Found Footage Friday: PWFG We Love Murdoch FOREVER 7/27/96

Pro Wrestling Fujiwara Gumi "We Love Murdoch FOREVER" 7/27/96 

MD: Pretty sure this is the last PWFG show ever and it's a Dick Murdoch tribute. I was expecting a blurry handheld but this has commentary and is on a polished home video. They start with a ten bell salute with Fujiwara holding a picture of Murdoch and they show photos of Fujiwara and Murdoch battling over the years throughout, including a great shot of Murdoch about to hit Calf Branding. 

PAS: Incredible that we got a previously unseen PWFG show, honestly one of my favorite promotions ever and there is still gold in them hills.

Arkangel de la Muerte/Blitzkrieg/Hellblazer vs. Suicide Kid/Super Phoenix/Ultraman Jr.

MD: Cagematch only has two Blitzkrieg matches in Japan and this is one. Who knows how reliable that is. It only has 8 matches of his before 99. I don't think I've seen any 1996 Blitzkrieg. Commentary said that this was a lucha libre match with the hot young stars of Mexico. 

Obviously there was a lot going on here. Arkangel and Ultraman were mostly paired, which seemed to make sense. Hellblazer looked like indie lucha Abyss ten years early and he was basing well for everyone, plus had one killer forearm. I wondered if it was actually Blitzkrieg as he had a pared down look and was with the rudos, but yes, yup, can confirm. Definitely Blitzkrieg. You see it in his first handspring into the corner and then you definitely see it when he comes off the top to the floor twisting too many times and far too fast to be just about anyone else. Anyway, that cleared the ring for the finish. Fans weren't into this quite as much as you'd expect but they probably didn't come to this specific show for this specific match either.  

ER: What an unexpected match to find on a PWFG card. The PWFG crowd - for the most part - did not seem to want it on the card. It's not a very good match, but fascinating from a historical standpoint. This is among the earliest Blitzkrieg matches we have (is it the earliest? Feels like it), and it's cool seeing the act in its infancy, tried out on the wrong Japanese crowd (at a time when his style would have fit in perfectly in every other Japanese indy). What's funny, is while the crowd doesn't seem to want this match, Blitzkrieg is the guy who gets the most reaction from them. He is 120 pounds soaking wet, has no presence to speak of, and spends the match pulling up his karate pants that kept slipping down. He also moves like someone who looked insanely far ahead of US juniors wrestling, so even though everything he did made zero impact due to his size, it's still cool seeing him somersault senton himself onto Super Phoenix's face or do some kind of twisting back splash to the floor that gets the crowd temporarily alive. 

I unexpectedly thought Hellblazer looked like the most polished wrestler in the match. Unexpected, because Arkangel is a guy I always go out of my way to see, but here I thought he was mostly stuck doing rote basing for Ultraman and looked more like he was rushing to get out of there. Hellblazer had strikes that would have played in 1996 Japan indies, swung missed clotheslines at Suicide Kid's face and hoped he ducked, caught a slick Suicide Kid slingshot rana on the floor, just seemed like a guy who understood Japanese undercard juniors trios better than the rest of the guys in the match (again, feels absurd to say that about someone who is in a match with Arkangel).  

PAS: If we had gotten this match in 1996 we would have been losing our collective shit, this has a very CMLL Japan feel to it, especially with Archangel and Ultraman Jr. who where staples of that promotion, lots of cool armdrags, and Blitzkrieg was out of his mind in a way you rarely saw back then. He does like two things in the match, but they are both mental.  It isn't necessarily what 50 year old Phil wants out of a PWFG show, but 20 year old Phil would have opened  Schneider Comp 6 with this for sure.

Onryo vs. Pequeno Gefero

MD: On paper, Onryo vs Pequeno anything seems unfair. I have no idea who this guy is and the internet isn't much help. Commentary said he was from Brazil and a mysterious fighter. If this was 8 years earlier, I would have said he could have been Owen. If it was 6 years earlier I would have said it could have been Benoit. He was blonde with a real Calgary feel to him under the mask.

Almost a rough around the edges ECW/pre-Super indie bombfest feel to this. They did a lot of stuff. Lots of bombs. Some of it hit well. Some of it was that "Oooooh" of barely getting a guy over for a power bomb. Onyro started hot with a big dive and I thought he'd not look back but Gefero got a dragon screw and a STF. Onryo had to snatch the ropes with his teeth. After that, Onryo came back with a twisting shoulder tackle off the second rope where the timing was off  and they didn't look back together.

When Onryo finally won the thing with a low blow and small package instead of something more dominant you bought it because nothing conventional was going to stop either of these two on this night. This is the sort of match that probably would have made a comp tape in 1996 but might not in 2026, if that makes sense. 

ER: I am a big fan of Onryo undercard singles matches. Dude is a weirdo who hits hard and can crash harder, and he's weirdly good at getting neat matches out of unknowns or greenhorns. I have no idea who Pequeno Gefero might be - only that his existence implies the existence of a regular size or gigantic Gefero - but damn if he didn't stand firmly in the way of Onryo's low cutting springboard cannonball, taking it right to the chest and face with no soft landing, and keep finding ways to impress. When the match started, I was convinced he was a beginner tasked with catching something far beyond Beginner Level, and by the end he seemed like kind of a badass who was testing Onryo's patience. Who knows where the truth may lie in all that. There are moments where Onryo seems frustrated, where Gefero seems to not know how to follow up...but many more sequences where the match grows to something More.

Moments like Onryo breaking La Tapatia by biting the middle rope, or when Gefero runs too close to the turnbuckles for Onryo to fully rotate on his corkscrew moonsault, so instead it hits Gefero like a torpedo headbutt. After, Onryo drills him with a fast and rough Saito suplex to teach him a lesson, then teaches him the same lesson to make sure he doesn't forget. You'd think that's where the match was headed, towards Onryo imposing his will on the way to the finish...but that's when Gefero goes on a big run, hitting stiff clotheslines, a superplex, even hitting his own torpedo shoulderblock off the buckles to the floor! Where I was expecting Onryo, the assumed vet, to take things home by beating Gefero's ass, the reverse kind of happens? Instead of beating ass to the finish, Onryo looks like he is the one looking for a way out. He punches Gefero in the balls and Gefero reacts to it the way a man not expecting to be punched in the balls would react. When Onryo takes him over with a small package to finish, it is not clean. Gefero gets spiked on his head by Onryo pulling him into the clutch, shoulders forced down with the weight of the hold. Something happened. Maybe nothing nefarious. Maybe just intriguing pro wrestling. 

Masashi Aoyagi/Takashi Okamura vs. Hirofumi Miura/Masayoshi Motegi

MD: This was chaotic, having that mix of karate guys fighting, out of the ring brawling, and weapons and just enough blood that you'd expect from some Japanese indies in the 90s. Miura took a hell of a beating from Okamura and Aoyagi for a chunk of this. He'd try to just eat the kicks and the kicks would eat him. 

They controlled on Aoyagi for a bit later but it was by tossing him out and using weapons. That led to a big comeback from Okamura where he ducked nunchucks followed by him messing around with them in the ring as Aoyagi crushed people on the outside. Miura ended up bloody. There were some pretty believable nearfalls on Okamura. Aoyagi got revenge on everyone on the floor multiple times. It ended a double countout. Everything on this show has hit the marks so far even if the marks for each match were very different.

PAS: Put some dudes in Ki's in 90s indy puro, I am seated. Mirua and Aoyagi are guys who worked a ton as both a tag team and opponents and just slide right into their shtick, which is a great shtick full of straight punches spin kicks and recklessness. We get some cool chair shots where the seat flies off, some nunchucks and blood. I am not sure this match was much higher then the floor for these four guys, but the floor is super high 

Shinichi Nakano vs. Kamikaze

MD: Of guys who were regularly featured in late 80s/turn of the 90s AJPW, Nakano is the least inspired of his generation. He's the Steve O of the era, and watching some of his mid-90s indie work, he had very little to offer the scene except for maybe a meat and potatoes throwback feel which served as contrast to the other styles flying around. Maybe there was something comforting about that? 

This was straightforward as could be, down to a shine/heat/comeback structure you don't even usually get in Japan. He worked the leg early, really bullying Kamikaze. Kamikaze came back as if the leg had never been worked on at all and hit a number of mid level moves like DDTs or things treated mid-level like a Superplex, building to a top rope 'rana near fall. He tried another 'rana but got power bombed and Nakano came back. They traded things a bit. Nakano got a nearfall with his powerslam and won it with a Nothern Lights. It was fine but fine looked paltry in comparison. 

Yoshiaki Fujiwara vs. Tatsuo Nakano

MD: Very weird (to me, at least) to have both Nakanos on the show. We've seen 96 Shinichi vs Fujiwara and while that was fine, I'm very glad to see the more DVDVR coded Nakano against him here. They have Mr. Takahashi from NJPW refereeing this. 

Nakano has come so far from where he was in 1989. He was able to utilize his size advantage to control with holds, not just to try for big bombs and an early win. If he had followed that track, he'd wear down Fujiwara and conserve his own energy instead of the other way around.

But Fujiwara wasn't going to let him do that. There's a point in almost every Fujiwara match where he gets his opponent to "break." It's one of the most fascinating and interesting things in the history of pro wrestling. Here he peppered in headbutts, launched elbows from the ground, and even rode Nakano's back in a way that did little damage but was borderline humiliating.

And Nakano did break, slapping Fujiwara down, hitting a suplex. He went back to holds, a choke from behind, but the die had been cast. The tension then becomes whether or not Fujiwara gambled properly. Did he unleash something he couldn't counter or control or was everything part of a complicated chess game with Fujiwara sitting five moves ahead. 

In this case, as with most cases, Fujiwara was the master. He escaped the choke a few times and eventually Nakano swiped at him once again. Fujiwara dodged it and locked in the armbar and that was it. Ten moves to one, but the one was all that mattered.

PAS: Very cool structure. It felt like Fujiwara remembered the hothead Nakano of 7 years before, who could be counted on to blow his top and make a mistake, while Nakano seemed determined to be patient, use his size and keep his cool. Fujiwara can bring it out of you though, and while Nakano was able to keep it together for a while, eventually he fell into the trap. The thing about Fujiwara is he is always moments away, he can take a beating, get worked over, seem out of it, but make one mistake, lose focus once, and you are done, and eventually Nakano made that mistake.

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Found Footage Friday: Wrestle Yume Factory~!

Wrestle Yume Factory 8/11/96

Pick this up from @itako18jp on Twitter, he is doing god's work

The Madness vs. The Wolf/Cosmo Soldier

MD: A handicap match. Madness is a huge guy with a skeleton mask that he adjusts all the time. Wolf and Soldier start well with Soldier drawing him in with a test of strength challenge and Wolf attacking from behind. They have a flurry of offense but get tossed off on a double pin and really this is just a matter of time until he catches them, and catches them he does. Some of his stuff looks great. He has this suplex into a bodyslam of sorts which is brutal. Some, like his strikes, just kind of look ok. There's a great moment of Soldier bursting off from the side of the screen to break up a pin at one point, and another great one of a roll through pin out of nowhere which almost works. It goes on a bit too long after that though and even though they get one more flurry including a tornado DDT, it's inevitable and after a power bomb, Madness drops one on top of the other for the pin. This had a pretty good balance of protecting Madness but having Wolf and Soldier chip away at him effectively, I thought.

Basara vs. Masakazu Fukuda

MD: I'm not sure we've ever written about Basara here but he had a mask with a big white mustache coming out of it and hair on top the head. Fukuda was mid 20s here and died tragically in 2000. Basara controlled early. He had an answer for everything Fukuda tried and Fukada didn't have an answer. Fukada would take Basara down and try strikes but get his arm caught. They'd get in a headbutt war and Fukuda would get crushed and bump across the ring. When he took over it was by getting in and under and hitting a uranage, first a throw which opened up the match, and then the rock bottom version to win it later. In the middle Basara asserted himself as they ended up hitting bombs to a degree. Basara had a second rope senton and power slam and Fukuda got under him to take him over in a sort of Beach Break. They both threw dropkicks (Basara's surprisingly good). I'm not sure this kept the same narrative focus once it opened up but in general it was fun just to see them throw things at one another. 

Shinichi Shino vs. Shinigami

MD: Shino is later on Fukumen Taro. Shinigami is a blast. He's got caked on grey/green makeup like a ghoul and it's honestly a great look that no one really uses. Plus the gloves and the black coat/pants that makes him look as much like a Castlevania monster as a movie monster. He lumbered down to the ring upsetting chairs and driving fans away. Shono was all pluck and fire. Powerslams and clotheslines but he threw himself into all of them. He capitalized on a missed dropkick and took it to Shinigami, including tossing chairs on him on the outside, but nothing really worked. Shinigami turned it around, buried him under a row of chairs, and then splashed the chairs. Looked like a great bit but it was on the wrong side of the ring so we only had the sense of it. His big move was a claw-assisted uranage and frankly, it's a wonderful piece of business. He dragged Shino into the ring with the claw before hitting it and then down the stretch hit a top rope one before pulling him up and hitting a bridging one. Post-match he went after the timekeeper for no reason and I quite enjoyed the time I spent with Shinigami.

Hector Garza/Silver King/Onryo vs. Masayoshi Motegi/Super Crazy/Kamikaze

MD: All action trios with some great names. I'd say everyone looked pretty good here (Crazy maybe the most dubious if I was pressed), but Silver King looked like one of the best in the world. He was matched up with Kamikaze early and that was the best of the pairings. Everything broke down and we had some very loose rudo beatdown structure on Onryo a couple of times especially, but this was the sort of match where Silver King was just going to super kick someone in the face and take over. Dive train was sensational and Garza looked great in the final pairing. You knew what you were going to most likely get here, but they gave it to you, and that's the important thing. There was also this great bit where Silver King went for a powerbomb onto Garza (his own partner) and alley-ooped him into a splash which looked so smooth that people should reverse engineer and steal it. Variety is the spice of life and this absolutely fit into such a weird and varied card.

Horiyoshi Kotsubo vs. Hirofumi Miura

MD: (EDIT: According to Sebastian I got Kotsubo and Miura confused, so just flip them in the below. I haven't done that in a while). Horiyoshi Kotsubo is Tsubo Genjin. Here he has a karate gimmick with a black gi, the sides of his head shaved, a goatee, and nunchucks. But it's Miura who's fun here. It's scrambly to start, but Miura goes to the slaps first. Then he hits a great spinning backfist and later on a very quick tree-of-woe/short dropkick combo. Kotsubo has some nice pokey punches in a mount at least, and he wins it with a submission that is very hard to explain but certainly novel, starting with a STF but then barring the other leg. Not a ton to say about this one but I need to watch that Aoyagi vs. Miura match Phil covered here now. 

Yoshiaki Fujiwara vs. Shinichi Nakano - GREAT

MD: I've spent a lot of time with 1989-1990 Shinichi Nakano, and quite a bit with him from the years prior, and there isn't a whole lot there, let me tell you. He was fine. Absolutely fine. Inoffensive. Sometimes could show some fire. He wasn't the guy you wanted in a Jr. Title match (not relative to Fuchi or Momota or Inoue or Joe Malenko) or in a tag, except for maybe if that tag was against guys like Hansen and Tenryu. Then he could take a beating and come back with a bit of fire only to get beaten down once more. Actually, 1989 Fujiwara vs 1989 Nakano would have been a blast.

Thankfully, this was pretty good along those lines too. Nakano was older, more grizzled, but a ton of this match was him doing something, paying for it, and getting beaten and stretched by Fujiwara, which really, is exactly what you'd want. Early on, he tried to push Fujiwara into the corner. That didn't go well for him. Fujiwara turned him around, punched him in the face, and then played to the crowd that he slapped him instead, all before goozling him in the ropes. Later on, Nakano tried again to stomp Fujiwara in the corner and the greatest defensive wrestler of all time, snatched his foot midstomp and hit a rare dragon screw leg whip, just like that.

At one point, he did have some success with things Fujiwara had less defense against, armdrags, leading to a cross arm breaker and Fujiwara escaping to the outside. He then got some nice clubbering in with Fujiwara on the apron stretched over the top rope. All well and good if he didn't try for a posting, but he did, and you can't slam Fujiwara's head into the metal connector obviously. Headbutts ensued, followed by Fujiwara doing his own mirrored clubbering and then hilariously teasing a dive. 

What else did Nakano try? Oh, a leglock. Went ok for a bit until Fujiwara snatched a leg of his own and slowly and patiently worked things all the way around so that Nakano was on his stomach and Fujiwara was bending a leg back. And then down the stretch, he hit a power bomb and a suplex and locked in a half crab, but he couldn't put Fujiwara away and when he went back to the well for another suplex, everyone watching knew exactly what was going to happen. Fujiwara jammed it and jammed Nakano down right into the armbar. While I may have hoped that Nakano had become some sort of secret master over the 90s, what I can say about him instead is that he was still a good sport, and that gave Fujiwara lots of room to stretch (figuratively, literally, metaphorically, however you want it).

PAS: This was pretty much a Fujiwara one man show, Nakano was a fine sparring partner, wrestling chicken stock but Fujiwara bought all of the spices here. Of course those are incredible spices, countering everything Nakano tried, backing him into the corner and working him over. I have written time and time again about how Fujiwara is the greatest defensive wrestler of all time, and here he is again throwing up another countering masterpiece as easy as a Nikola Jokic 40/14/12 stat line. The kind of thing that would be legendary for anyone else is pedestrian for him.

COMPLETE AND ACCURATE FUJIWARA

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Masashi Aoyagi Got Pistols in his Pockets Boys

Masashi Aoyagi vs. Hirofumi Miura WYF 3/20/98 - EPIC

PAS: This is really the platonic ideal of an awesome Aoyagi match, a pair of guys in Gi's beating the every loving shit out each other with kicks and punches. Aoyagi comes into the match with a kneebrace and Mirura just lasers in on it with violent kicks and stomps right on the brace, one of the nastier limb destructions I can remember seeing. It reminded me a bit of the time when Great Sasuke was going to get knee surgery and he spent the matches right before it having Dick Togo senton full on his knee joint. Aoyagi was on defense for most of the match, but had moments of just unleashing hard kicks and punches to keep Mirura off of him, including just bisecting him with body kicks.  Finish was awesome with a limping Aoyagi just drilling Mirura with a check hook, knocking him stiff right before Aoyagi collapses in pain. It felt like a legendary UFC finish, with someone pulling out a KO at the last moment. Incredible stuff, man I love cool wrestling. 

JR: Sometimes it can be this simple. A man in black, sullen and petulant. Another man comes out wearing white. He’s already limping, sighing before he even gets in the ring. A sympathetic, beleaguered hero. Aoyagi, our hero here, sells his knee before the match begins. For Miura, his opponent, he creates a target. For the audience he creates a road map.

Miura attacks the knee with a sort of professional elegance. Until Aoyagi forces him to change, he will repeat his tactics over and over again. Miura looks great on offense here, finding ways to change angles to apply pressure to keep the narrative moving forward without shifting any focus away from Aoyagi’s knee.

Aoyagi, for his part, sells wonderfully. It’s so rare to see someone sell a limb on offense instead of just after offense is completed. It’s rarer still to have a performer find ways to let the audience see the wheels turning. Aoyagi’s first big offensive move is a rolling kick, a move where he has no plant leg. He wouldn’t even have to chamber his knee. Later, he does a big sequence while holding the ropes for support, ending with an axe kick. The kicks all have weight because we can feel how tired Aoyagi is. He’s swinging big, finding ways to end it. He knows he is fighting from behind.

Miura finds such simple ways to escalate here. Getting more desperate as his focus fails to yield results, he grabs at the knee brace of Aoyagi. This is brilliant. It toes the line of illicit and disrespectful, pushing Miura from a violent upstart into something much more villainous. Truly, wrestling doesn’t need much more than this. This is the monomyth of wrestling played out on so small a scale we are forced to focus on each detail; one man forced to confront his heroism while his body fails him while the other faces the abyss and finds himself reborn as something worse.

Of course, the hero triumphs. A true knockout blow. Aoyagi, surrounded by followers, sits over Miura. He is pulled off, rescued from without. He returns, weakened but victorious.

COMPLETE AND ACCURATE AOYAGI

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