markus, Sr., maskless, has a sort of enjoyable weighty swagger to himself. This is the guy we saw in so much of the Houston footage, just older. Jr. on the other hand, is younger than what I'm used to and a bit more spry. This opens up with fun in-and-out matwork between him and Chavo. Chavo's in the most but Hector has a nice snap belly to back and the end of the primera is a combo of that belly to back and an axe handle off the ropes. And of course, Mando is a ridiculous beast like always, full of contorted, tricked out offense: takedowns and monkey flips and bounding around the ring. There's a lot more to the opening feeling out stuff than the beatdown or the comeback, but both are spirited enough. If this led to some sort of Chicana vs Hector or Mando match, I would have liked to see that too.

Bart Sawyer/Steven Dunn vs. Ashley Hudson/Flash Flanagan (Double Dog Collar Cage Match) MCW 1997

MD: Very timely Bryan Turner upload here, though not timely enough to make Phil's list as an honorable mention. Sawyer was attached to Hudson and Dunn was attached to Flanagan. Babyfaces dominated early. There were a bunch of chairs in there, both wedged in the corners and just free floating and Dunn used them liberally. That led to free flowing blood. They'd switch advantage for a bit. Very few big setpieces here and just a lot of violence. That said, both Sawyer and Hudson did fistdrops off the turnbuckles with the chain wrapped around their hands onto the other. My most vivid memory of the match itself was probably Sawyer choking Hudson with the chain as Dunn stomped on his groin. There was a lot of that sort of thing here, but plenty of cage shots, chair shots, and chain shots too. It all built to a ref bump and Dunn accidentally clocking Sawyer. That's when things got really fun. Sawyer stared at Dunn, slowly took off the dog collar, snatched the key from the ref, and went to leave the cage. Dunn tried to stop him and ate a kick and a DDT for his troubles and Sawyer locked the cage back up on the way out, taking the key as the fans shouted 'traitor' at him. Hudson and Flanagan made short work out of Dunn after that, finishing it with a leg drop off the cage from Flanagan. Then, as Prentice (I think) taunted everyone on the house mic about how this was his New Year's present for everyone and not to worry because "It's just Steven Dunn", they absolutely dismantled him after the bell. No one could help since the heels had the key. Finally, Sawyer came back in to finish him off. Good match and a truly great post match angle.

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Found Footage Friday: EDDIE~! CHAVO~! MANDO~! REY~! FIERA~! ESPANTO~! NAVARRO~!

Rey Mysterio Jr. vs. Eddie Guerrero WWE 4/8/05

MD: 20 minutes or so, with Eddy bringing out a Make-A-Wish kid to begin and Carlito getting in his house show interaction with the two of them (and a bit of Torrie) at the end. So it's not the thirty minutes that the video suggests but it still gets a ton of time. Eddy and Rey were the tag champs together at this point so that made it feel even more special and timely for this week.

They use the time to really let things breathe, with Eddy attacking Rey's arm with a lot of different and varied holds. Maybe what I loved the most about this was how into it the crowd was based on the way they put over each bit of wrenching or cinching of a hold. Eddy would land a drop toe hold out of nowhere and the fans would "oooof" in unison. He'd do a headstand to tighten up a hammerlock and it'd lead to an "ooooh." You have to love that level of investment on even simple things. It is hard, sometimes, to go from 70s French wrestling where everything, a top wristlock or a hammerlock or a short armscissors would have a four minute elaborate series of escape attempts to 21st century wrestling where we have to live with one huge fly mare out of Rey instead of three attempts of it with Eddy hanging on, but that's a me thing, not a match thing.

When Rey really got going, he really got going, hitting from one direction and then the next and the next, all fluid, all with oomph, all believable. Eddy could do no wrong at this point. He cheated and the fans chanted his name, so while he was the aggressor and Rey had to work from underneath, it still felt like a babyface match, just with different tools used than usual used to achieve the same ends. That was a testament in itself. Having not seen it for a while, I love to see Eddy do the three amigos, because unlike all of the tribute spots now, there's no hesitation to milk the moment. He just bursts into the sequence. The finish was the old, tried and true, splash mountain into a 'rana, but it, like everything else in the match looked great and got over huge.

PAS: The dream is to find the bloody house show brawls these two had, but it is really cool to see them work a basically scientific face vs. face match, even with Eddie being a lovable cheat. Really simple effective wrestling with Rey taking a corner post bump and Eddie really showing every step in how to crank and damage an arm. Good point about the Three Amigos, he has a ton of explosion and force on the move, which is never really captured by the tribute spots. I love getting another chance to watch Eddie, what an electric and compelling performer he was

Eddie Guerrero/Chavo Guerrero/Gacela vs. La Fiera/Espanto Jr./Predator Juarez

MD: This is posted on the Juarez YouTube page and is about ten minutes but only a few of an actual match before mask pulling, post match fighting, and Chavo making challenges. Eddy had some really good strikes here though. That's my biggest takeaway. It's not something I usually think of when I think of pre-modern Eddy. In the short amount of footage we have here, he launched a spinning backfist, an awesome European uppercut that reached for the ceiling, and a really nice elbow smash, and then post-match took a bunch of shots well and sympathetically as he was tied up in the ropes. You catch him too early in his career and he often comes off as an afterthought. That wasn't at all the case here. Just given who was in this one, if we had more of it, or if there even was more of it, it'd probably have been good, but we come in on the chaotic violence and as chaotic violence goes, it's solid stuff.

Mando Guerrero vs. Negro Navarro

MD: The only record I see on Cagematch with these two is from 1981 in Los Angeles. It's possible. Navarro is certainly young with a full head of hair. There's a brief bit in English in between the Spanish commentary. Fact of the matter is that I don't know. What I do know is how well these two are matched up. Both have a certain amount of over the top theatricality in what they do. In his later career, Navarro would overlay that on top of the maestro style. Mando was more apt to roll around the ring and eat up opponents. Here, Navarro had control with bit offensive flourishes. He'd grab what I assume is Mando's cape and wrap it around his hand to beat him down. He'd bite. He'd pose. Mando would fight his way back, making sure to preen to the crowd for half a second before big shots. Navarro would cut him off. Just when I thought the 8 minutes of footage that we have would cut off without a finish, Mando snuck through the ref's legs for a roll up and a banana peel win. Whatever vintage it is, it's a good look at Navarro earlier in his career and a very apt pairing.

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QEPD Super Porky

Brazo de Plata/Brazo de Oro/El Brazo vs. Solomon Grundy/Chavo Guerrero/Popitekus CMLL 4/8/90

ER: It doesn't get more portly than this in lucha, and this match was filled with a ton of belly busting. The big draw here is Porky/Grundy and it delivers in every way you'd want it to. In a match with no dives we still wind up with a ton of big boy gold. Outside of a few nice armdrags we don't really get any Popitekus (but with his gorgeous hair he looks like the fattest possible Ramone), but we get a lot of Porky picking on Grundy, building to a huge sumo war between them to end the tercera. Grundy dwarfs Porky but Porky throws harder fists, throws an uppercut into Grundy's neckbeard, and then bumps him to the floor with a belly bump. There are a LOT of belly bumps in this match, and they're all great. 

I love Grundy's slow bumps to the floor, feels and looks like a glacier falling into the Antarctic. He falls to the floor, Porky hits a lariat off the apron (felt like it was supposed to be a plancha but Grundy moved), and then Porky splatted him with his running belly bounce. Later Grundy takes the absolute slowest Harley Race bump, and I love it. The match is filled with entertaining misdirection, a lot of Porky accidentally hitting splashes and avalanches on his bros and then blaming them for it. Porky even shoves Grundy backwards onto his brothers! There are some classic moments, like Porky being knocked from the apron onto Oro's shoulders, who dumps him butt first onto a front row fan! I also loved the big build to Grundy hitting an avalanche on all three Brazos, with Porky doing a hilarious bump where he runs most of the way across the ring before just taking a normal back bump. The final sumo showdown between Porky and Grundy was fantastic, with Brazo shoving a ref in between them to get Los Brazos DQd, the ref getting a full stretcher job post-match to sell the Porky/Grundy loose meat sandwich. This match might have the most belly bumps I have ever seen, so of course it comes with the highest possible recommendation. 

MD: Great build here as they really milked a potential Porky vs Grundy encounter all the way to the tecera, with a couple of false starts along the way. The first was best as they teased it only to have the other Brazos rush in, kicking off the transitional beatdown. It wasn't just all Porky either as Grundy showed some decent physical charisma in his bumping and in building the anticipation. And of course, yes, he'd eat Porky's clothesline to knock him out, catch Porky's clothesline off the apron and get crushed against the barricade for good measure. The funniest bit of this one was when Porky ended up in some guy's lap in the first row. That shows protecting people with control of your body right there. This ended with one of the most satisfying bits of ref flattening you'll encounter. It was hardly definitive but I doubt anyone cared about that given the effort they made to stretcher him out.

JR: I don’t know if this is a personal failing or an issue with the narrative overall but I feel like far fewer words have been written about rudo Brazo de Plata, so I’m glad we can touch on it here. I think it’s instructive for how gifted a performer Porky truly was. He has great timing and great cut offs and when he does his normal spots minus the flourishes that made them so well loved otherwise, they stand out as tremendously impactful. He is a performer that can use his body in so many ways, or rather, can use his body in one way but change enough about it to make it feel so different. As he rushes forward, with good but rarely seen punches and headbutts and body checks, Super Porky feels inevitable.

Of course, as the match goes on, specifically in the third fall, we get to see the rudo comedy that one would expect from Porky, where he is essentially the incompetent henchman deployed by his slightly more competent brothers. Nothing here is exclamatory per say, or groundbreaking, but at the same time there is value in being able to play the hits and do so without any major faults. This match is fine, more of a Brazos exhibition than anything to talk about on behalf of their opponents, but at the same time it is nice to see Porky show off different shades and viewpoints rather than the standard fare we talk about most often.

Brazo De Plata/Negro Casas/TAKA Michinoku vs. El Hijo Del Gladiador/Gran Markus Jr./Satanico CMLL 5/30/97

MD: Fun trios. This was sort of a sweet spot where Porky was still imposing, to the point where he was, of course, funny, but could make someone like Hijo de Gladiador beg off when he was taking liberties. Within a decade, that would be over and he'd be there just for laughs. Great laughs, certainly, but here he could serve more roles within a match. He could also make like Shawn Michaels posing in the ropes while his partners were in the ring, so it was a balance. And when it was time for him to come in, the fans buzzed in a way that they didn't for Casas or Satanico, for instance. The end of the primera was fun stuff with Casas hitting one big DDT only to get jammed on the second, setting up Porky to come in and accidentally knock him onto Markus only to teeter him back to a sitting and pinning position and then squashing Hijo de Gladiador on a sunset flip attempt. They got the pin while shaking hands like gentlemen. Not much else to say here except for that TAKA (more Taka here than TAKA) was paired well with Satanico both in the primera and in the closing exchange. Satanico was pretty giving against him and looked as great as always; his big interaction with Porky was slapping him in the corner only to get crushed by a series of headbutts out of it as the crowd popped big. The final tecnico comeback was picture perfect Porky use too, as Hijo del Gladiador was trapped behind him in the corner so every time he got whacked by Satanico and Markus he was crushing HdG. Not only does that never get old, but here it was effective and pro wrestling believable in switching the momentum for that final time.

ER: Wow. I actually had no idea a match existed that had Satanico tearing it up on the mat against Taka Michinoku (I trust we do NOT have their singles match a couple weeks after this?), and it's only one of several very fun things happening here. Porky is really treated as the biggest name in the match, and he worked the match as someone who relished the role. This was always building to a big Porky/Markus chubby boys showdown, but all the pairings here worked really well. Gladiador and Casas gave us some quick exchanges before Satanico and Taka came in and outquicked them, and I loved all the rudos scrambling away from Porky whenever he came in. Gladiador hit a questionable strike on Casas and Porky runs in and just plasters him into the corner. We get a lot of classic Porky comedy mixed in with actual strong ringwork, so we get him bumping his butt into Gladiador's face when getting punched in the corner, but we also get an amazing sequence where Satanico starts punching and slapping Porky over and over in the corner. and I'm expecting Porky to start his crying routine. Instead, he had enough and charges out of the corner with a half dozen wicked headbutts that backs Satanico all the way across the ring. Porky hits a big dive into Markus (Markus had landed two very stiff punches earlier during Irish whip exchanges and I couldn't wait for Porky to flatten him) and Taka finishes things with his nice missile dropkick to Satanico's chest, then plants Satanico with the Michinoku Driver. Loved the vibe throughout this whole match, great mix of classic lucha and comedy and stiff strikes. 

JR: I must confess that I haven’t watched a ton of this 90s lucha since the pandemic, and returning to it here is like putting on an old pair of comfortable shoes. Seeing prime Casas and Satanico and remembering the things they did every night was so gratifying. It made me love wrestling for a moment.

But Porky! A revelation every time. People talk about Tajiri being a silent film star with his body language, but I see Porky do sequences here, with a stylized hip attack and a rope running sequence and I can’t help but think of Charlie Chaplin films, in which he is toeing the line between genius and accident. Porky does that here; getting kicked in the gut, but the momentum causes his ass to hit someone in the face, or flattening his own partner so hard that he bounces back up into a cover of his own.

Really, this is sort of the platonic use of porky in a match like this. Casas does the heavy lifting and holds everything together long enough for Taka to shine and change the pace and for Porky to have a few huge moments, including a tremendous plancha. This isn’t what I’d call an all time Porky match or anything, but I think it’s the blueprint of one.

Brazo De Plata/Brazo De Oro/Brazo Cibernetico vs. Villano 3/4/5 Acapulco 11/20/04

PAS: I think I have probably called 15 different lucha cage matches "the only good lucha cage match", but I am doing it again. Here is the only good lucha cage match and it is great one. You can put together any combination of wrestling's Hatfields and McCoys and they are going to try to murder each other, and this was an awesome combo. Nothing funny about Porky here, he was looking to put Villanos in the ground, and there was some big chop and punch exchanges and a fair amount of spilt blood. I liked the finish with V5 and Oro left in the cage only for V3 to break a bottle through the cage on Oro's head so his brother could escape. I am not sure how we didn't review this match when it arrived on the internet, but it is another chapter in this endless family feud. 

MD: Nothing is bad in a bubble. Lucha cage matches tend to be bad because they're a bunch of singles guys stuck together, a few of them maybe with programs or build, but with the primary goal of escaping in the midst of the chaos so that they're not one of the last two in there. Team vs team cage matches probably work better because there's much more hesitation for wrestlers to just scramble out at the first opportunity; to be doing so would be to leave their partners in danger. More so, there's generally a more visceral feud as was the case here. Finally, you have to factor in how hard it is for Porky to get up and out of the cage by this point, so they really had to do some damage to the Villanos to allow for that. Put that all together and you had a recipe for a good lucha cage match. 

I loved how this was filmed. You weren't going to see all the action but then that was impossible given the sight constraints and the size of some of the wrestlers and how thoroughly they were intent on beating and bloodying one another. Instead, it almost felt like you were on one of those rail rides at an amusement park, except for instead of the figurative horrors of It's a Small World, you were able to look left or right and see the real horror of a bloody Porky getting battered in the corner or Platino scrapping hard in a fist fight. It was less on the big memorable spots and more on the steady violence then, at least until the ring started to clear a bit. Thankfully, it all led to the most memorable moment of all, when Villano III smashed a beer bottle into the cage as Oro was trying to climb out, shattering it against the cage and sending glass right into Oro's face. Brilliant, unsafe spot, that was only lessened a little by the fact the Brazos weren't immediately on top of him to get vengeance.

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New Footage Friday: Dougie! Dundee & Barnes! Eddie! Jimmy Golden! Pre-Parka La Parka!

Bill Dundee/George Barnes vs. Tojo Yamamoto/Jimmy Golden CWA 5/20/75

PAS: This clip starts with the end of Barnes/Dundee vs. Tojo/Eddie Marlin, which is a pretty entertaining double juice brawl which ends with Dundee and Barnes grinding salt into Eddie Marlin's eyes and a wild post match brawl around the arena including a whole section of Dundee and Barnes crawling under the stage to escape. The Golden tag was titles versus Jimmy Golden's hair, and we get a really good chance to see Dundee and Barnes as a heel team. Barnes was a real bruiser with his punches landing with more thud, while Dundee's landed with more speed. Golden is a bunch of fun in this, he is so tall and his offense has this nifty awkwardness, that makes everything look less polished and more violent. That top rope dropkick he finishes with, looks like might have knocked Barnes all the way out of the ring.

MD: This has the last few minutes of Tojo/Marlin vs. Barnes/Dundee and the post match, the back half of Tojo/Golden vs. Barnes/Dundee, and a few minutes of Bob Armstrong vs. Stomper. It falls more on the "rare" side than completely new but it's nice to see it in one place. Any chance to see Barnes/Dundee in action is worth taking. Here they were big bumping (look at the armdrag over the top in the second match), big stooging (especially Dundee, who was quick with the object), wound targeting (Barnes, to the point where the announcing noted that he liked to target the head), heatseeking heels. We got glimpse of fiery hot tag Tojo, at bloody, struggling Marlin, and a bit more of that of plucky babyface Golden fighting from underneath and launching a mid-70s missile dropkick to win the belts. The best part of this was the post match of the first match though, where the faces trapped the heels on the stage and got chaotic revenge for the way the match went.

ER: I'm not too familiar with Barnes so this was a treat, as he gets more time to showcase than the others. He's like if Memphis Jeff Jarrett was a better cheating stooge. He throws hard punches that are a nice counterbalance to Dundee's whipping punches, and they both bump all around for big Tojo chops and Jimmy Golden is this mammoth clumsy athletic babyface. Dundee looks like a teen idol, like the bassist for Sweet or an Australian Paul Williams, and when he's paired with Golden it looks like Big John Studd vs. Sky Low Low. It's amazing. Barnes is a real great bastard, takes fun banana peel bumps, Golden shocks the hell out of me with a missile dropkick to win, the whole thing was an awesome glimpse at Dundee as part of a cutie pie Nightmares. "Bobby Sherman except asskicking cheaters." After the match you get to see how great 1975 Bob Armstrong was, before this match you got to see how great 1975 Eddie Marlin was, this was a wonderful 22 minutes of wrestling.


Chavo Guerrero/Eddie Guerrero vs. Los Invasor Del Norte Monterey 6/19/91

MD: This is a young LA Park as Invasor 1. As best as I can tell, he's the one with the yellow boots. That's the one that comes off as the star at least. There's a ton to like here. Chavo's cool and collected, smooth as can be. Eddy's a bit rougher around the edges but works like he has a chip on his shoulder. You get a real sense of Chavo having to basically babysit his younger brother who has something to prove which is one of those narratives that exists in a lot of fiction but not a whole lot in wrestling matches. Between Chavo's showmanship and the Invasors' willingness to stooge, the end result is a lot of fun. The first few minutes of the match is just them teasing lock ups but hugging instead (first the rudos and eventually the Guerreros to pay it off). When Eddy gets in, first ends up in a hold but Chavo sort of waves him off on a tag to get out of it. "You take care of this one yourself, kid." was the gist I got, which isn't something you usually see.

They were willing to try a lot of stuff, from back body drops over the ropes to a proto-STO to Eddy clobbering IY on the apron to a forearm, to those swinging arm drags that defy gravity but that look so cool you don't even care, with the first fall ending with duel Germans by the Guerreros and the second with real pretzel submissions by the Invasors. The beatdown that followed in the tercera was fine but I wish that Chavo had a bit more oomph on his save on Eddy that set up the comeback. It ended with a foul on Eddy and I would have definitely watched a hair vs mask match between Invasor I and Eddy on the way to Stuka eventually taking the Invasor mask.

PAS: Every bit of Eddie Guerrero footage we get is a true blessing, and he was electric here. His pendulum armdrags are incredible looking, and I loved the way baby LA Park takes them. All of the falls were classic lucha structure, Invasor's bump and stooge big for the initial babyface run, and are signficanlty rudoish during their beatdown. I liked the heat of the post match brawl, although I agree with Matt that it would have been better with more steam. This wasn't a lost classic or anything, but it was really cool to backfill the history of three all time greats (and whoever the other Invasor was)


Franz Schuhmman vs. Doug Gilbert CWA 12/20/97

MD: Totally committed Gilbert performance here, from the moment he comes in (to Born in the USA which while seemingly used for every American, feels particularly poignant here) with his jacket airbrushed with his own face to the brawling on the floor and the Bret-like roll up reversal out of nowhere he ate for the finish. In between, he basically did everything right. The chain wrestling to start was fun and believable even if it went maybe one minute too long given the length of the match. Gilbert got frustrated first and went dirty and his control segment was perfect, with him working the crowd and the ref and his opponent with a bunch of good stuff. The comeback was mainly brawling in the crowd with one big posting and then they went right into the finish. Good showing with Gilbert presenting himself, if not exactly like a star, then at least like a great, memorable character that you want to see again.

ER: What is Doug Gilbert doing wrestling one match in Germany? Don't care, because we got it! And this is one of the best Dougie performances I've seen, just going to Bremen for a one-off and coming off like a genuine star. He stalked that ring with an absurd amount of confidence, and it was cool how he adapted his style to be more technical opposite Schuhmann. He's still yelling at the crowd and being a dickhead about removing his jacket, but he doesn't spend all match just winging punches. Technical Dougie is fun as hell, and it's cool to see guys showing off the spectrum of styles they can work to adapt to a specific environment. I like wild eyed brawler Doug, but seeing him bend Schuhmann around with a cool Indian deathlock or a wrenched in figure 4, to bumping big to the floor and spiking Schuhmann with a great piledriver, it really felt like Gilbert wanted to show off everything he could do. He still gets to color in a lot of things with brawling, but him working a Schuhmann match was much more interesting to me than him working a Doug Gilbert match. As I said, he looked totally in control of that ring the entire match, just came off like a big deal. I don't think of Doug Gilbert as a guy who could go anywhere and have a professional 15 minute match in any style, but he looked like a pro's pro here.

PAS: This was a CWA vs. The World card which was completely crazy, along with Schuhmann vs. Dougie we get Osamu Nishimura and Tony St. Clair repping CWA vs. Rhino and Robbie Brookside repping WCW (Rhino was in WCW?), Marshall Duke vs. Savio Vega repping WWF, Chono shows up repping the NWO, and there is WCW's Ice Train vs. CWA Cannonball Grizzly, yes Ice Train vs. PN News, lets hope that shows up. Dougie was repping the USWA and he repped the fuck out of the USWA in this match. This was Bremen, Tennessee and Dougie broke out all of his great tricks, and even a couple we didn't know he had (that Indian deathlock was totally dope). Schuhmann was a bit of a passenger, but I loved his hard punches to Gilbert's forehead (I thought he was going to hardway him). Pretty much everything you would want from a hidden gem Doug Gilbert match.

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New Footage Friday: WARGAMES!! Fuchi! Chavo! Finlay! Brad!

MD: There's a real Black Saturday feel this week with the unofficial (because when can WWE ever be transparent about anything? What other industry acts like this?) notice of the end of the Hidden Gem releases. It's rough and we're left on the hook for all those potential 83 Georgia Omni shows or more full Crockett Cups or 90s Dark Matches or maybe, just maybe the 91 WCW Omni shows, etc. That's not going to stop us though. The community is strong. New or rare stuff keeps popping up: lucha, 90s and 00s indies, 80s and 90s Japan TV and handhelds, a treasure trove of German footage, and we know there's always the possibility, any week, of new PR or old French Catch. We have a backlog. We have veins to tap. We are here for you. These posts are up by Saturday morning most weeks. They almost always have links to matches that you almost certainly have not seen. We'll tell you if they're worth watching and we almost always pick matches that are. We're not going anywhere. Follow along, post your thoughts, tell a friend who might be lamenting the neutering of the Network footage. We'll keep going until the well dries up and there's plenty of water to go around for now.


Masa Fuchi vs. Chavo Guerrero AJPW 8/19/83

ER: This starts with a dynamite 3 minute real time package, Fuchi already waiting in the ring with gorgeous swooped hair and a blue track jacket unzipped below his sternum. Fuchi looked like a super cool high school P.E. coach, or an average cool southern California pharmacist. He waits stoically in the ring while Chavo lightly jogs out, mariachi jacket and pants, yellow bandana holding down hair almost as cool as Fuchi's, shotgun shells crossing his chest. And the match itself was cool and tough, about 70% of it on the mat and building to some heavy thuds at the finish. The mat work was snug and linear, nothing flashy, but nice headlock takeovers and headscissors escapes, boots scraped against faces to defend single legs, and cool things like Chavo losing a surfboard on the roll over so just opting for punching Fuchi in the neck a couple times. We get my favorite camera angle on the pescado, filmed across the ring so that when Chavo makes perfect connection the two of them just get swallowed up beyond the other side of the ring. The count out finish was one of the more clever count outs, with Chavo getting back on the apron after the pescado, but Chavo being on the apron gives Fuchi the leverage to drop him down to the floor with a back suplex.

MD: This had everything you'd want from a 1983 AJPW Juniors match. They really took it to the mat early with sharp, sweeping counters and nothing that felt given or even fed. That spiraled into a heel/face dynamic as Chavo went for the cheapshots first. Fuchi fired back angrily. They escalated into some bigger bombs, and it all ended with a dive and a fairly novel yet still definitive count out finish, with Chavo putting the icing on top by trying another cheapshot only to get run off. Just about ten minutes bell-to-bell.

PAS: Pretty basic match with a couple of cool flourishes. Loved those overhand smashes by Chavo, just thudding nasty looking shots. I always enjoy Fuchi grinding a guy down on the match and he really has some punishing moments. The finish was really great with Chavo hitting an alltime great Pescado, only to get snatched off the ring apron with a backdrop suplex on the floor for the count out. Shortish match, and it wasn't an all time great match for either guy, but it is fun sometimes to see the minor works too.

Fit Finlay vs. Brad Armstrong CWA 12/3/95

MD: We have a lot of Finlay to watch in this German footage, and that's the best problem in the world to have. For this week we had to decide between two or three different matches of his. This one felt really novel and was highlighted further by a really nice twitter post he made a few years ago talking about how great Brad was as a wrestler and a human being. This is about 40 minutes worth of video with entrances, a flag ceremony, and music during the round breaks. We get a bunch of rounds, five or so, and lots and lots of meaty, meaningful, illuminating wrestling, but it does cut off before the end.

The face/heel structure is not what you'd expect here. This is probably the most significant heel Brad footage we have, I think, especially unmasked Brad. As good as he was as a meat and potatoes babyface, you always hear from wrestlers that his personality was larger than life and how it didn't transfer into the ring. Just because of who he was and his position within his family, he wasn't going to have the sort of chances to be a heel that Brian or Steve might have, but you get the sense he would have shined a lot brighter in that role and could have easily been a guy on the US title level, despite not being the biggest guy. Here, he realized the way the crowd was leaning early on and he went mean and pissy and didn't look back. He was quick to hit cheapshots, to rile the crowd, to argue with the ref, to have his second (Kauroff?) pull open the ropes so Finlay could bump through, and to feed for Fit.

Finlay was a badass babyface here, the sort of guy who would take a cheapshot, fire back, and then just dare the heel to come after him. He had a real, unmistakable connection to the crowd, one that he managed without pandering and without much changing who he was. At times, it actually hurt the match a little. There were moments where they could have prolonged his revenge on Brad thanks to the round breaks to get a higher payoff. and he stormed out of the ring to give him a beating instead. On the other hand, Finlay actively hulking up towards the end of the footage was both surreal and thoroughly satisfying. You'd expect that out of the way he continuously dismantled Brad's arm with the world's meanest armbar, sure, but not with an outright hulk up.

I wasn't as upset about the lack of a finish as I might have been otherwise because we did get so much action here and because you had a sense the direction everything was headed after that last comeback.

ER: Bruce Springsteen should go into the Pro Wrestling HOF just for the vast amount of wrestlers who have used Born in the USA as their entrance theme because they were the American wrestler in the match. And I thought the face/heel alignments were screwy as hell here, and didn't give me much sense at all of what heel Brad would look like. Outside of some moments in the first two rounds, most of this was Finlay clearly being the heel and being cheered anyway because he's Fit Finlay in Germany. But I really didn't care about face/heel dynamics because the work was simple, tough, and engaging the whole way through. We don't get a finish and there's a clip where I'm unsure how much we missed, but the runtime on this is long so we get a lot of bang for the buck. There were parts of this where I felt Brad was working more stiff than I've seen, but while Brad's work was obviously tight it was mostly Finlay selling like he was seeing stars every single time Brad dished out an elbow to the temple. Finlay is my favorite salesman in wrestling history, and every time he took a shot he would be stumbling, whipping his head back, holding his eye, feeling around for his opponent, falling into the ropes for support, everything he could do to make Armstrong look like a lethal weapon. Brad throws a snapmare the way they're supposed to be thrown and Finlay takes a snapmare bump the way someone is supposed to take a snapmare, and I love how it lead to Finlay finally refusing to go over, stopping Brad's forward momentum and dropping him with a jawbreaker.

Finlay is such a tremendous post bell asshole, just getting in every shot he can every time a round ended. I loved Finlay just pounding away at Brad on the floor, where you can here someone say "Don't do it, Finlay". Finlay takes a tremendous bump through the middle rope to the floor when Brad's second pulls the rope, and it's one of a zillion spots that Finlay clearly works out the physics on. There are tons of those spots in wrestling where a wrestler does Action A which leads to his opponent doing Action E, except most of the time we don't see anything that looks like attention being paid to B, C, or D. A guy hitting a tope but getting stopped with a chairshot will almost always look like a guy just running into a chair, because it's extremely difficult and dangerous to commit to a dive that is ending with you taking a chair to the face and falling painfully to the floor. Finlay is great enough to have a reason to run into the ropes, and then actually look like he was 100% committed to hitting that middle rope before it wasn't where it typically is. Finlay does all of the math on every one of his spots, making things that miss and WHY they miss just as important. Finlay got the most out of taking Brad's offense, and when he fights back it obviously delivers. Finlay throws a short left lariat that is so perfect that I wonder why Finlay didn't use a lariat as a finish. His armbar was fantastic even though Finlay isn't a guy I saw routinely work armbars, but the way he gleefully works to extend Brad's arm is fantastic, as is the way Brad sells it between rounds while I Was Made For Loving You jams over the PA. Some of Armstrong's best work in this match was done between rounds, like pleading to the ref for more time because of Finlay wrecking his arm after the bell. For all we know there's another 15 minutes of this match, but right here we got more total time with these two than all their other singles matches combined, and that's a special thing.

PAS: I would not have expected to see Brad Armstrong of all people step into a Finlay match and match Finlay shot for shot. Where the hell was violent asskicker Brad Armstrong for all of these years. Finlay of course is a master, his crazy bump to the floor was Jerry Estrada level insane, and I imagine a lot of the reason Brad Armstrong felt like Johnny Valentine was Finlay's selling. All of the armbar stuff was perfection, brutal violent bursar sack popping arm mangling, which Armstrong sells great. Cage match has this going to round 10, so we miss some real parts of the finish, but man alive what a treat to get what we get.


Devil's Rejects (Andrew Alexander/Tank/Rufus Black/Se7en) vs. Team Empire (Drew Delight/Rush/Ben Thrasher/Chunky Dragon) EWE 3/1/12

PAS: A music video for this match got uploaded on youtube a couple of days after it happened and I commented on the video asking them to release it in full. Seven plus years later it shows up!! Devil's Reject's Wargames are some of the coolest stuff that happened this century, and hardly anyone has seen them. This isn't at the level of the all time classics in 2006 and 2007 (and Tank was the only constant besides Rev. Dan Wilson) , but it wasn't a huge step below. The Alexander and Drew Delight opening five minutes is awesome, heated brawling, great punches and and some big cage bumps. Tank comes in and starts carving, and there is a nasty spot where Ben Thrasher gets the spike from him and drives it into his arm. Se7en is a huge guy and really good at menace, I am not sure why he never got a bigger role somewhere. The finish is crowd pleasing, although a bit lacking in drama. The babyfaces just take control, and Chunky Dragon lays into Alexander with knife edge chops and a pectoral claw until he gave up. Wargames is a great wrestling formula, all you kneed is some good brawlers willing to bleed, and that is what this delivered.

MD: Very good War Games. I liked the idea of Alexander cutting a promo to begin. It set the mood and was a good use of having the first guy in. It feels like the sort of thing CM Punk might do to make a sanitized WWE War Games work better. Honestly, Alexander was the highlight in this whole thing for me. I'm not sure how I'd feel about him in a normal match but he was a great receptacle for Delight's great punches, stooged and bumped around the ring, even late into the match, and then served as the big end center point where he lasted long enough to gain sympathy but finally surrendered in the face of little enough escalation (but an absolute sense of hopelessness) that you didn't feel TOO bad for him. They handled the momentum shifts well, balancing the new faces coming in and the fatigue/numbers game. I think this would have been better with a second ring as nothing really stood out once everyone was in. I was of two minds on some of the last quarter. They worked one big set piece with the figure-fours and the bat and while it was a little silly for a War Games match, it stood out and was memorable. It was hard to keep track of the brawling in the single ring and no single final transition stood out, but I kind of like how the babyfaces just slowly won the brawling war of attrition.

ER: I don't have a ton to add (though it feels like when I type that I then end up writing two full paragraphs), only that this felt like a genuine article WarGames, and that goes a long way in making me love a WarGames. This was not as great as earlier Devil's Rejects WarGames, but that is an insanely unfair comparison. If these were just 8 guys we'd never heard of and not a stable involved in two classic WarGames, this match would come off even better. Having watched the WWE WarGames within the month and now this one, though? There's no argument which way is better. I came away super impressed with Andrew Alexander, a great front to back WarGames performance that mostly required him to take a beating and be a wobbly kneed clown for Empire, and he did it magnificently. Drew Delight was throwing these great hamfists at his head, big round closed fists that were thrown with no style, just swung right at Alexander's forehead. The order of participants was staggered well, Tank coming in 2nd as a big wrecking ball was great, and even better because he was a wrecking ball with a spike. Tank threw a couple shots with the spike that made me jump, and I love how the inclusion of a spike has been so important to WarGames: You know that bringing a spike into WarGames will mean that your team will be eating a tong of spike, and I dig when a WarGames starts getting deeply into that torture. Everyone filled their roles nicely, bunch of big guys punching and bleeding a ton - and really what more is there? - and I loved Chunky Dragon as the final man. I've never heard of Chunky Dragon, and I assume I'll never see another Chunky Dragon match, but he was such a good fired up babyface tearing into the ring. He had real Michael McAllister energy to him, dug his big crossbody, loved all his hard chops. The finish doesn't necessarily peak anything, but I liked the burn at the end, of Alexander being held prone and trying to hold out as long as possible while getting punched and chopped, and finally accepting that nobody was coming to his rescue. When you hear your local indy is running a WarGames match, this is the level of quality you hope for.

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New Footage Friday: Andre, Heel Tito, Funk, Baron, Hara, Jericho, Bestia Salvaje

Terry Funk/Ashura Hara vs. Baron Von Raschke/Killer Karl Krupp AJPW 12/12/81

ER: This was an okay tag made up of some doppelgangers. Hara seems like he's trying to look like Funk with their matching trunks and matching curls, Baron and Krupp look like relatives, and they have an okayish match that the crowd was rabid for the whole way through. Baron is always so weird to me, as he's a legit athlete who rarely moves with any kind of athleticism, and this is cool because it's one of the very few times he ever was up against Terry. Seeing a stumbly goose stepper going up against Terry's stumbly punch drunk style brings some joy, and there's a fun haymaker blowout that ends with both of them comically flopping to the mat. There were plenty of clawholds, Krupp throws some nice knees, Krupp takes a big bump over the top to the floor (where we see a ringside area with no guardrails, which is intriguing), Terry hits a nice piledriver as the major highspot of the match, and again the fans are into it the whole time, rabidly. But I've seen tons of Funk matches against dodgy opponents that I enjoyed more than this.

MD: This never quite got to where I wanted it, but it was interesting for a few reasons. First, I love watching Funk, maybe the best seller ever, sell one of the coolest visual tools in 70s-80s wrestling in the claw. It makes me want to see a whole bunch of Funk vs Spoiler and Funk vs Mulligan matches that probably happened and we just don't have. Second, him stooging against the Baron is one of those match-ups I never realized I wanted. Funk would have fit in very well in mid-80s AWA. Third, Krupp is a guy I've always sort of written off but between the knees and the hip toss bumping, he was pretty spry here. Any new Funk performance is worth watching. Any unique Funk match-up is worth watching. I'm glad there's just more to discover.

Andre The Giant/Chavo Guerrero/Tito Santana vs. Willem Ruska/Tatsumi Fujinami/Riki Choshu NJPW 5/16/80

ER: I was drawn to this by the allure of Heel Tito - something I have never seen - but this was much more Heel By Default Tito in the background of a superstar Andre show. We got one little stretch of Tito acting as an honorary Guerrero brother helping Chavo take apart Riki's leg, but Tito really is the 5th or 6th banana of this one. Really, everybody was the 5th or 6th banana, because Andre was all kinds of bananas. Andre is fast and aggressive and takes a ton of risks, and an Andre who will run at you and throw his entire body towards you is downright horrifying. Look at the enthusiasm as he misses a big splash...but then outdoes himself by climbing up the turnbuckles from the apron, all the way up and over to the middle buckle, to miss another splash. Did he really almost slip and fall off the turnbuckles backwards to the floor!? Did he add that in the same way a tightrope walker does a couple of slips just for show? Or did a gigantic man almost plunge to the floor with no parachute? Check out Andre setting up being trapped in the ropes, and look how far into the ring he was when he threw himself backwards full speed to get caught. He is 40% of the way into the ring, takes a couple of dropkicks, and flies backward so fast that I fully expected the ropes to completely snap. Imagine the trust he must have had in that ring crew! And my god look at that Rockette kick that he flat out stuck when attacked in the ropes! He sticks that leg as high as I've seen him and it just gets buried. Our tecnicos acted like cavemen to Andre's wooly mammoth, taking cover when he stormed around the ring and jumping on him all at once the second he showed any weakness, although the Fujinami double leg takedown to start was spectacular. I loved Chavo attacking Riki's knee, the spot where he pole vaulted with his leg and seemed to float was my favorite non-Andre spot of the match. But here's Andre with his cheat code, the ability to end the match whenever he wants, deciding enough is enough, throws a lifeless Chavo into the ring from the floor, wasting Fujinami with an spine rearranging atomic drop and treating Ruska like a child's backpack. I think I only want to write about Andre the Giant.

MD: So, as you guys must know by now, a lot of the footage we've watched over the last year is because people have navigated Japanese ebay successfully. This was on a NJPW 1980 TV set and if you want to see more, go head over to PWO and find my pal PeteF3. We'll get to some of that stuff eventually (like some cool Spoiler matches and maybe the best look at Keith Hart being really good we've ever had), but not for a bit, so don't wait for us. The version I was working off of didn't transfer well, thus the four parts and audio problems, but the disc itself is better. I'm just not all that great at transferring things. You get the gist of everything here though (we miss one Chavo leap into the ring move that I wish we had) and hey, it just gives you kids a sense of what tape trading was like thirty years ago, right? This is something that everyone needs to see though.

Yes, there's an appeal to heel Tito, the legwork towards the end (which was really cool from all three foreigners), him eating the fall as Andre's drawn away with Hansen, the quick tags with Chavo, some of his feeding, the flying forearm that was more of a sledge, but this gets dwarfed by the amazing Andre performance. The first chunk of the match is pure Andre as Fezzik, or maybe the world's best Colossal Connection Andre performance. He gets swarmed and shrugs people off. He demands people get down off the top rope instead of jumping at him. One touch is death, but he's able to move so much better. This is heel Andre, in a tag setting, with partners he cherishes (which was always part of Heenan family Andre), but with him fully dynamic. As the match goes on, though, he's just all over the place. He misses two splashes, one off the second rope. He hits two suplexes, the biggest suplexes in history. There's a pile driver! Throughout this, the other team is bouncing off of him and trying everything they can. I love Ruska constantly badgering Andre and then running away from him as he gets furious and charges in like this was some sort of old cartoon. This is all Andre, right down to the finish where he chucks Chavo (who just ate a dive) back into the ring and lets Ruska bounce off of him from the apron, ensuring the count out by being a one-man wall. Even with the slight technical issues, there's nothing in the world I'd rather watch than stuff like this.

PAS: This was the uncut Fentanyl Andre, one of the purest examples of what makes him an all time great. He was both totally out of control and totally in control. The spot where he almost falls off the top rope (where he would kill several members of audience I imagine) only to steady himself, only to empty pool smash into the mat, fucking perfection. I also dug how much he seemed to be into his role as the monstrous Guerrero that Gory kept in the basement. There is a great spot where he is giving double fives to his partners, and Choshu comes over and dropkicks him. Andre turns around with such fury "MOTHERFUCKER I WAS DAPPING UP MY HOMIES, I AM GOING TO FUCK YOU UP." Loved the heels losing the fall because of Hansen only for Andre to clean out the faces and tie it up. Even as the show was going off the air, he was celebrating with Chavo and Tito by carrying them around the ring. What a fucking legend.

Chris Jericho/Crazy Boy/Falcon de Oro vs. Bestia Salvaje/Poison/Principe Joel Compton Lucha 3/1/96

MD: There was a lot to like here. When I come into these things (we'll say a lucha match in an alien setting, only being familiar with half the guys) I tend to look for a few things, first and foremost, the framework for how to watch a match: how are the opening pairings? Where are the momentum shifts? Are the transitions interesting? How much effort do they put into the beatdown? Do they sufficiently ramp up expectations for the comeback? How's the moment of comeback? Where do they go from there? What's the finish? Specifics like the quality of matwork or whether or not there's a central rivalry in the match or coordinated tandem offense and crowd control in the beatdown or if there's an interesting dive train or what sort of crowd or wrestler-to-wrestler interaction are in there? All of that then fits in.

This hit a lot of those marks. The opening exchanges up to the tecnico primera win were all good. Great energy from the tecnicos. This was really good use of 96 Jericho: fiery, enthusiastic, throwing himself into everything, getting triple teamed and trying to fight back, game enough in his exchanges. I was honestly amazed that Falcon de Oro was able to hit something of the stuff that he did given his body type. The transition in the segunda was great, as it played up the Jericho vs Bestia central story and had the rudos act particularly despicable. That helped ramp up pressure for the eventual comeback, which was spirited, with fun dives and a nice bit of satisfaction snatched away as Jericho couldn't get his revenge. Presumably that set up another match, though with the really fun late run in, who knows?

PAS: This was house show HH trios match which hit all of the expected beats, but had enough cool wrinkles and great performances to push it up a level. Bestia is one of the greatest all time swarming heels, kind of like a lucha Buzz Sawyer. He really pushes the pace when he is in there with Jericho, and Jericho is game and willing to go there with him. All of your So-Cal regulars looked really good too, with Falcon De Oro being a really fun Super Astro style tubby flyer. They clearly all worked with each other a bunch and their primera caida exchanges were all super crisp. Principe Joel is Bestia's brother and he was very much in the spirit of the family, working just a little stiffer then you might expect. He apparently had (or has?) a wrestling school in Colorado, and I am guessing trained a bunch of local luchadores here in Denver (Luchawiki is the best). I liked the finish with the rudos going overboard until Misterioso (maybe, not super familiar with the booking of mid 90s Compton lucha) runs in and we get a nifty post match.

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New Footage Friday: Thesz, Valentines Jr. and Sr., Flair, All the Guerreros, Kikuchi, Slinger

Lou Thesz vs. Johnny Valentine Florida 9/1/73

MD: The Thesz/Valentine match had some frustrating cuts. We basically lose any time Valentine gets over on Thesz. What we do have here is pretty great though. It feels like a completely different beast to wrestling we have today. There are little things like how Thesz controls the center of the ring and Valentine has to work around him, the way that space and distance is used, the sheer effort in Valentine just trying to press Thesz' head down. Some of it is timeless and universal too, with Thesz getting fed up and starting to unload with the forearms, for instance. The headlock takeover counter to the bodyslam would be striking in a match now. Just a really good finishing sequence. Here's a testament to this thing: We only get seven or eight minutes but when they shifted to the up-close alternate angle, I knew exactly what spots/moments I was looking at, and in a world of flimsy HD, it's amazing just how good and legitimate this stuff looked close up.

PAS: I have a hard time watching and rating clipped up matches, feels like judging a movie based on the extended Red Band trailer. The highlights in this match were pretty choice though. Johnny Valentine is the best ever at making simple things look awesome, there is an extended armbar where he just shoves Thesz's neck to his chest, he feels like he is going to pop it off like spare button. I loved Thesz unloading in the corner with a flurry and Valentine's droopy selling, Valentine going glassy eyed really put it over the top. I was really hoping for a whole match, Valentine is an all timer, and we have very little of him, still I'll take what I can.

Ric Flair vs. Greg Valentine Mid-Atlantic 7/17/80

MD: The Flair/Valentine match was all cuts. You'd get one every few seconds. That said, you were sort of able to cobble together the narrative of the match. We don't have a ton of Flair from the summer of 80, but he was 31 (which, to put in perspective, is how old Roman Reigns was two years ago) and he was electric. The initial armwork shine was just over the top great. (The story behind this feud was Valentine coming back to the territory in late 79 to find his partner, Flair, as a face now. They had an altercation and some matches, and eventually Valentine says he wants to change his ways and work with Flair. Of course he turns on him in a cage tag match). There was blood. There was the two of them just mauling each other with shots. There was a pretty good finish. You can't judge something like this on merit considering how clipped it is, but you can tell instantly just how great a babyface Flair was that year. Hopefully they have more. Hopefully they have something complete.

Hector Guerrero/Mando Guerrero/Chavo Guerrero/Eddie Guerrero vs. Negra/Crazy 33/Ari Romero/Bonzi WIN 11/26/89

ER: This is a fun 10 minute Guerrero Familia showcase, similar to the 4 Horsemen showing up on the Pro to take on Bobby Walker, JL, and Men at Work. This actually works out to be mostly a Mando showcase, which is a fun twist, and I really liked his quick Indian deathlocks and fast work around an armbar, and he even got to be the one to save Hector (during the one moment the Guerreros weren't really in control) with nice babyface punches. The match is mostly pretty simple ring cut off stuff, some arm drags, some backdrops, fairly one-sided towards the Guerreros, but we build to a really great early tower of doom spot with every single person in the match getting stacked and climbing on top of each other like a big cheerleading routine finale, before everybody crashed to the mat with back bumps. Couldn't get a big sense of the non-Guerreros in this: Romero felt like a guy I'd want to see again, loved him stooge bumping to the floor and running down the aisle through the crowd to get away; Bonzi seemed like kind of a load, or like a not-nearly-as-good Phil Hickerson type who shows up in new masked gimmicks every other week; Crazy 33 felt like a Bestia Salvaje type professional, and there's probably a reason he was in for a lot of this.

MD: Sometimes we watch things because they're great. Sometimes we watch them because they're new and novel. Sometimes we watch them because we just have to. This is a little bit of all of that. Despite the size of the video, the match isn't all that long. The first half is a presentation of a plaque to Gory with all of his kids involved. Each one comes up to him in turn. It's heartfelt, special stuff. The match itself was fun. The rudos were game. Crazy 33 stood out enough as a stooging base that I'd like to see more of him. Mando shines in an environment like this, one where the good guys are meant to be triumphant and the rudos are meant to be clowned. The Guerreros work like a well-oiled machine. There's no real heat to this, just some moments where they rile young Eddy or get Hector in the corner for a minute. It all breaks apart at the end in a huddle in the corner, with Eddy coming out of it with a big electric chair drop off the second rope. Good, celebratory stuff.

PAS: Crazy 33 is Rocky Star who was in that cool mask match with Fuerza and Santo so it makes sense he is the standout rudo here. Eric really hit the nail on the head comparing this to a WCWSN semi-squash, but it is still super cool to see all the Guerreros together. I would have loved to see a little more of Chavo, but I am on record as enjoying watching Mando eat folks up. Eddie was a little unpolished but was an athletic marvel, so fast and explosive. Would really love to see these four against some real competition, but this was nifty.

Tsuyoshi Kikuchi vs. Richard Slinger AJPW 3/3/91 

ER: For a guy who is the ultimate babyface in trios matches, Kikuchi certainly takes every chance he gets to show what a prick he can be. This gets unprofessional really quick, but never verges into "somebody stop the damn match something is wrong!" territory. Both guys appear to be working together, while also clearly beating the shit out of each other and taking liberties at any chance. Slinger starts with some simple light leg kicks to gauge distance...and then Kikuchi pounces in and starts unhinging Slinger's jaw with elbows. And from there that's what this match becomes, and it's incredible. Kikuchi clearly starts elbowing Slinger in the back of the head on the mat, and Slinger doesn't look super cool with it, so Slinger starts picking his own shots; my favorite was when he was locking in an STF and "accidentally" kicked Kikuchi in the back of the head while swinging his leg over. And that STF. My god. Slinger bends Kikuchi back into the most demonic upward dog pose you've seen. The struggler is real in this motherfucker. Every elbow looks angry, every kick lands on a jaw, neither man can stand up off the mat without stepping hard onto the other's face....and yet this isn't some no selling dick contest. These two sell and bump for the other...while looking like they are trying to injure and sandbag each other. It's incredible. Kikuchi has to muscle Slinger through on a backdrop, really looking like Slinger just got as heavy as possible. I was expecting Kikuchi to turn around and kick his teeth in, but instead Kikuchi sells how difficult it was to muscle him over by falling into the ropes. We get THEE GREATEST backslide exchange in pro wrestling history, looking like the only instance of two guys trying to shoot backslide each other. The struggle over this backslide is the stuff of legend, the most struggle during the most violent backslide skirmish you've ever seen. Both of my shoulders would have been dislocated if I were part of this exchange. Slinger hits a wicked spinkick under Kikuchi's chin, Kikuchi locks in a super vertical crab to snap Slinger's back, and you KNOW the chickenwing that ends the match gets held WELL after the tap out. This match would stand out as notably violent on any card in history, a truly incredible find. GOD BLESS CAMCORDER OWNERS WHO ALSO PRESERVED THEIR FOOTAGE.

MD: This is a good problem to have, but the amount of AJPW footage we have to comb through is daunting. There are the endless six man tags with a lot of the same guys that you know will all be good, which add to the litany of these matches that we already have and that are part of the canon. Why do you go for one instead of the other, etc. Really, the only way to handle this is just to watch everything, but who has the time for that?

That said, this was a disc I wanted to look at because it was full of bonkers tag matches (main evented by yet another Mitsuharu Misawa, Toshiaki Kawada, & Kenta Kobashi vs. Jumbo Tsuruta, Akira Taue, & Masanobu Fuchi sort of match). The first match on the card was this though. I figured I'd start there since we just had fun with Slinger last week.

That's the thing with these. You never know when you're going to find something great. This is great.

Just from the get go, you have Kikuchi responding to a few Slinger low kicks by charging in with brutal forearms. Slinger's response was a roundhouse superkick out of nowhere. It never lets up from there. They follow it up with gritty, competitive yet somehow still tricked out grappling, bookended and enhanced by the two of them just beating the crap out of one another or Kikuchi grinding Slinger's face to dust with his boot (something that Slinger reversed into a Dragon Sleeper/STF, by the way). Later on Kikuchi moves out of a grounded armbar into a front facelock, respositioning Slinger to lift him up into this big twisting slam, and following it up with a deep crab/half crab. A minute later they'll work organically into Slinger hitting a floatover suplex or taking Kikiuchi's head off with a spinning wheel kick. It never really feels like two guys just hitting spots though. Everything has weight and impact and time to settle in. Everything's earned and takes a couple of extra shots or finding an opening for them to hit it. This is even true for the finish (Slinger throwing kicks, Kikuchi catching a foot, Slinger going for the enziguri, Kikuchi ducking it, both guys being down for a moment, and then Kikuchi taking advantage of the positioning for a Tazmission of all things). It's just that sort of match.

PAS: This was a blast, Slinger who was Terry Gordy's cousin seemed to only have a career in Japan (are there any TN indy Slinger matches? Someone ask Beau James or Kris Zellner) and he is fully qualified to have a banger with a guy like Kikuchi. Kikuchi was half himself, half his arch enemy Fuchi in this match,  he gets tortured with some sort of violent reverse STF, which some indy guy needs to steal ASAP, and also lies in a boston crab that looked like it would snap Slingers back. I liked how both guys would fire back, refusing ever to get washed away with the wave of the other guys offense. That backslide was as awesome as Eric described it as and basically the whole match had that sense of real struggle.

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You Let Me Down, But Chavo Never Once Did

Chavo Guerrero v. Gino Hernandez NWA Houston 5/22/81

We don't typically do obituary posts, but Chavo Guerrero is a Segunda Caida favorite and a guy with a bunch of under the radar classics. This is a 2/3 falls Jr. title match courtesy of the invaluable NWA Classics service. The match is reffed by Lou Thez, but is worked differently then most Thez reffed matches. Match starts with Gino beating the everloving shit out of a fan, it was hard for any match to live up to the violence of that fan beatdown. We get some Thez approved mat work in the first fall including some very cool stretching by Chavo, he wasn't fancy like a Negro Navarro or Johnny Saint, but his maestro chops were more about making simpler things look really painful. Match breaks down into a hell of a back and forth fight in the third fall with both guys exchanging big shots. Chavo has really great looking punches as does Gino, and both guys are amazing at selling punches, both guys would make weak shots look strong, and they make the strong shots look devastating. Chavo gets the belt with an OG Guerrero cheat to win tight pull, only to have Gino smash him with a belt leading to the crowd going apeshit as Thez clears the ring. Great match, and an awesome example of what Chavo could do as a triumphant babyface, this is how I imagine his Olympic wars with Roddy Piper must have looked like.

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Lucha Underground Season 3 Episode 4: Brothers in Broken Arms

MD: I am ahead of Eric now, which is frustrating because I can't just crib off of his notes. That's not to say that Lucha Underground is work, but you definitely have to be in the right mindset. This started with Sexy Star and Dario talking. I love that they call atomicos matches atomicos matches. Why doesn't CMLL ever run them? Why didn't they run Ultimo Guerrero, Gran Guerrero, Euforia, and Niebla Roja vs Rush, Sombra, Mascara, and Marco (or Naito) when they could have? I'm really not looking forward to Mundo vs Star one-on-one when that happens, but at least they're building to it.

ER: FYI you guys, Sexy Star was really bad in that opening segment. Just thought you'd be interested in knowing that. Her line reading always sounds like she's phonetically screaming English, as if she's not actually saying real words, just jaggedly combining sounds together to form objects similar to words. Her kick to the locker door didn't even convince the locker that it had been kicked.

1. Sinestro de la Muerte vs. Prince Puma

MD: Way, way, way too competitive. Apparently Dr. Wagner, Jr. is the only one who can properly squash anyone anymore. This match was supposed to be Puma looking strong against Muertes' crony, to the point that Catrina was going to kill him. I'm not saying it should have been a total squash and it did get across the idea that Puma was more intense now, but Sinestro took way too much of this. Striker's commentary was too staged too, as if he was expecting Mil to run in and was just waiting for the cue. Puma doing the flatliner was cute and I hope it leads to Mil doing the 630.

ER: Decent enough WorldWide squash to pace us until Puma's match with Muertes, until it suddenly didn't turn into a squash and Sinestro got a lot of offense. I thought the opening punch exchange was awful, looked like two guys having a hoedown. Once we got into move trading I dug it, both guys worked fast sequences well and Sinestro was adept at taking Puma's offense. I liked this missed interference spot by Muertes, leading to Puma finishing off Sinestro while glaring Muertes down. The wild dive after the match was great.

MD: Dario's "I'm kind of a big deal" nameplate is awesome. I wonder what the story behind it is. I bet that it's Mascarita Sagrada's secret santa present for him. Passive aggressive Castro is better than scared Mr. Cisco acting. Dario using Pentagon Dark like Teddy Long would use the Undertaker was good too.

2. Cortez Castro vs. Pentagon Dark

MD: So Puma can't get a squash against the guy that they're killing off (literally), but Castro gets completely squashed by Pentagon despite needing to be a quasi-protagonist in all of this police drama stuff. Beats me, though I'll admit Pentagon needed to look strong. I would have flipped the layout of those first two matches.

ER: See, they CAN do squash matches correctly! Here's the obligatory Phil throwback spot where he points out them running the same angle and same match on the same show. I have no idea how I'm supposed to feel about Castro at this point. Am I supposed to be rooting for him? They're not giving me a whole lot to root for. Also noticed JR Kratos just sitting in the crowd, not really reacting to Pentagon's promo. But I loved one guy's reaction to Pentagon saying that in the ring, he doesn't even respect his own mother. Some guy just had total disbelief on his face.

3. Aerostar, Fenix, Drago & Sexy Star vs. Johnny Mundo, Jack Evans, PJ Black & Taya

MD: The best multi-man lucha tags all have a central storyline running through them. Here, it should be to set up Sexy Star and Mundo? That's not promising and frankly, it barely matters because they don't focus on it anyway. They started with Taya and Star instead, with Taya having her share of chants. That's not too surprising given how thoroughly into her character she is. All of the beginning of this was goofy. At one point PJ Black was fighting against superior tecnico odds which is generally not something your heel should be doing? Then they had some heat on Sexy Star, her getting the hot tag to show up Mundo, a fun comeback with Aerostar looking awesome on dives (again), and Mundo making sure Sexy Star lost in the end, continuing their program. I'm not sure where Eric is going to fall on this, but it felt like a mess to me. The destination forwarded the program but the journey was all over the place.

ER: I thought this was fine. The guys I expected to look good looked good, and the people I expected to stink, stunk. Sexy Star looked terrible throughout. This was not unexpected. I was hoping her interactions would be limited to one or two opponents, because she has a knack of making everybody else look stupid by waiting around for her. So, we had a lot of guys waiting for her to get in the right position, or wait far too long in one place for her to finally do a move. The match needed more Fenix, my personal favorite in the group. And when he was in I thought he looked awesome. Evans made me laugh with his neverending string of handsprings leading to a tag out. Even Striker made me laugh right after when he said "Some of Jack's best ring work". Mundo and Black rotated between throwing out something real good, and something overly rehearsed. At one point Black threw a kick about 2 feet to the right of Drago, clearly because it was just meant to be swept aside. I hate when those kind of cracks show. Drago had some nice glue moments, coming in low and fast on dropdowns and keeping a real snug and fast headscissors on Black. Aerostar always seems like he makes up flying moves as he goes and I love him for that. Sometimes they look a little dodgy, but it's worth it for the spectacular moments. So yeah, this was kind of a mess, but the mess all came from expected sources.

MD: I'll let Eric talk about soul stealing and broken necks (or let him not talk about it).

ER: I mean, this match was one of Sinestro's more dominant performances, so it's weird for them to so casually be done with him now. There have probably been 10 lousy Sinestro performances that lead to him not getting his neck broken, so it's weird they just now realized the last of their lightning babies was a dud. I'm unsure how much strength you can gain by stealing the soul of losers, but at least they had the decency to break his neck so he doesn't have to go through life not having convenience store doors open for him. It's possible Muertes will just trade it for some pogs anyway.

4. Dragon Azteca Jr. vs. Chavo Guerrero

MD: Azteca gets credit for selling the arms early on. People sure recover from Pentagons' broken arm treatment quickly so it was nice to see some lingering aftereffects. I'm always irrationally glad that Rey has his "Jr." back. Look, this was all fine and everyone played their respective roles well, but when the most memorable part of a match is Vampiro, on commentary, babbling on about haunted houses and Aztec warriors, then maybe there's something lacking in the match.

ER: I liked this more than Matt, mainly because I thought Chavo looked great. He's probably the most undeserving guy who gets dumped on by fans of the show, and I think he's mostly delivered throughout his LU run. This match may have failed if the goal was to make Azteca look like he actually deserves and has a shot against Pentagon, but at least it continued to confirm how good Chavo can be. All his mat stuff looked good, his clothesline out of the corner was great, really he was awesome at steamrolling Azteca. Again, not sure it's in their best interest to have Azteca steamrolled, but I didn't mind.

(neither of us mention Black Lotus and her ninjas)


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Lucha Underground Season 2 Episode 18: Enter the Mundo

1. Joey Ryan vs. Mascarita Sagrada

ER: For some reason I didn't notice the other week that Famous B now has suit cuffs that match Sagrada. That's great. The match was harmless. Sagrada's big tope was killer, and he took a tornado DDT like a man. They milked a couple of decent nearfalls. Harmless.

PAS: I liked the tie with the Mascarita colors and the phone number on it. I was also a fan of Ryans flower tights and boots, the print looked very lush like the kind of thing Rag and Bone would put on a bomber jacket and sell for $1100.

ER: We get a Taya introduction video. Taya, who debuted over two months ago and has been featured every week since. Okaaaaay. I do like the reintroduction of Cuerno, who now has Muertes in carbonite. Hopefully they just erase all the stupidity they put his character through, because a Muertes/Cuerno big match can be goooood.

2. Chavo Guerrero vs. Cage

ER: Good match. I was hoping for an actual match but expecting a Cage steamroll, so was pleasantly surprised by a competitive match, and probably the best Chavo has looked in awhile. Chavo gamely took some of Cage's nastiest slams (that whip snap powerbomb off a suplex reversal was sick), got launched on a monkey flip, and I liked the nice false finish when Cage hit a big falling lariat but Chavo landed with his leg draped over a rope. I wish Cage hadn't no sold Chavo's big rolling kick as I really love that move, but whatever, this was good. Cage vs. Matanza could be wild.

PAS: Yeah this was really good. I am long time Chavo fan, and he has been really misused in this fed. Glad to see him actually get a chance to stretch out a bit and show what he can do. That monkey flip bump was really breathtaking, and that near fall on the frog splash was pretty great. I kind of hope Chavo gets a Rey match in Season 3, as those guys have always worked great against each other.

ER: Oh brother that Castro/Ryan segment was terrible. This awkward and shitty fusion of their non-existant comedy chops and their non-existant acting chops. Cisco's "You guys were robbing Jefe and didn't tell me!?" line attempted to save things, but then the scriptwriting yanked a rug out from under him by have him say he's going to tell Dario on them. What the fuck are these actual cop sketches supposed to be? Are they supposed to be engaging as cop action? Humorous? Amusing in their purposeful winking? Because nothing about them works. I just want to know the intent. If we know the intent we can at least figure out if they're succeeding in ANYthing they're attempting to do. But I really want to know who's baby this storyline is.

PAS: Eric pretty much covered it, but this undercover cop storyline is one of the single dumbest most poorly put together gimmicks in wrestling history. This is as bad, if not worse, than the midget speedboat stuff or amnesiac Cactus Jack or Beaver Cleveage. LU gets a lot of passes from folks who like the cool shit they do, but this is a bag of flaming poop, it is a crumpled coffee stained paper pulled out of Ed Ferrerra's trash can. Too bad, I actually like Mr. Cisco too, he deserves better.

3. Jack Evans, PJ Black & Johnny Mundo vs. Prince Puma, Dragon Azteca Jr. & Rey Mysterio

ER: Often sloppy, but almost always ambitious, so I overall dug it. There was a whole lot of things pulled off that seemed fairly physically impossible, so when some things weren't pulled of clean it made it easier to forgive. Azteca had a nice showing and damn did Evans hurl himself around the ring perfectly into position for him. Loved Black's superkick to a handstanding Puma, and I have no clue how Rey and Mundo tumbled to the floor with Rey managing to stay on Mundo's shoulders. I mean that was just freakish. We get some wild dragon rana attempt and reversal, Mundo awesomely catching an Azteca tornado DDT, stopping the momentum and tossing him overhead into Puma, tons of cool stuff here. Finish is pretty overblown with tons of kicks to the balls with a downed ref, Mundo celebrating a decade of overshooting his finisher, and a kind of anticlimactic finish considering some of the moves that landed throughout the match. Overall fun, but still feels like some of these teams have been underperforming and not churning out the classic trios matches I was hoping for and maybe unfairly expecting this season. So far none of the trios matches this season have come close to touching the big Crew vs. Ivelisse/Havoc/Angelico match from a year ago, even though most of these guys are better than most of those guys. I won't be surprised when we eventually get an all out banger, I just want it now!

PAS: Yeah this was a match which had some very cool moments but never got to that next level. We could have used more Rey and less Azteca. Rey was awesome for the moments he was in, that spot where he stuck on Mundo's shoulders was rewind worthy, but he only had a couple of moments, more of a cameo then anything else. Azteca had some cool stuff, but also was a step off in a lot of the things he tried, he is obviously the greenest guy in the match and it showed. Finish was really overblown and took away from the coolness of the match. Good but I think I liked Chavo v. Cage more.

ER: Good wrestling this week, which automatically makes it an easy step up from last week's trip to blandsville. This cop stuff is alarmingly terrible, though. Somebody please explain to me what tone they're going for. Also, reallllly excited for Cage/Matanza. I'm sure Cobb and Cage have matched up before, but never like this, in this environment. It should rule.


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Lucha Underground Season 2 Episode 17: Crime & Punishment

ER: Having Dario mug in the ring during the Aztec medallion intros was a somewhat out of character but funny bit. "Aerostar!! Welcome back to Earth!" Making fun of the interchangeability of the Disciples of Death, egging on Chavo and Cage may have been the best ("Fight it out guys, fight it out!!"). Again, Dario out there riffing and cracking jokes was a little off considering the punishment he and his brother went through last week in Graver Consequences, but the guy is funny and charismatic so it's fun to see him riff.

1. Argenis vs. Daga vs. Kobra Moon vs. Mascarita Sagrada

ER: This was perfectly acceptable, if flawed. Everybody did something I liked and something I disliked. Daga hit a nice shoulderblock and a really great rolling flip dive to the floor, but then took ages to set up a silly double submission on Argenis and Moon. Moon would throw a great dropkick but then do some clunky stalling (though these may be character directives that I just don't understand yet or aren't being communicated well), Sagrada took a fine beating, with him getting tossed and spun neck first into the bottom rope, and Argenis doing a Backlund lift into a driver on him looked sick. So yeah, some fun stuff, some problems. This was definitely a 4 way match between some low level guys.

2. Marty the Moth Martinez vs. Killshot

ER: Martinez deserves a lot of credit in this one for taking some of Killshot's stupid indy offense and making his other stuff look good. But damn there are so many guys in this fed I'd rather see get 8-10 minute singles matches than Killshot. The way he boings and sproings out of offense makes stuff that should look really devastating just look fun and painless. He takes a nasty release German at one point, and an exploder into the buckles, and then just kinda bops around like he's covered in Flubber. He takes a curbstomp and makes it look like Boogaloo Shrimp perfecting a new breakin' move. Moth takes a ridiculous DVD on the apron and some sort of neck duck driver from Killshot, leans into all of his thigh slaps, takes a great spill off the apron after a sidekick, really tries to make Killshot look good. But they seem ointent on the Killshot hardsell this season, so I'm sure we'll get more of these "feature" matches with his athletic brand of bumbling.

3. Gift of the Gods: Texano vs. Joey Ryan vs. The Mack vs. Sinestro de la Muerte vs. Aerostar vs. Sexy Star vs. Chavo Guerrero

ER: These Gift of the Gods matches haven't been very good so far. 7 guys is too many. In a trios match you have a few guys waiting on the apron because they're not tagged in. In this match you have guys lying around selling or waiting on the floor because...they just don't want to win, I guess? Mack looked good in this, Aerostar had some cool moments (I mean, throw Aerostar in a match and he's going to do a couple cool things). His falling meteorite is a crazy awesome flying move, and I liked when he was rope running at one point he found a way to kick an opponent on the floor with both feet, while not missing a beat running. That's impressive. This whole match existed to set up the Cage/Chavo angle, which feels like a weirdly roundabout way to just get to a cage/Chavo match that was set up out of nowhere anyway. Let's take several weeks to have qualifying matches for entry into this match, to set up a match between a guy who was and a guy who wasn't supposed to be in this match.

ER: The Pentagon/Vampiro sadomasochism stuff is getting weirder and weirder. I like where it will eventually wind up, with an even more violent Pentagon emerging to take on Dario and Matanza. But this went on a bit too long.

ER: Pretty nothing show this week.  If you had to skip one, this wouldn't be a bad pick.

PAS: WILL DO!!!
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Lucha Underground Season 2 Episode 8: Life After Death

ER: Dammmmn Fenix and Catrina bring the sensuality, with tender arm caressing and neck touching and gentle tear wiping. I bought in. You can't fake upper arm caressing or waist touching. Shit's real.

1. Ivelisse, Angelico & Son of Havoc vs. Disciples of Death

ER: We get another major stipulation literally mentioned as an afterthought, as Melissa Santos does ring intros and as she's exiting the ring goes "Oh, the team of Ivelisse, Angelico and Son of Havoc have agreed to leave the temple forever if they lose." Oh. Okay! It immediately telegraphs the ending, although it would have been quite the hilarious boner if it hadn't. I mean, they hadn't wrestled on TV in a month, and I can't think of a more last minute way to announce a major stip like being gone FOREVER, so by doing that either you immediately reveal the result (which is what happened),  or you treat a major stip - again - like an afterthought. So stupidity aside, and it was stupid, the match was fun. Short and rather inconsequential, but fun. Disciples of Death are second only to Sexy Star in terms of Striker's commentary not ever matching up to anything we've ever seen. "This team is hate personified" "Don't be alarmed by their violence" This is a team who has beaten Pimpi teaming with a mini, lost to Puma/Pentagon without ever even having an advantage despite them being on the privileged side of a handicap, and then got handily beaten here. This is not a team anybody is scared of. Billy Zabka's skeleton gang looked far more menacing biking after Ralph Macchio. They aren't violent, they don't wrestle any bit out of the ordinary. They have never, ever looked threatening. Nothing at all about them is "the embodiment of pure evil". One of them did a really nasty stretch muffler on Ivelisse. That, I liked. Your tecnicos all looked good with Ivelisse standing out, as she has better facials than the other members of her team it's easier for her to make stuff more meaningful.

PAS: This was fine, the Ivelisse, Angelico, Havoc team have turned into a consistently entertaining act. Ivelisse is by far the best in ring female act in the fed and has been able to make the otherwise terrible mixed matches tolerable. The Disciples of Death are such goobers, a total zero. I like the idea of Muretes having a group of evil henchmen, but if you put jobbers like Ricky Mandel and Argenis under spooky masks you just have masked jobbers, and every time they wrestled they felt like that. I hope this is the end of this concept.

2. Bullrope Match: Chavo Guerrero vs. Texano

ER: This was a weird culmination of a pretty bad, very rushed feud. A few weeks ago Texano dominated a 3 on 1 handicap match and lost due to cheating. That kind of thing tends to lead to a cage match or something, but he's a whipmaster so for whatever reason it leads to a bullrope match. I guess that's his special match? They do a decent job, but this whole feud was dead out of the gates anyway, and a bullrope match doesn't tend to be a good visually violent match. I'm sure getting smacked with a thick rope hurts like hell, but it's a violence that hurts more the next day than to the TV audience watching at home. Still, this had moments. Chavo was effective getting yanked around by the rope, off the top, splitting his uprights; Texano took a nice spill through the ringside chairs, and spills through ringside chairs have officially become their version of a NOAH rail ride or a WWE ring steps bump. I like it. The chairs bump is the best of the three as you get tons of motion, like getting tossed into a swimming pool but you get rows of chairs rocking and sprawling. So yeah, okay enough match for what it was, and hopefully the feud is over. Texano has really been quite the muffled fart in LU so far.

PAS: I like Chavo, and I think he has had some nice character moments in this fed but he hasn't really delivered a great match, this was the closest to a good match, as there was some nice violence, but this could have used some blood or a bit more ferocity. I would have no problem if we never see Texano again.

ER: Muertes finally dispatches the Disciples of Death (at least two of them), flipping out and chucking them all around the locker room. I mean that's what happens when you summon a trio of jobbers from the netherrealm. You don't have Hogan recruit Joey Maggs and Frankie Lancaster to do his bidding.

3. Fenix vs. Mil Muertes

ER: Great great big match feel from the guy who has been probably the best big match worker of the last year plus. These guys both know how to read the room and that's important in a big match epic. It's not that far removed from just doing heatless spots in a questionable order. But this whole thing built and Fenix was really able to bring the fight to Muertes the Insatiable. Muertes would stomp him down and pound him through the mat but Fenix was so great in the struggle, so great at fighting back and surviving. Once masks started getting ripped you knew this shit was heating up. That's a thing we've seen a lot in actual lucha, but I don't believe that's a road they've traveled down in LU, as right when Mil started ripping into Fenix's mask it had an Oh Shit feel to it...and once Fenix started ripping Mil's mask it had an OHHH SHIIIIIIT feel to it. Once Muertes spears the shit out of Fenix off the apron things really start to feel real, and as they brawl through the crowd and the bloodied up Fenix is rubbing through people, Muertes just ups the ante by awesomely shoving Fenix into the crowd as he's running towards him on the rail. That was not what I was expecting. Just a bullying, tossed off shove right into the crowd. The fans help Fenix back, and the lunatic runs right back onto that rail, launching himself at the farthest point right into Muertes on the floor. Muertes gets pissed and back in we get nastiness like a DDT off the top rope and a vicious urunage. You haven't seen a urunage this awesome since grumpy old man Hiroshi Hase wrestled a trainee. But Fenix keeps fighting, and just when he's down that's when he sneaks in a superkick, or a rabbit punch, tricking Mil into punching a chair, just annoying Muertes with his mere survival. I was not actually seeing his victory coming. I was looking forward to a long Muertes reign, just a dominant monster on top of his throne. Fenix getting the win was a big surprise and a nice moment, but now I'm wondering what the angry godlord is going to do to get his title back. There's something special about not just an epic, but a main event epic, and this totally delivered.

PAS: This was a killer match, that is three great matches this pair of guys had in 2015. I am pretty sure Fenix got his mask ripped in Grave Consequences too, but Fenix tearing Muertes's mask and blooding him up was a great moment. Fenix is awesome at throwing in crazy highspots in ways that fit in perfectly,  there are a lot of guys in LU who do cool shit, no one makes it matter as much as him. Muertes is so great, he is maybe the best guy at working at vulnerable monster since Vader (Brock is great, but I think I would take Muertes over him.) Great overcoming the odds victory, which makes the goofy post match a little worse, they should have let the victory soak in a bit.

ER: They announce that Aztec Warfare is now for Fenix's just won title, and Fenix is now the #1 entrant, and Mil is now the #20 entrant. That kind of stuff is starting to feel way too overdone and "The Authority" when I'd rather just see Mil murder somebody. We'll see how that works, but this show was mostly a win, and you can argue with that main event it was a major win. And this show needed a win after the last few weeks.

PAS: I totally agree, that kind of stuff is very bush league heel authority figure stuff. This fed is at its best when it does its own thing, and there is no need to book like a tossed off RAW episode. This is the same instinct that brings in guys like PJ Black, and it isn't a good one.


***Muertes/Fenix is an easy add to our 2015 Ongoing MOTY List, because apparently every time these dudes match up it manages to be completely great***


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MLJ: Recent Uploads: Chavo Guerrero, Eddy Guerrero, El Dandy vs Mongolian Mauler, Fuerza Guerrera, Vampiro

1991-05-10 @ Arena Coliseo
Chavo Guerrero, Eddy Guerrero, El Dandy vs Mongolian Mauler, Fuerza Guerrera, Vampiro

We're going to have a brief detour from all things productive for this one. decadas80s90s2000 on youtube is a lovely human being, a double-threat who posts both fancams from Elite shows and older lucha on a regular basis. His nomenclature strategies can be occasionally misleading however. This one popped up on February 23, with the title of "EDDIE GUERRERO,EL DANDY VS FUERZA GUERRERA,VAMPIRO CANADIENSE." I figured that I could tolerate some Vampiro for the sake of a 23 year old Eddy, Dandy, and Fuerza. Not mentioned in there was Chavo Guerrero, but I've been enjoying him quite a bit in the nwaclassics.com footage, and he was probably better to watch in 91 than a relatively green Eddy.

Also not mentioned, however, was the Mongolian Mauler, which was quite the oversight. I kind of love fish out of water monster lucha appearances. Sometimes, it works out really well, like with Kamala or Haku. Or it can be at least functional like Solomon Grundy, a foil for a particularly talented tecnico or rudo to play off of. A Killer Kowalski graduate running with the Geeto/Bepo Mongol gimmick and black contact lenses and prone to eating the turnbuckles, the Mongolian Mauler was a totally different beast. He had a cup of coffee in 1994 WCW, including a Main Event match of Sting, Dustin, and Pillman vs Regal, Austin, and the Mauler, which I really need to see at some point. He was actually all over the place. SMW, Reslo, WING, CWA. It's a weird career for someone I hadn't heard of. I think his ring work is best summed up with this gif I made from a squash over Brian Armstrong in WCW:

Still, it shouldn't have been an issue in a match with Dandy and Fuerza, right? Fuerza could direct traffic and Dandy could sell and it'd be fine? They could work around Mauler like we've seen with so many other such wrestlers. Not so much. The problem was two fold. First and foremost, having the Guerreros in there made things problematic in a way that you wouldn't expect. While I imagine Chavo could work a trios match without breaking a sweat, having Mauler in there to play off of meant that he decided to break from convention and work things how he wanted. That meant getting tossed over the top rope a few times so that he could do a skin the cat spot as the match ground to a halt as the others weren't sure whether they should come in the ring or not, that sort of thing.

The second issue was that this was a storyline driven match. This was the road to Vampiro's face turn, which involved miscommunication and a post-match beatdown by the rudos. Having Mauler in there as a prop for the miscommunication spots was less than ideal, especially when they were relying on Vampiro to make it all work in the first place. There were good things in the match: Fuerza/Dandy exchanges were as good as you'd expect; it was nice to see Chavo and Eddy interact, including them saving one another at times; and Vampiro, despite what I just said, is the sort of guy you're always better off seeing in story-driven matches as opposed to more technique-based ones, but I think it was, all in all, an example of just what happens when the delicate formula of lucha libre trios matches get distrupted. They only make it LOOK easy most of the time.

By the way, according to the Match Finder, Vampiro had two singles matches in 91: one vs the Mauler, one vs Nitron. Don't you wish you could see those? I sure do.

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