Found Footage Friday: KONG~! KANSAI~! HAMADA~! SATOMURA~! STOMPER~! HEENAN HANDCUFFED TO T~!

Frank Hickey vs. Mongolian Stomper Kansas City 1960s

MD: This was another old match that Charles from Wrestling Playlists posted last year in one of his huge tape buying sprees. As best as I can tell, the Geigel match from earlier in this show was online but this wasn't. It's certainly a moment in time and a moment in pro wrestling canon in its own way. More on that in a minute. Stomper, at this point, had the look (mostly shaved head, fu manchu style goatee) but he talked just like a normal guy and wasn't affected (in his inner ear) by the crowd's boos. Hickey had an elaborate costume with a cape and a headguard. They don't call him the Spaceman here, but he was. I don't know if this was heel vs heel or what but these were just two big guys throwing big shots for the most part. Hickey controlled this more than I'd expect, honestly, as Stomper was pushed harder and talked about going after Thesz post match. Midway through the match, a hulking figure with glasses from the crowd walked up to ringside and had to be shuffled away. That was a debuting Ox Baker (no facial hair) and one subplot through the match was the commentary talking about how they had to turn him down when he wanted to wrestle before because despite being 300 pounds he wasn't trained. At the end of the clip,  after Stomper had won somewhat anticlimactically, they said that the promoters were going to allow Ox to wrestle that coming Thursday and he got to introduce himself. Interesting little angle/gimmick for the 60s. To me, it was just strange to see the Stomper not even trying to put on foreign airs.

Superstar Billy Graham vs. Hercules WWF 8/15/87

MD: This was another recent Richard Land find so you'll have to go find his patreon. While there was absolutely no way it could live up to its promise on paper, it was still pretty great, all the more so because I didn't realize what the post-match was going to be. This was when Graham was stepping in for Patera. The match itself was ok. Hercules created the motion with a few big bumps. He had some nice cutoffs. Graham controlled the middle and was able to stand tall with his strength. They had a nice finish where Hercules tried to slam Graham from the outside in and got rolled through on it. 

The real appeal here, however, was Heenan. This had the one-two punch of Heenan handcuffed to Mr. T and the losing manager having to get whipped, so you can only imagine all of Heenan's mannerisms as he got yanked around by T and then the whole hoopla of the post-match with Hercules trying desperately to protect his manager and then Graham and finally Patera getting their shots in on a writhing, squirming Heenan as the crowd went wild. I wish there was more of it. A lot of the time we just got glimpses in the corner of the screen of Heenan's reactions. This was definitely more for the live crowd, but I'm glad we got to see it at all.

ER: I thought Heenan's promo to start this whole segment was far and away the most cutting thing. Heenan wasn't funny at all, he was ruthless. I mean, he was funny, but he came off tough, like a guy who ran a hard card game. When he was talking about being cuffed to Mr. T he straight up told Ken Patera to put the cuffs on himself, as a little stroll down memory lane. He talked about how everyone you see with big arms and a big body is unemployed, because working men can't spend 8 hours lifting and 8 hours working. He makes fun of Graham for eating 19 cans of tuna and 65 raw eggs all day. It's a promo that felt like real hate, and it made the match more disappointing for having hardly any hate at all. I don't think any of the Heenan/Mr. T payoffs were there and it was one of those reminders of how big wrestlers were and how small actors are. When Bobby Heenan is larger than Mr. T and he just cut a promo about real tough men from the midwest, I want more than just 10 minutes of Heenan cowering from T on the floor. 

It's insane how Billy Graham aged 30 years in 10. 1987 Billy Graham works like 75 year old Jimmy Valiant. 10 years earlier he was the most charismatic man in the building and here he's like 1999 Terry Gordy. Hercules I thought looked great. His kneedrops and elbowdrop and knuckle locks and big bump to the floor selling for Graham all looked strong. He had a pretty steep hill to climb and the stipulation would have been more fun if it had ended with Heenan bumping for Mr. T and Patera instead of absorbing pulled belt shots thrown by a one armed man and a suddenly elderly man. 

Aja Kong/Dynamite Kansai vs. Ayako Hamada/Meiko Satomura GAEA 6/22/03

MD: It's hard for me to write this one up. So much happens. It's one imaginative, iconic spot after the next. You watch it and by the end you forgot that Aja branded the guardrail at one point even though it was awesome in the moment. They just pack in so much in twenty minutes and while there are themes (Kansai going for the Splash Mountain until she gets it, it gets broken up, and then she gets it again for the win, for instance), and while I'd even say it comes together and never entirely falls apart, it's just a lot to keep track of. Here, of course, you have not just the problem of Aja early on but also the problem of Kansai where she can just catch you in a claw and slam you to the ground. Even worse for Hamada and Satomura is when you get the problem of both, where you can put one down but the other is creeping over to hit you with a lariat. There was one point where Hamada was pinballing back and forth to kick Kansai to try to break an ankle lock on Satomura and then nail Aja so Aja wouldn't flatten her and she had two or three tries to do that before she just got crushed by Aja.

In some ways, despite all the spots and bombs and bumps (and occasionally weapons) this did have a bit of a sports feel where Hamada and Satomura would get lots of little shots on goal, but all it would take would be one breakaway from Kong/Kansai to end it and everyone knew it. Some of that was from the two teams just constantly pressing forward and never letting up, even though things still had weight (of course they did) and impact. It felt like a big deal when Hamada and Satomura got their opponents down and on the ropes, and they had some very big bombs of their own (literally as they power bombed Kansai onto Aja for instance). That said, it was all just a matter of time, of course, but it was a spirited time while it lasted.

ER: I thought this was good but never came close to approaching the greatness of the Kong/Meiko match from the week before (which Matt and I wrote about earlier this month). Meiko is one of our great punishment takers, an out-laster on the same level of Yuki Ishikawa. I buy it from Meiko, it's Ayako I don't buy it from here. The excitement of the Aja/Meiko matches is how Aja is going to walk through most of Meiko's offense, and be honest about the things that slow her down. You don't just get leniency from Stan Hansen, you have to move him before he sells for you. Aja is the same, you actually need to move her or bounce her on her head, and Dynamite Kansai can do the same thing. Aja and Dynamite as a team are similar to the problem created when Vader and Hansen teamed in All Japan. They are going to walk through almost anyone and Ayako's well thrown but worked elbow smashes are not going to be taken seriously by either. I need some real fire from an underdog outsized babyface and if you're still holding back a little on arm strikes after Kansai stomps on your fucking face from the top, then I stop buying it. 

But I did like this. I made a prolonged noise I've never made before in reaction to that double stomp to the face. I let out of deep guttural oof at the finish when Aja presumably broke one of Meiko's ribs with a kick to the stomach harder than any Kawada ever threw. I liked the way Aja treated Hamada like a little pest, finally hitting her with a backfist without much effort and then sitting on her while Dynamite disposes of Meiko. There were stretches where kicks were missing and timing was behind, and that's just not going to be enough to stop two monsters. Also, it's crazy how much faster Kong's kicks look than Hamada's or Meiko's. She's like Scott Norton with speed, it's unreal. 

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Found Footage Friday: KONG~! MEIKO~! CACTUS~! ATLANTIS~! MASAKRE~! DANDY~! JT SMITH~!

Cactus Jack vs. JT Smith TWA 8/20/91

MD: Guessing on this date from the finish. It's surreal to see Foley go from Manchester vs Vader back to this (just a couple of years earlier). He did stuff on top of stuff to keep it entertaining, smacking a chair into his head (two chairs; the first wooden which he sold more), going on the mic for a big rant (after which he ran right into Smith's offense), the Cactus clothesline over the top, a flip bump in the corner, so on and so forth.

His shots in the corner all looked great and he was there for every little thing Smith did. Smith was in the right place at the right time hitting the right stuff for a lot of this, keeping the crowd engaged as a babyface, but it was hard not to be overshadowed by Cactus. I'd call this more entertaining than coherent or great, but you still didn't want to look away which was the hallmark of early 90s Foley. Great finish too as Foley got his throat caught in the ropes leading to a count out, a very clever way to get Cactus Jack out of a tournament if need be.

ER: A cool match, and I love the timing of this coming just a week after we covered a new Cactus/Vader match. That was 1993, this is 1991, and Cactus seems like such a different wrestler in this one. Just two years later he was slower, beefier, and his execution on almost everything was completely different. Here he threw punches with his arm and threw them more overhand, completely different arm slot than he would use for most of his career. His punches looked great here. Every time he hit JT Smith it looked like a real shot. JT Smith was in there to take shots, and the crowd responded to it. They really got behind him, even though every single time we got a glimpse of the crowd there didn't seem to be a single person in attendance who looked like him. How about that. 

JT Smith isn't really a guy with offense, so of course you were going to have Cactus make up for that. That's when you get him wandering around the building hitting himself with chairs, cutting a promo mid-match, keeping people riled and wary against him and hot behind JT. He knew JT was going to bump big for him - JT Smith got thrown, hit, or clotheslined to the floor three times in under a minute and every fall he took to the floor looked great - and he is Cactus Jack so of course he's going to take some bumps. That said, I don't know if I've seen Cactus take that Ray Stevens bump in the corner before. It's not the Shawn Michaels roll up bump, it's the Stevens bump that John Nord and Mike Modest took neck/shoulder first into the buckles. Nord and Modest took it more horizontally and landed flat, but Cactus takes it messier and ends with an uglier bump down into the mat. 

There were two really great moments, as judged by some guy sitting near the cameraman who exclaimed "Oh SHIT!" two different times: The first was when a charging Cactus clothesline knocked Smith sideways on landed him on his stomach; the second was when Cactus got himself hanged in the ropes very near to where he was sitting. His verbal exclamations were absolutely correct both times. 

Atlantis/Rayo de Jalisco Jr/El Dandy vs. Pierroth Jr/Masakre/MS-1 CMLL 9/92

MD: Really a blast in the about ten minutes we get here. The primera and segunda function almost as a fully formed sprint and then we get at least part of the finish of the tercera. Atlantis looks like a huge star here. He bounds into the ring and gets ambushed starting the rudo control. Masakre is a menace here, sneaking in and punching anyone he can at any point, even when they're in holds.

Atlantis comes back basically on his own, including eating a punch and kipping up immediately to fire back. While this is happening Rayo is fondly holding the hand of a prone Dandy. Atlantis just outslicks all three rudos until his partners can come back (and when they do, it's with a huge Dandy punch and Rayo doing his shtick; it all felt balanced here). For the tercera we come in on them switching matches around which is a little weird, but the tecnicos pretty quickly overcome. I would have liked to see how we got to the mask switching but overall what we did get here was great.

Aja Kong vs. Meiko Satomura GAEA 6/14/03

MD: We're going to try to tackle some of these GAEA uploads that people think are rare/new as we've done a bad job at that. I have no idea about the context here, but I do know that Aja Kong might be the most immediately watchable wrestler ever. You can drop into almost any of her matches from almost any period and while the match might be enhanced by content, you're going to be able to figure out exactly what's going on. 

I call it the "Problem of Aja" which has to be overcome by any opponent she faces. She's too big, too strong, too fierce, too much, and even against someone like Satomura, you see it right from the get go where Aja just stuffs her and starts to pull her apart, wrenching her arms in all sorts of ways they don't belong. With a little bit of distance Satomura can get a quick shot in, but by giving Aja a little bit of distance, she'll get run over in turn. She can smash her head with the metal bucket (or throw it at her) but Aja will just take it and headbutt her back, or even worse: she'll get the bucket and smash Satomura and then drop her head first on it. 

The great equalizer here was Satomura's death valley drivers. Any move that took so much effort could justifiably have such an effect, and they were enough to turn the tide and even to almost put Aja away, but almost isn't enough and while she was able to duck the uraken a few times and get ten strikes in for every one Aja hit, all it took was one landing to end this.

ER: I thought this was incredible. This wasn't out there before? This is new? We're just seeing this match, that feels like one of the classic matches of a classic feud? That can't be. If this match happened on this week's Dynamite it would be a 5.5 star match that people actually remember two months later. Aja Kong is an unstoppable danger that must be endured, and I've never responded to a woman wrestler the way I respond to Aja. The same way I can show any of my non-wrestling bubble friends any Stan Hansen match from any era and they recognize on sight that this man is beating the shit out of everyone and moving and falling and reacting in ways they have never seen yet instantly understand, Aja Kong has that exact same level of accessibility. If this is your first Aja Kong/Meiko match, you will understand everything. The fight Aja forces Meiko into bringing, Aja's unbeatable and at times literally unmovable condescending honesty, and Meiko's urge and determination. Aja feels like someone who cannot be moved and it requires Meiko to do it for real, and when Aja takes something for real she's finally a monster wounded. 

The GAEA girls at ringside keep taking this to higher levels, their volume and cries and anger growing over a brisk 12 minutes, and the crowd actually sounds upset when Aja kicks out of Meiko's final surge of fire. The anguish of her girls at ringside was felt as much or more than the emotion all over Meiko's face.  Every hit in this match is honest as can be. The death valley drivers compress Kong, the slaps seem like they should all swell Meiko's jaw and wreck her hearing. Kong gives this woman a brainbuster on a metal bucket and it's not as violent as a half dozen of Kong's strikes. The emotion is huge for a "short" match, and Kong pulling a fucking small package - and a small package so well executed that it would have brought a tear to Bret Hart's eye - is one of the greatest bullshit asshole heel spots I've ever seen. Can you picture Stan Hansen needle dicking his way into pulling a small package on Misawa? Riots. I've never seen something so brazen. She eventually buckles Meiko's entire body with a uraken but I wanted to see the looks on everyone's faces and the boos from every mouth had Aja Kong won with that perfect small package. 

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New Footage Friday: CASAS! AJA! MEIKO! SANTO! PANTHER! TARZAN!

Máscara Mágica/Olímpus/Silver King vs. Guerrero de la Muerte/Negro Casas/Rey Bucanero CMLL 6/29/96

MD: I love dropping into a moment in time like this, even for a mid-card feud with some great window dressing. This set up a Welterweight title match between Mascara Magica and Guerrero de la Muerte which would then set up their apeuestas match, and I have to admit, this actually made me want see all of that. They worked well together, with Guerrero standing out as a particularly effective clubbering bully that could still turn it up a notch. That's to say I didn't mind that the focus of this one was on them and not Casas and Silver King, not that we didn't get some great stuff from each individually and together. They played Sharp Dressed Man for both sets of entrances and Negro Casas had fun with it. He danced and hugged the ref with the expected audacity and familiarity so the pre-match is great. There are certain wrestlers you don't want to take your eye off in a match, no matter what is happening. Terry Funk is one. Casas is another. For the primera, they paired Olimpus with Casas and Bucanero with Silver King, which made sense. Young Bucanero, as always, was ambitious but not always entirely smooth. I loved how Casas reacted to basically everything Olimpus did (even when in a simple hold, as Olimpus would go for the chin or the hair or an arm, etc., Casas just was totally on all the time in his complaining and reacting). We did get some good Casas and Silver King time in the segunda and tercera, with the usual rope running trip spots that no one did better and some fun brawling through the ropes to clear the ring for Magica and Guerrero at the end.

ER: Great match, I loved this. I haven't seen much Guerrero de la Muerte, and I'm not sure I've ever seen Olimpus, and that already helps make it a great on paper match for me. It has two of my all time favorites in Casas and Silver King, two guys I've seen a ton and like in Magica and Bucanero, and two guys who are new or relatively new to me, one of each category on each side. The guys I loved did things that I loved, it's fun seeing the elements of Bucanero that stayed as he matured and the small things that didn't, I loved the rope work of Olimpus and the overall rounded professionalism of GdlM. Everybody fit into their cog nicely, the pairings all looked good, and we got a couple of things I've never seen. Casas and King were the highlights, with King especially moving blisteringly fast. I love seeing these two move, and they both looked excellent. King broke out this cool looking spot, where he and Bucanero had been working a nice sunset flip sequence. King kicked out of one and Bucanero went for another one, and King just tried to run away during the flip. The spot looked minorly blown when Bucanero nudged by him, and the spot became something unique and special. If it started as Bucanero slightly missing his mark and sunset flipping King after a delay, the moment Bucanero was sliding down King's back to pull him down by the legs, King starts to move with Bucanero on his back! So Bucanero was being blocked by King while King basically held him in position for Omori's Axe Guillotine Driver. It was a cool visual, pulled off quick, and felt like something innovative we'd see in French Catch. All I see now is 50s French Catch in wrestling, even if there is zero chance those wrestlers ever even heard of French Catch.

Bucanero wrestled more like a junior (and was sized like a junior), and he still had his lunatic fast spills to the floor. Bucanero was a longtime favorite of mine for the many ways he knows how to get to an arena floor, and is still capable of surprising. The peak of his powers was around 2001, when he and Christian were having weekly TV contests to see who could take the most bumps over the top to the floor in a match. Here he is not taking high bumps to the floor, but fast beautiful lucha rolls to the floor, the way a veteran luchador knows how to kind of back handspring through the ropes to the floor after taking a dropkick.  Young Bucanero, wearing gorgeous plate glass tights, had veteran level bumps to the floor at age 21. Olimpus had a couple of great ropes moments with a couple of nice tricks. I loved the moment at the end of a caida where Casas ran in to break up a pin, and Olimpus ran in the ring behind him to spring off the middle rope with a dropkick to the back of Casas's head. in ring springboard senton to a standing opponent is a fun signature spot, and it was hit and reversed in satisfying ways here. I don't think Olimpus has much of a rep, but he has few enough matches that maybe I should go through an under 10 match Olimpus run, while also doing an under 10 matches Babe Richard run, since there is some overlap with each in the same match. Is it stupid to go through and review the 20 or so available Olimpus and Babe Richard matches before I go through and review 20 or so available Javier Llanes matches? Almost certainly! Will that make a difference? Of course not. Casas made Olimpus look plenty good in their exchanges, and King worked fast with all the rudos. Seeing King try to actually take out Casas's feet with dropdowns during a sequence is just one of those signs that guys are taking their best shot at making this match a good one, and I grinned the whole time.

Aja Kong vs. Meiko Satomura GAEA 12/15/01

MD: At the 22 minute mark here I turned it onto 2x speed so I could just get through this. I was pretty much done after the fourth death valley bomb. I was probably done a minute or two before that. It's a me thing as much as anything else. What I post on the blog is basically what I watch: old French wrestling and what we find for NFF which is basically lucha, German Catch, old Japanese TV and handhelds and occasional territory stuff. The other guys watch things more broadly and much more modern wrestling. The point is that I am not at all mentally prepared for twelve minute excess-laden finishing stretches that end up being more than one third the total length of the match anymore. Wrestling isn't math, but I think that's probably my rule of thumb: while there can be exceptions like anything else, a finishing stretch should be a lot closer to 1/6th the length of the total match than 1/3rd. If anyone wants to engage me on this, I'm happy to write a couple thousand words somewhere. Otherwise, let me just talk about the rest and not drag down NFF.

What I love about Aja, especially Gaea era Aja is that her matches tend to be like thought experiments. Like Hansen and to a degree Brock, what makes them so fascinating is watching how her opponent tries to handle the unstoppable force that she presents. Meiko, obviously, was presented as a force unto herself, but she came in prepared for and experienced against what she was going to face and that let them work in some more early counters. Even so, Aja took most of this on the notion that if she can get her hands on you (and that means running into her hands as well), she's going to cut you off. Her opponents are always working from a point of disadvantage, which with a normal monster heel would be a perfectly fine narrative point, but with Aja means even more. She can attack from all sorts of different angles: my favorite here was when she just sidestepped Meiko and tripped her to cut off a comeback corner charge. I also liked how opportunity-driven Meiko's comebacks were. After getting battered around the ringside area, Aja placed her back on the apron and she used the higher ground for an axe kick in a way that felt perfectly strategic. Later on, Aja dropped her onto some metal with a brainbuster, but the ref demanded the object leave the ring before counting the pin, letting her come back with another Pele kick. She went to that well once too often and the finishing stretch (overextended as it was) was entered by Meiko realizing she didn't have the right distance/angle and jamming herself on launching another which let Aja clothesline her instead. The match was full of little touches like that which kept things both believable (human) and interesting for the first two-thirds. And I'll just leave it at that.

PAS: I agree with Matt, this match really could have used an editor. We only had a clipped version of this match before, and I imagine it might have worked a bit better as a clipped match, as it might night have felt as bloated. Still Joshi has a maximilist style and this is a pair of great wrestlers to watch overeat. Awesome Aja performance as she demonstrates again why she is one the greatest monster heel wrestlers of all time. Violent and brutal offense, mixed with perfectly timed moments of vulnerability.  Meiko is awesome in this match too, she has such credible offense, and is great at finding and taking advantage of openings. She has really good boxing for a pro-wrestler who doesn't throw punches. There were awesome moments where she uses head movement to evade shots, and she fires in these killer fast combos to the face. There were lots of moments when this would have have been an all time classic if they had ended there, and there were just too many of them. I did love the actual ending though, Aja's one count kick out is the best one count kick out I have ever seen. Total hubris, like a fighter who stands up too quick from a knockdown, instead of taking the moment to clear her head she bolts back up, only to get put back down. We just needed less nearfalls before that.


El Hijo Del Santo/La Mascara vs. Blue Panther/Tarzan Boy Monterey 1/1/06

MD: If we were going Epic/Great/Fun/Skip on this, it'd be Fun. Mascara was, not unexpectedly, the weakest link, but that's not to say he didn't carry himself well given who he was in there with. You'd get a 'rana that looked a little off but it'd follow three or four exchanges that hit perfectly. My favorite bits in the match weren't the perfectly smooth Panther vs Santo exchanges or the usual joy in seeing Santo's signature spots, but instead his interaction with Tarzan Boy. They had been on the same side of trios and at least one tag back in 98-00 when Tarzan Boy was much younger and after the tecnicos took the first fall here, Santo patted his cheek and shook his hand only for Tarzan Boy to return the favor. That felt like it really paid off with Tarzan Boy catching Santo with a powerbomb for a pin later on. My other favorite bit was Blue Panther using the drop down double leg nelson move we've been seeing from France so often lately to submit Mascara. The tercera was a little loose and free, feeling more like a local show than something for TV, but there were a bunch of tecnico dives and everyone went home happy. A good match with flashes of excellence from two of the best ever, and we're never going to complain about something like that popping up.

PAS: I love formula lucha libre, as a wrestling style performed well it has the highest floor. A basic househow lucha match is better then any other kind of houseshow wrestling. This is a match with two all time greats, a solid young wrestler and a competent hand, so it is going to be super entertaining. Santo and Panther are two of the most perfectly matched dance partners ever and we get some gorgeous exchanges between the two, some classic Santo dives and nifty interactions between Tarzan Boy and Santo, which had a bit more roughness then the smoothness of Santo and Panther. Mascara was pretty replaceable, but didn't do anything giant to drag down the match.

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All Time MOTY List HEAD to HEAD Santo/Casas v. Bestia/Scorpio Jr. VS. LCO v. KAORU/Yamada

Mima Shimoda/Etsuko Mita vs. KAORU/Toshiyo Yamada GAEA 4/4/99

ER: Well, this wasn't very good. This was a mess. This was sloppy, and disorganized, and had zero selling in sight, had botches and was way too long. Picture a Tanaka/Awesome match from 1999. Now picture a tear in the space time continuum, and suddenly another Tanaka and Awesome appear. And then all 4 of them start fighting. So you have two Tanakas and two Awesomes all having a Texas Tornado match. And three of them are having an off night. That's what was happening in this match. You had botches and silly spots that took ages to set up (those falling guardrail spots were terrible) and moves that meant nothing because anyone who took a move could just stand right up and do your own move. Or maybe worse is KAORU, who spent more time selling in the match than anyone else, all consecutive, and all in the first half of the match. And then she was completely fine during the finishing 5 minutes of the match. Some of Shimoda's axe kicks looked like they couldn't cut butter. The crowd brawling was worthless. Yamada was the only one in the match who was sustainably good the whole match. Yamada made this have moments worth watching. She tried the hardest to keep the crowd brawling from being listless, had the best cut off spots, hit her timing best, sold emotion the best. But by and large this was not good.

PAS: I liked this more then Eric did, although it wasn't a great match by any means. It had the kind of ragged feel of a fun Sabu match, with people trying crazy shit and not always hitting it clean, in some ways the awkwardness added to the crazy feeling of the match. I also liked how LCO kept fucking up the ref, hitting her with chair shots and rail shots for the hell of it, added to LCO's characters. They don't give a fuck and will wreck anyone. Yamada also had some awesome looking spin kicks, total game changers and momentum shifters. Still this went way too long, and had as many bad spots as good ones. I imagine all four were in pain the next day, but you don't get an A for effort in wrestling

Apuestas Tag Review

Verdict:

ER: Yeah no chance. This had none of the nuance or storytelling of the lucha tag. The blade jobs were good but not as good as the lucha tag. The build doesn't compare, the heat doesn't compare. Lucha tag in every way.

PAS: This was a blowout, I liked the Joshi tag fine, even if it was a bit long, but the Lucha tag is an all timer.

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Tell You What Meiko Satomura's Gonna Do...Kick It Down, Kickin' It Down, Kick It Out

Meiko Satomura vs. Kana Kana Pro 2/25/14 - EPIC

(Previously published in SLL's All-Request Friday Night)

One of the most unusual and fascinating matches of last year, played under blue lights with Kana in one of the trippier wrestler get-ups this side of Alebrije and some dude jamming on a traditional Japanese string instrument throughout the whole match. Seriously, what's it's closest relative? That Jarrett/Mantell match with the percussion orchestra? Kana should be NXT's next hire as a dual worker/producer. I wanna see the weird shit she and Jimmy Jacobs come up with together.

First part of the match has the girls trying to match the trippy setting with equally trippy matwork. Meiko with the reverse figure four breaker? Kana chains the stretch muffler into an ankle lock? Is everything about this match delightfully weird? Eventually, we transition into the "Meiko killing the fuck out of people" phase of the match. Meiko, as always, is great at dishing out a beating, and Kana is great at eating a beating and sneaking in comebacks and hope spots, including a really big German suplex.

Uh oh, the music is getting intense! Their health bars must be low! Seriously, they've both been kicked to shit by this point in the match - even though Meiko has been the big aggressor, Kana has chipped away at her enough that you buy her being worn down, too. Meiko with the cartwheel that ends with her kicking a downed Kana in the head, because Meiko even makes cartwheels devastating. I am glancing at the index of nominees for PWO's Greatest Wrestler Ever project, and I'm noticing Meiko hasn't been nominated. I should probably amend that when I'm done writing this up. I have no idea what my ballot for something like that would like right now, but pretty much single-handedly making an otherwise dead genre of wrestling still somewhat worthwhile for 15 years seems like a resume worth considering for something like that.

They start fighting over sleepers. Manzerman is thrilled, I'm sure. In all seriousness, though, it's really well-done, the sleepers are impressively varied, and most of all, this is the rare three-act match where all three acts are very different from each other, but all seem to fit together regardless. In summary, you want all this.

Meiko Satomura vs. Akira Hokuto GAEA 4/29/01 - EPIC

Fair warning, the quality of that link is shit, but it was all I could find. I came from a tape trading era where you kinda had to take what you could get video quality-wise, so this was watchable enough for me. I actually used to have this in better quality on VHS, but my wrestling stuff was, surprisingly, amongst the first to go when I began to purge my physical media some years back, and even if I hadn't, my VCRs have bitten the dust.

That said, so long as I could find this in at least somewhat watchable quality, I kinda had to open with it (well, open as my first original review for this project, anyway), because it's really Meiko's signature match from this period, and if you really want to understand why I'm doing a Complete and Accurate Meiko, you have to understand this period. See, in 2001, the smart fans I paid attention to considered joshi to be good. Very, very good. The stuff GAEA was doing in the late 90's through about 2002 was some of the most praised wrestling in the corners I was following...hell maybe the most praised. And joshi fandom wasn't some weird superniche like it is today. The people who thought GAEA fans were contrarian fools didn't feel that way because joshi was obviously garbage. They felt that way because AJW was obviously better, and everybody knows Momoe Nakanishi was the real future of joshi. GAEA fans, of course, disagreed. Momoe was an overrated hack with bad skin who only got popular because her fans could fantasize about abusing her since she was so good at taking a beating (I'm paraphrasing here, the actual reviews of the time were much more entertaining). The real future of joshi, they contended, was Meiko Satomura.

Actually, the real furture of joshi was no one, because two years after this match, all of of this was gone.

In my near 25 years of wrestling fandom, joshi's near-overnight, near-universally accepted de-evolution into utter crap is one of the most bizarre developments I've ever seen, and yet, it really never gets discussed. I guess I understand why. I mean, it's not like it's something I really noticed at the time. I didn't wake up one day and go "well, joshi sucks now, I'm gonna have some coffee". I just bought some GAEA shows from Jeff Lynch and thought "hmmm, these weren't as good as they looked on paper". I was kinda taking a chance on them, since they weren't getting talked up as much online by that point, but hey, they're not gonna knock one out of the park every night...or every month...or a fucking year, wait, what? So it's not like it was an immediate realization, and by the time it dawned on us that this thing we all used to think was amazing was now lousy, we had become too disinterested in it to investigate further.

To this day, I still don't really understand how it all fell apart, and maybe this project will help make that clear, but regardless, I think the framework you need to fully appreciate Meiko's career is that of the career she was supposed to have. Like I said, this was probably Meiko's signature match pre-genre collapse, and on rewatch, I'm not sure it should be. Akira Hokuto is really the better half of this match, and what problems I have here, I mostly attribute to Meiko's performance. The first half of the match is built around Hokuto ripping up Meiko's arm and Meiko finding openings to kick the shit out of Hokuto when she could. She sold the armwork well when it was being worked over, but when she made her comeback, she quickly dropped it for some big throws, and none of it really figured into the rest of the match, which was mostly just bomb throwing. It's the kind of match layout that a lot of mediocre indy dudes would do and you'd instantly forget about afterwords because all they cared about was getting their shit in. This is a match that got MOTYC plaudits at the time because Meiko came into it with the eye of the tiger and Hokuto was on a bit of a post-prime hot streak that year as I recall, and from early on, they did a great job establishing the feisty young ace-to-be of the company standing up to the legend who was repping for Mayumi Ozaki's goon squad that was running roughshod over GAEA at the time. You buy into the match because you buy into Meiko and Hokuto, and despite a few awkward moments along the way, they reward your faith in them.

I have to talk about the finish, because it is pretty distinct. It's something that stood out enough to me to 2001 to help me call this MOTY, but in 2015, it looks wrong enough to me that I wouldn't even call this a MOTYC. Basically, after a lot of big moves back and forth, Hokuto drops Meiko with the Northern Lights Bomb, but she's too out of it to get up, so the ref lays the ten count on both of them. Lo and behold, Meiko is able to stagger to her feet, and Hokuto isn't, so Meiko Rocky II's her way to victory. On paper, I do think that's a really cool idea: Meiko survived Akira Hokuto, and Hokuto wore herself out trying to take down the sparky young up-and-comer. In practice, watching events unfold leading to that finish, I have a really hard time believing that Hokuto had nothing left in the tank after dropping the Northern Lights Bomb, or at the very least, that she had less than Meiko. That really felt like stretching my suspension of disbelief a bit too far, and that's a shame, because most of the rest of this match is really easy to get wrapped up in.

In retrospect, maybe there were better Meiko matches from this period to highlight here, but I don't mind going with this one to make my point. Just the way they took this wonky match structure that shouldn't work at all and somehow made it awesome just by having really strong characters and a great story and absolute conviction in their performances is really admirable and amazing to watch even with it's flaws. Even if you watch this and don't see that Meiko had "it" here, I'd like to think you'd see why people like me thought she had "it", and why we were sure she was the future.


The future never showed up, but Meiko Satomura is still here. And that's why I'm doing this.

Meiko Satomura vs. Ayako Hamada SENDAI 10/18/14 - GREAT

Mike over at Wrestling KO said this may have been one of the twenty best puro matches of 2014. I'd need to think hard before committing to that claim, but it doesn't seem outlandish. Honestly, this tip-toed right up to EPIC status before a flat finish stopped me from going all the way. They didn't create the kind of atmosphere that helped push Satmoura/Hokuto past it's flaws and limitations, but they did at least make up for it somewhat by being a more technically sound match, and damn entertaining in it's own right.

Consider Ayako Hamada, who made one of the more drastic career transitions post-genre collapse. Late 90's/early 00's Hamada was the spunky young star of ARSION, positioned opposite veteran badasses like Lioness Asuka and Aja Kong, and was generally considered one of the premier PYTs of joshidom. Today, Hamada is a straight up hoss, and I gotta say, as cute as she used to be, I like her way better now that she's mauling people like Little Miss Hashimoto. This also means that Meiko doesn't just get to murder the fuck out of her problems like she would with someone like Kana. She's the smaller, faster, more technically sound one this time, and she has to use those things to her advantage. Not that she doesn't bust out things like the cartwheel kneedrop, because she does. Nor for that matter, is it like Hamada doesn't bust out a pair of moonsaults, one of which goes from the top rope to the floor, because she does. It's just that this is mostly about Hamada as a violent slugger and Meiko trying to outmaneuver her. Look at Meiko's frequent use of the sleeper here. It's a quick and easy way to try and slow down a woman who - left to her own devices - was double stomping the shit out of her knee. It comes into play again at the end when Hamada kicks out of the Death Valley Driver, so Meiko slaps on a sleeper again for a moment, then...just releases it and hits another DVD for the win? That's it? Well, it's more believable than the ending to Meiko/Hokuto, but still, kinda lame. Honestly, if they were going in that direction, they probably should've just had her go out in the sleeper. Still, very well put together, very well executed match.

THE COMPLETE & ACCURATE MEIKO SATOMURA

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Best of Japan 2000-2009: Aja Kong vs. KAORU, Gaea 2/13/00

1. Aja Kong vs. KAORU, Gaea 2/13/00

Aja Kong is my favorite female wrestler of all time and this match is one of my favorite joshi matches of all time (at least it was when I saw it over a decade ago) so I had tons of excitement to rewatch this one. Up until 2000 I had not seen much joshi. I'd seen Bull Nakano in WWF and WCW, and the Kong/Asari Raw match, and the only women's wrestling I had seen that was actually *from* Japan were a couple matches from FMW tapes. So then young me sees this match and was blown to pieces. I haven't seen this match in years and years and it was crazy how much still seemed fresh in my brain.

KAORU is all on fire to start and running circles around Kong and it rules, until she bites off more than she can chew and gets cute, and misses a senton off the top to the floor TAILBONE FIRST through a table. And then we get a brutal (to the shock of everybody) Aja Kong ass beating. Kong tosses her all around the building and god bless KAORU for taking the insane beating. Kong starts bouncing the broken table pieces of KAORU's face, then a couple chairs off her face, then piledrives her on the floor and runs her face first into a wall. And KAORU is busted open and Aja Kong does not give a fuck. All the speed vs. brute strength stuff works great here, with KAORU going back to the plan and ducking around a bunch of Kong backfists and playing dirty right in step by smacking Kong a bunch with a trashcan. However, again, zero fucks were given by Kong. In a crazy moment KAORU goes for a moonsault and lands face first into Kong's boots (while somewhere, a young Mistico was watching and thinking "I like that so much I'm gonna do it EVERY match!") and then when KAORU charges Kong, Kong just alley oops her in one of the more spectacular spots in wrestling history, with KAORU clearing the ropes and just crashing and burning onto the floor. It's like Kong thought of going for a hotshot, but just launched her 15 feet instead. Amazing.

Now it's Kong's turn to get cute and it costs her too. She goes for a dive and KAORU matadors her right into a table, then proceeds to beat the life out of Kong with a piece of broken table and THEN hits her top rope senton through the table (this time with Kong actually on it)! And somehow things get even more sick, as KAORU blocks a spinning backfist with the broken table and then begins slicing and smashing Kong's arm with the broken table. Kong is BLEEDING from her ARM!! Even sicker than Vader blading his chest. And forgive me for flipping out about Kong throwing KAORU to the floor earlier, because KAORU then moonsaults directly onto Kong's arm...while holding that broken table piece. I mean it looked like it just legit crushed Kong's arm.

One of the great things about the match is that all the transitions happen when either worker gets to fancy or starts playing outside their comfort zone. Kong starts to pile on and get cocky, that's when KAORU starts peppering her with stuff. KAORU starts foolishly trying to do power moves or string too many moves together? Kong backfists the hell out of her face. Kong goes to the top rope? KAORU dumps her vertically on her head with the grossest Michinoku Driver you have seen in your life. Kong should have probably died. All of this was so violent. Both women dished out furious beatings, KAORU getting punched and kicked in the face (finished off with a double backfist!) and Kong letting KAORU shine.

This match was just completely brutal. There were so many stiff shots, nasty spills and yet at no point did anything feel like overkill. Everything built, all the shifts in momentum happened logically and it was just one awesome oh shit moment after another. One of the most violent spectacles in wrestling history. I LOVED this.


BEST OF JAPAN MASTER LIST

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