Big Time Wrestling 7/29/16 TV

1. Christopher Black vs. Andre LeVeaux

Hosts Dragon Dave and Hank Renner Jr. keep telling us that the debuting (?) Christopher Black has a "worldwide reputation for violence" which, well...seems like a dubious claim. But I liked him, so that counts for something. Match was only 5 minutes but they accomplished enough to make the short time worthwhile. I've never seen Black before and only seen a little LeVeaux. They start with some amusing twisting wristlock reversals, silly but I liked the outcome. Black gains advantage by yanking LeVeaux to the mat by his dreads, which seems like an appropriate thing for a mean bald dude to do to gain an advantage over a guy with dreads. We get a couple of moments where Black transitions away from LeVeaux by yanking the dreadlocks, which is a great thing for a heel to do, but rarely has an opportunity to do so. I really liked LeVeaux's big comeback down the stretch, hitting a nice lariat and a really hard back elbow, then spiking Black with a dropkick in the corner. Black hits a big boot with nice follow through to end it in satisfying fashion, with LeVeaux going limp on contact, making me buy it. I'd really like to see more of these two, or shoot just know more about where they came from, how long they've been working, etc. (**Apparently they just debuted in April, which is really impressive**)

2. Victor Sterling & Jack Madison vs. Rik Luxury & Will Roberts

Man Hank Renner Jr. sure does say the word "kisser" a lot. Nobody can be punched in the face, it's always gotta be his "kisser". "Take a look at Rik Luxury's kisser." There's no way he just naturally talks like this. His shtick is...tiresome. You can also count on hearing "well-oiled machine" many times during every tag match. And this tag match was really good. Really, really good. But woefully short. They go 7, and I easily could have been down for 17. What we got was really good, but so cruel to have it taken away so quickly. Roberts and Luxury are a fun team (I dig teams with size differences) who kind of do a reverse Ricky Morton, with Roberts being in the ring more often but as a heel. It never went full heel-in-peril but it was an interesting layout. Sterling and Madison have some polished double teams and Sterling in particular had some of his best move execution all throughout. A simple Madison drop toe hold into a seated Sterling dropkick looks real great when executed so well and timed so nicely. Sterling throws some nice knees and Roberts makes offense look even better, I dug Luxury doing a sort of fisherman's suplex on Roberts to flip him onto Sterling, and the finish stretch was real good and excellently timed. But again, so cruel to keep this so short. Easily could have gone twice as long.

3. Christina Von Eerie vs. Davina Rose (6/26/09)

Davina Rose is obviously now Bayley, and this is a smart move by BTW to unearth a couple of her matches and showcase them. Eerie ambushes Rose to start and I don't know how Renner thinks it's ok to keep saying "Pearl Harbor job" over and over to describe what happened. When a really large wrestler gets knocked over does he call it "a realll 9/11"? He has an extreme problem just calling objects what they actually are, always has to have some quaint colloquialism for every damn thing. Von Eerie's boots are called "stompers". Good grief. yet he doesn't seem to know what any actual moves are called. "Guy who likes Gorilla Monsoon commentary and adds shitty changes to it" is never going to sound good. This is really early into Bayley's career, she probably had less than 10 matches at this point, and it shows. She's decent at selling and can get over vulnerability, but she doesn't know how to land when doing offense and doesn't really know how to take moves. She gets confused a couple times one time falling out of a bodyslam in a way I've never seen anybody fall out of a bodyslam before. Eerie looked better here than I think she presently looks, seemed like someone who got to a certain level and stopped trying as hard. Announcer Dragon Dave is a creep in this as he keeps bringing up Eerie's ass crack and complimenting the camera man on his nice work. We also cut to the crowd to see someone with a Quagmire sign saying "Alright Ladies". Yuck. Good move to show this match and let a new audience see Bayley's beginnings, and a terrible idea to not redo the commentary.

This was another good, tight episode. I know I keep saying they're good at filling their time, but it really is important when you only have 30 minutes to work with every week. Both new matches they showed were good, and while the final match was not good it's totally understandable and smart that they would show a Bayley match.

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Big Time Wrestling TV 7/8/16

All the matches on this episode are from the BTW Academy, which isn't ideal as the sound is terrible, and the fans are all on one side of the ring (off camera), so wrestlers have to work to one side of the ring, which is the side away from the announcers. So that lead to a couple moments where the announcers were talking about what a wrestler was doing, but you knew they couldn't physically see that from where they sat. So there were problems, the audio especially.

1. Pitbull Wellman vs. Jack Madison

Short match, under 4 minutes. Both guys are fairly green, especially Pitbull. Madison had a nice powerslam and big scoop Michinoku Driver, Pitbull did an amusing pinfall where he pressed across Madison's chest and lifted his leg, but this felt like a 3 minute student match.

2. Shotzi Blackheart vs. Beatrice Domino

Shotzi comes out to talk about the upcoming Dangerous Damsels tournament, and mentions they might as well just give her the belt and save her from having to go through 3 women who are "crap". Beatrice Domino comes out to a huge reaction, and says that they might as well just give her the belt, because she worked hard. It's weird to run this match a week before the Damsels event, since these two are in the tournament and could face off, but as someone who likely can't attend the show, I don't mind a bit. It looks like they got lost down the home stretch as there were some awkward moments and some time stand still moments, but Shotzi is new and they handled things fine enough. I really liked Domino here as she kept things moving, and recovered a couple of the awkward spots. In one Shotzi stood still while Domino came off the ropes, and to cover things up Domino muscled her up with minimal help and delivered a cool rydeen bomb. She also leans into a nice Shotzi high kick. Shotzi throws low on a missed clothesline, which I always like, and leans into Domino's hard clothesline. Shotzi also hits a sweet cannonball and ends the match with a killer senton off the top. I had no idea what she was doing up there, and se looked a little unsure on the top rope, but the senton landed great. I can't wait to see a match between them in a year, as they've both improved every time I've seen them. Also cool job by the promotion filming the senton from a totally different angle, higher up and looking down across the ring. Made the finish look cooler.

3. Kikyo Nakamura vs. Christina Von Eerie (2/19/16)

I don't really think Eerie ever got good, as she seems to be about the same level as the first time I saw her wrestle 6 years ago. But Kikyo is a good match up for what Von Eerie can bring skillwise. Kikyo looked really good throughout, she bumped big for Eerie's stuff, caught her on a dive, hit a great northern lights, went up for a back suplex, nice shoulderblocks, big German. Eerie really didn't look good. Her offense is either to convoluted for her to pull off clean, or she just awkwardly gets up for stuff. But again, really great Kikyo performance. Oh, and at one point in the match the camera panned slowly away from the action and moved to a long crowd shot, before slowly panning back. The whole time Kikyo had a Fujiwara armbar locked on and you could hear Von Eerie's screams. I'm sure they didn't intentionally mean to make me think about Michael Madsen cutting a guy's ear off in Reservoir Dogs, but man was I dying. I mean, Kikyo starts working the arm, we slowly pan away, hear screams, and slowly pan back. They really should have been playing Stealer's Wheel, but oh well.

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Uprising: Lucha Libre Workrate Report 7/5/14

The last several weeks they've been showing reruns of this show, but now they're back to showing fairly recent stuff (which is a nice trend compared to them showing 4 year old matches). This match was from the 2/22/14 show in SF that we all attended. We ended up running a little late as Tim wildly took a turn like he was trying to shake a tail, a turn nobody suggested he take. It's possible Tim is leading a secret life and was trying to avoid running into his secret family or something. So we walked into this match right when the bell rang.

1. Cheerleader Melissa vs. Christina Von Eerie vs. Savanah Riley

Pretty disappointed when this was announced as a three way. Three ways are always a mess, lead to tons of awkward exchanges, tons of weirdly shoehorned three person spots, one person disappearing for way too much time, just bad. I much rather would have seen a singles match with any combo of the girls. I'm unfamiliar with Riley, but she worked the crowd better than the others, threw some nice forearms and chops, seemed fine. I've seen Von Eerie a lot more, and she is not very good. Really sloppy (she almost spikes herself delivering a sunset flip) and the "Oi" chants seemed a little lost on the audience made up mostly of hispanic children. Though I assume (if it hasn't happened already) that Colt Cabana will be using an Oy chant in a similar way Daniel Bryan does the Yes! kicks. This match had plenty of nice individual moments. Von Eerie took a nasty bump off the apron to the floor, letting Melissa/Riley work solo for awhile. Melissa bent Riley in half with a vicious indian deathlock/boston crab combo, and threw some cool axe kicks. The times the match fell apart were when they shoehorned  in 3-way spots, like the dreaded "superplex/powerbomb" which took a loooong time to set up for the payoff. Riley and Von Eerie kind of just had to freeze time, standing on the ropes waiting for Melissa to wedge herself into position to do the powerbomb, but Von Eerie is tiny so there really wasn't much space for Melissa to fit into. Just a predictable spot that rarely looks good, and really needs to be retired.  Brian Cage interferes on behalf of Riley, and Melissa takes him out with an awesome, out of control dive off the top, allowing Von Eerie to win the title back in the ring. Pro Wrestling Revolution always has a hilariously misguided and bad knack for making the good guys look bad in matches. Here they clearly wanted a big moment for Von Eerie, but they have her win the title by pinning the person who isn't the champ, while the actual champ (Melissa) dominated the whole match and was only out of the ring because guy twice her size interfered. Quite a special moment.

Later in the live card there was a match between Border Patrol member Derek Sanders, against clear tecnico El Mariachi. I mean, he was the obvious tecnico, coming out in full mariachi gear in front of a 85% hispanic crowd, doing a stylish zapateado with his intricately dressed valet, facing a guy who came out shouting about sending Mexicans back home. And all through the match you had El Mariachi yelling at his valet, complaining about interference to the ref, and then threatening to break up with his valet when he lost. The thing is, there WAS no interference, and he lost 100% clean to Sanders. So your big tecnico just whined the whole match and then blamed his loss on his chica, and the promotion genuinely thought he would leave to a polite ovation from the fans. I mean just a completely clueless way to book tecnicos.

Another major problem I was hoping the fed would fix on their TV hiatus, is the actual time management of their TV show. But my god it's as bad as ever. They have 30 minutes, and that's not a lot of time. But most weeks of television are one match stretched to fill the 30 minute run time. This three way was 11 minutes long, and it's the only match to get shown. We get 7 minutes of ring entrances, 11 minutes of match, and then 3 minutes of highlights of the match we just watched. Just a brutal and wasteful use of your 30 minutes. I know they don't have an extensive library, but their insistence on showing full ring entrances is maddening. This is time that can be much better spent showing some short features on your wrestlers, wrestler promos, promoting upcoming events, anything. But stretching an 11 minute match over the 30 paid for minutes is so, so foolish. It should not take 6 weeks to show one event's worth of matches, but I know they're going to milk this whole damn event, match by match. It's stunning how clueless this fed is when it comes to their TV.

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Uprising: Lucha Libre Workrate Report 11/10/13

Journey with us further back into 2009 (5/30/09! They're somehow airing even older stuff!) West Coast indy wrestling, during another installment of Pro Wrestling Revolution's "paying to air matches from last decade". These matches are so old that if you had mentioned the black president during this card I'd assume you were talking to me about Fela Kuti.

1. Raesha Saeed vs. Christina Von Eerie

I liked Von Eerie's look but at this point she was still really green and tentative in the ring, and just didn't have enough presence to be a very engaging babyface. I mean, weren't we were all green 5 years ago. I was a young man in my 20s! I had a flip phone when this match originally happened! You want to talk dated look no further than right here when promotions still thought it was relevant to have a pretty, talented, charismatic worker use a Taliban gimmick. Saeed gave a good effort here and tried to lead Von Eerie through some stuff, but again she was not good at engaging the crowd at this point and the match was pretty flat. I was amused by Saeed messing up Von Eerie's mohawk and then spitting, just disgusted by our Americans and our luxurious hairstyles.

2. Mascarita Dorada vs. Pequeno Pierroth

Alright, if they're going to show ancient irrelevant matches then I really have no problem seeing guys like Dorada. That's a guy I can genuinely see being used as a draw to your live events (even though they don't mention their live events during the TV show), and this is exactly the type of "classic" match they should be showing if they stubbornly insist on showing old footage. The match itself was awesome as these guys have their touring match down at this point and it's a formula that is impossible to fail in front of a high school crowd. Watching Dorada do his thing is pure joy and Pequeno Pierroth is great at getting things from A to B to C. Both guys are great at expressing a lot of personality through the mask and Dorada seems to go hard no matter where he works. Here he's in a high school gym and does an insane moonsault into the front row and a couple lunatic dives into the entrance way. Match pacing was really great with fun matwork at the beginning into some teaser arm drags, back into their fun reversal-heavy matwork and then into the hot end run of crazy spots. When two guys like this are matched up you know you're going to get 10 really fun minutes that will almost always steal the show.

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Uprising: Lucha Libre Workrate Report 10/13/13

Looks like we're back to 2009 matches this week. I'm not sure why nothing from 2010-2012 is being shown here, as some of the matches they've shown from 2009 have been pretty uninspiring (the Mr. Wrestling IV match especially standing out as a poor use of air time). I mean, they have 5 years of shows to cherry pick from, you'd think that would mean some pretty strong material

1. Cheerleader Melissa vs. Christina Von Eerie

First few minutes are mostly Melissa domination which is fun. Von Eerie gets some counter roll-ups but mostly it's a Melissa stomping. She grabs Von Eerie in a wheelbarrow lock and walks around the ring, swinging her into the guard rail on every side of the ring numerous times. Awesome. Melissa also bends her in half with a neat modified Texas Cloverleaf. Ladies always make submissions look cool with how flexible they can be, really getting contorted while in a move. Melissa hits a hardway pump handle slam, looking like Von Eerie sandbagged her the whole time. Von Eerie is tiny but Melissa still looked like she had some Backlund strength there. I dig Von Eerie struggling out of a DVD attempt by Melissa and planting her with a DDT (Melissa really took it great, too). CVE sets up a chair in the ring to vault off of into the corner, but Melissa catches her and plants her on the chair with an Air Raid Crash. Melissa looked really great here, but it was pretty clear she was holding CVE's hand through this, even having to do moves to herself.

2. Vaquero Fantasma vs. Hijo de Rey Misterio

Again, they have 5 years of matches to cull from, so not sure why they seem to be showcasing fake Rey Misterio. I fully understand having fake Rey Misterio on your live shows, but don't understand the purpose of showcasing his 4 year old matches on their valuable air time. Is their goal to trick new viewers into thinking they're watching a Rey Mysterio match? Or is their goal to bring new viewers to their live shows. The former seems odd, as it won't bring them new business. I'm pretty sure the fake Misterio no longer even works. The latter would make more sense, except this match is showcasing a guy who no longer works, and I've yet to see the TV show advertise any upcoming events. They advertise the training academy, and I believe Fantasma is the trainer...but they don't specifically mention that in the ads. So...I'm really wondering what the goal of this TV show is supposed to be. I'm trying to remember if they even advertise the website, and I'm drawing the blank. All I remember seeing ads for each episode is the training academy, and the Killers-meets-Dashboard Confessional theme song.

This match is basically all Misterio, with Vaquero Fantasma tasked with getting into proper position for Misterio's random move generator offense, and attempt to put it into some sort of structure. It's not much use though. Fantasma bumps around nicely, and Misterio's moves look mostly fine, but they're all fairly meaningless. It's the type of moveset that works really well when making a 3 minute youtube music video, but doesn't do a whole lot for me watching it in full. Every time I see a Hijo de Rey Misterio match he's added one or two "hey that move looks cool I want that!" This time it was the Code Red. His aresenal really is a greatest hits of the last few years of indy lucha. I was stunned he never went for a Backcracker. Hats off to Fantasma for making one of the more contrived spots look killer, as Misterio took a while setting up Fantasma seated on the apron, holding a chair in front of his face (similar to that old Scoot Andrews spot where a guy has to balance himself on the ropes as if he's stuck, so Scoot could do a legdrop from the middle rope), so Misterio could do a baseball slide into him. Well Fantasma leans all the way into it and take an incredible Hamrick-esque bump from the apron back-first onto the floor. Awesome bump, above and beyond what he needed to do (and for that, we thank him). In summary, Misterio getting the pin was never in question, match was worked as Misterio moves exhibition, Fantasma gets full point for trying to string it all together.

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