Tuesday is French Catch Day: Cohen! Shadow!

Georges Cohen vs Black Shadow 7/16/83

MD: This is part of a show with a Flesh Gordon/Walter Bordes vs Eliot Fredrico/Kato Bruce Lee match from the previous week too and I kept that because the version we had before and covered here. This doesn't have the audio timecode issue though so it's an improvement. The Cohen vs Shadow match is new to us.

SR: Cohen has had one of the best singles matches of all the French matches that we've seen in 1968. 15 years later, he sure is aged, but still quite on top of the game. By 1983 these matches had approximated the rhythm closer to a lucha match. Less extensive working of holds, more complicated rope running and snappy armdrags with a rudo bumping a lot. It's a fascinating evolution. Cohen showed he was definitely not coasting by his old skillset. He could do all that. And Black Shadow was an excellent bumper. There may be an argument that the guys working France may have been better rudos than the Mexicans. I mean, Black Shadow had no problem bumping around for Cohen for like 10 minutes straight here, flinging himself into armdrags and outside of the ring. They would work some holds for a bit, and then go back the bumping and stooging. It's really fun to watch. Shadow actually ends up taking up the match working over Cohen with some mean stomps and punches. Nothing mindblowing, it does the job. Shadow actually put up a bit of a fight here but ended up falling to Cohens skill anyways. Perhaps they were a bit long in the tooth here going 20 minutes with the rudo beatdown being a bit much but it was a good match.

MD: Cohen sure was good. The first ten minute had him totally in control and some of his stuff was so slick. He'd torque the arm and then vault over for the headscissors takeover or bump himself with a front flip to set up the bridging headcissors roll over. The rope running was very good. The fans were into it. Shadow did a great job of feeding and running into it all, really bumping all over the place for Cohen. Very entertaining stuff and like I said, slick, just slick. There were two bits of heel control here. Both were quite similar, with a lot of stomps and punches, slamming the head into the turnbuckle, and tossing Cohen out. In the first, Cohen was able to mount a comeback because the ref was getting in the way of Shadow. Cohen went too big on his comeback an the ref got in his way though, letting Shadow take back over. The second, which got over big, had Shadow toss him out one too many times and Cohen yank him out from the floor. Cohen was able to catapult him into the ref too, satisfying everyone. You had the sense (and the footage might justify having this sense) that these two had worked together for years. It showed here. It's late in the game for the French Catch footage, but from a skill standpoint alone, this really does stand up to almost anything in the world in 1983.

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Tuesday is French Catch Day: Angelito! Gordon! KBL! Frederico! Cohen! Doukhan! Shadow!

Angelito/Flesh Gordon vs Kato Bruce Lee/Eliot Frederico 7/28/85

Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pZGPE7J7QQ&ab_channel=MattD

Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pL2SebLfXGQ&ab_channel=MattD

MD: This was a very good match with a very bad finish. It's a shame because even if this had a typical last fall/finish, it would have been one of the best matches we have from France in the 80s. Frederico is a guy that I wish had come along twenty years earlier. They gave him a big entrance here with a motorcycle and the full leatherman gimmick (with Kato playing along). He's one of the absolute best punchers we've seen in the footage but also a pretty great base in taking Angelito and Gordon's stuff, and some of Angelito's stuff was pretty complex and out there. Kato Bruce Lee is more of a goof. He did more fake karate here, but he was mainly a punch/kick kind of guy who could hold his own on exchanges and stooge well. Part of what made this work was that it had a slightly different structure, with the early even exchanges/stylist showcase giving way to heat after Frederico opened up with the fists and Angelito missed a senton bomb. They took the first fall which is usually a good sign for these matches. Then, they survived a pretty robust comeback to take over with a lot of cheating and misdirection to force a second bit of heat before a second comeback and the end to the second fall. If the last fall had been celebratory and full of heel miscommunication and flashy ref comeuppance spots, everything would have been fine. They only did a bit of that before the ref got fed up with Angelito and Gordon's clowning of the heels and DQed them after Angelito went down to count a pin of Gordon's. The heels took the trophies and no one left satisfied. Otherwise, it was a good one with plenty of slick individual moments though. 

Georges Cohen/Gass Doukhan vs Black Shadow/Kato Bruce Lee 8/10/85

MD: Another skilled tag from some aging heroes and villains. Well, and Kato Bruce Lee, who is most likely younger and coming into his own, a real over the top shitheel. You get kind of an undercard mid 80s WWF guy feel from him, like an Iron Mike Sharpe, but he's really throwing his all into it, bellowing and putting on a fit when things don't go his way but more than happy get bumped over the top too. Black Shadow, up in years now, was more likely to get knocked out between the top two ropes, or, occasionally, dive to nowhere during a rope running sequence.

If absolutely pressed, I'd probably tell you that the French tags would have been more enjoyable total packages if they became one-fall matches in the 60s like the singles matches did. We'd probably lose some nice long mat sequences, but there's a very good first fall in here and then some additional stuff which isn't bad on its own, that's quite good on its own really, but that might have been better served packed into that first fall. The exchanges were good. The cheating was fine (thought he heel-leaning ref was a bit much in this one, especially as he never got his comeuppance). We've been watching Cohen for twenty years and he's a great face-in-peril, especially here when they were beating him around the crowd, right in front of a bunch of kids. Doukhan was more of a Ben Chemoul sort, unique in appearance, stylized in movement, now greying in the hair but still able to go. They were true pros. Again, the first fall had the usual ten minutes of exchanges and ten minutes of heat and a proper quick comeback. But they went back to the cheating for the second fall, had another quick comeback in the third. It was spirited with the heels run around the ring, but it all could have been a tighter one-fall package. It's far too late in the game to be complaining about structure. I've learned to live with it and learned to love it. It's been three decades and hundreds of tags like this. They never conformed into what I wanted but I learned to find the joy in it regardless.

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Tuesday is French Catch Day: Gordon! Bordes! Frederico! Kato! Mercier! Montreal! Magnier! Fuji!

Elliot Frederico/Kato Bruce Lee vs Flesh Gordon/Walter Bordes 7/9/83
 
MD: Now this had some heat and was all the better for it. They did about ten minutes of exchanges before Gordon missed a dropkick and they went into heat and comebacks for most of the rest of the 30. In the first fall, that meant two or three hot tags too, one of which set up by Gordon catching a kick and driving forward with a trip that worked really well. The heels were more fresh and kept in control though. They used ref distractions for double teams so that even as the stylists came in hot, they got knocked back down. It finally built to a big sequence where they were able to work together to end the fall. The heels took back over in the second fall though, winning with a double team and this continued until the third when chaos would ensue with a giant dive to the outside (and then back in) by Bordes.

So that was the structure, always a welcome one. The details were good too. Gordon had come into his own with the new character, fast and fiery with sympathetic selling and that star nature of always coming back at least a little from underneath (plus that great flip around mare finisher that people badly need to steal). Bordes, older, some hair going n the back of his head, continued to pick up new tricks. They both seemed to integrate some of those headlock flip about tricks that only Petit Prince had done previously and Bordes had a really cool double hand on the mat block to an arm wringer throw. Kato Bruce Lee showed no signs of working a character named like that and was more of a Mike Sharpe style bruiser. Frederico had leather, a bald head, a mustache, and a pretty cool lifting choke towards the end. You watch this and it's hard not to think that they couldn't get a few more years out of what they had. Gordon came off as a solid heir to Leduc, Corn, Corne, Mercier, Ben Chemoul, Bordes, the last of which was still going strong. The heels were competent and compelling, and sometimes they got the structure exactly right to build the crowd to a fevered pop. We're into 1983, but this one simply worked.

SR: 2/3 Falls going about 25 minutes. Flesh Gordon debuts. And France would never be the same! In all honesty though, this was really good. Young Flesh Gordon was a pretty good technico, no kidding. Really dug the luchariffic rhythm of the early exchanges. And Bordes as his maestro partner was just ridiculous, even hitting a plancha to the outside. Most importantly, this felt like it had spark. It also had the kind of recognizable southern structure that people can recognize. Frederico & Kato Bruce Lee won‘t set your world on fire if you‘ve seen Anton Tejero and Albert Sanniez, but they knew how to beat someone up and make it not boring.

Guy Mercier & Marcel Montreal vs Fred Magnier & Yasu Fuji 7/30/83

SR: I have a suspicion that this is from the 70s due to the way it‘s filmed, but Fuji is listed as only having come to Europe in the 1980s. But what do we know. Anyways, this was pretty mediocre and brutally long so you don‘t really want to watch it.

MD: Sebastian got here first and had me worried. Overall, I'm not as low on this as he was, though I agree that it's a bit long for what it is, and it's also missing certain elements. There really isn't the sort of mat wrestling and in-and-out holds that you'd expect from almost every French Catch match we've seen so far. What we do get is generally from Mercier, as the heels are all stomping and hammering and leaning, with just a bit of power moves out of Fuji (primarily a lifting drop onto the top rope). And they do control a lot of the match. That's not necessarily a bad thing. Montreal takes a lot in the second fall, but when he's in control it's sitting in a headlock as much as anything else.

I do think Fuji brought a different presence at least. By this point he'd been active for quite a while and he was still a year or two off from being Super Strong Machine #3 but he had size and reach (especially stomping from the outside). Magnier is a doughy cheapshot-spewing stooge, a sort of poor man's Gastel, but it was still nice to see him again. And yes, Mercier still did all the hits, the spin out takedown (blocked once by Fuji but hit twice), the headstand headscissors takeover, grinding the knee and the nose at the same time, etc. The heels distracted the ref well at times and it made the two big comebacks in the match matter more, but again, it was all a bit lacking. You wanted more heel miscommunication spots and more dumb bits with Saulnier as ref and just more wrestling overall. There were still things to like here; it would have just been a lot better if they stopped at the end of the first fall. It was one of those.

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