Found Footage Friday: BRAZOS~! CASAS~! LOVE MACHINE~ BEYER~! LUBICH~!

Dick Beyer vs. Bronco Lubich NWA Upstate 1962

MD: Just watching them get introduced, I half wondered if this really was Beyer. We couldn't get close enough to see the nose and the frame from a distance seemed a bit off even for the youngest Beyer I would have seen, but no, within the first few seconds, he gets Lubich in a full nelson and repeatedly slams his head in the top rope and that was enough to convince me. I'd continued to be convinced as the match went on. He wrestled with incredible confidence and presence and ingenuity and imagination. That's Dick Beyer.

He was given the Destroyer gimmick this year so this was towards the end of him wrestling unmasked. Lubich was longer in the tooth and may have even been more managerial. They mention a birthday cake at the start (a birthday cake angle in 1962!) and Poffo (presumably Angelo) as allied with Lubich but hard to say exactly what was going on there. If it's documented somewhere I'd love to hear about it. This was all about Beyer having his way with Lubich though, with Bronco finding ways to get some shots in at the margins. For instance, Beyer dropped him into the leg nelson (with quickfire legwhacks) but right on the rope break, Bronco was on him. Or Beyer got him with an airplane spin but when he went for the second, Lubich grabbed the rope and landed on him. Or after a Giant Swing, Lubich rolled out and was able to ambush Beyer and drive his head into the side of the ring.

Lubich was credibly tough but Beyer looked like the best wrestler in the world and kept on him, finally beating him with a rolling bodyscissors sort of deal and a dropkick. Just a great look at Beyer in 62 right before he'd become the Destroyer.

ER: I wonder if there were any Sell The Arm fans in 1962 Buffalo who were upset at the ways Lubich never paid much mind to Dick Beyer standing and stomping and dropping knees onto his arm and shoulder. Some smart guy in Buffalo rolling his eyes after Dick Beyer gets run the length of the ring apron and flies off into the ringpost, because Bronco was in the ring holding up both arms instead of rubbing his shoulder. Maybe that man existed, because if Dick Beyer was moving like this in 1962 Buffalo then I'd believe anything. Beyer was so far ahead of his time and moved like no other American wrestler, so quick and crafty while built like a spark plug, an acrobat with thump. I love the desperate little ways Lubich tries to stop the onslaught, with his only chance briefly shifting his weight by grabbing for the ropes. If he wasn't a manager, it was a great "wrestling like a manager" performance against one of the coolest to do it. 

Los Brazos vs. Jaque Mate/Dusty Wolfe/The Viking Monterrey 1992

MD: I have no idea who the Viking is. I know it's our job to figure this stuff out for you but no idea. Past one fun staggering bump into the corner off a Porky headbutt, we don't really care about him anyway. Dusty Wolfe is doing his best Jimmy Jack Funk impression with a silly mask but we don't really care about him either in this one. We're laser focused on El Brazo and Jaque Mate, because right from the get go, Mate opens Brazo up and never, ever looks back.

Brazo spends a chunk of this out on the floor bleeding buckets. They seem almost reluctant to put the camera on him before he towels off which is something I'm not sure I've ever really seen in lucha from this era. That's how much blood we're talking about. And while Mate's happy to beatdown the other Brazos with his compatriots, he makes sure to come back out to do more damage. At one point he goes for a chairshot and a fan puts a chair up to try to block it. They even play music to try to rouse the Brazos.

Eventually, Viking tosses El Brazo back in and he goes wild, crashing across the ring, rubbing his own blood on his fist to use it as a weapon, tearing at Mate's mask and then opening him up on the outside. It's a great Brazos comeback but ends abruptly with a Mate foul that the refs miss and the rudos taking it. Great bloody mayhem here.

ER: What a world. Exhausted on a Friday night, I throw this on and am taken away to another world where somebody's 1992 Monterrey tape survived and we get a perfect color distorted tracking lined masterpiece that may as well have been from another dimension. This is a bloody match even within the annals of bloody lucha matches, with Brazo's entire face and torso covered in blood maybe two minutes in, and a long primera beatdown where Porky and Oro also get busted open. It's an all time bizarre rudo team as Jaque Mate recruits two real American goobers - longtime WWF job guy Dusty/Dale Wolfe and another guy doing a truly great job Bad Brody impression - and they all punch the shit out of Los Brazos. I actually liked The Viking as a poor man's Sylvester Terkay, and I thought Wolfe did a real good job punching and scraping away at Porky. Wolfe's punches to bust Porky open were on point and he kept doing a bunch of cool things to work over a cut, like scraping his boot eyelets across Porky's face. 

But yes, the real show is the brutal beating El Brazo takes at the hands of Mate, and the way the crowd physically rallied behind a man completely covered in blood. Men in white dominant polo shirts are coming to Brazo's aid as he's trying to catch his breath and maintain his balance, and then things get surreal when they start playing music mid-match. With the hazy video and choppy tracking, it feels like another channel is bleeding over into ours. Brazo is bleeding out and suddenly an angelic choir is playing over the top of it and it elevates everything to high art. Porky and Oro were great at taking secondary beatings throughout, knowing their brother was the show but not content with hanging back and out of the way. Porky was still in there taking backdrops and getting worked over by both Americans. The Brazos comeback in the Segunda, with a primera dragged out long enough to build that anticipation, was shockingly brief and even more shockingly ended in a Brazos loss. We never get the full satisfaction of Wolfe or Viking getting busted open, even if we get Porky and Oro throwing headbutts that look like they should open cuts. As we eagerly await these American goons getting squashed in various ways by Porky, Jaque knees Brazo in the balls for an undignified loss, music still playing, his brothers confused. Now we need another 30+ year old Monterrey tape to surface that has Los Brazos' bloody revanche.   

Love Machine/Apolo Dantes/La Fiera vs. Negro Casas/Hijo del Solitario/Stuka Monterrey 

MD: Stuka was a replacement for Black Magic. Everyone else was fine in this one, but this was the Casas vs Love Machine show. Two dynamic, imaginative wrestlers, who knew how to mug and make the most of things. You always see something new with both of them and they were matched up here. We start with Casas beating down Love Machine with a table, including jumping on it repeatedly from the apron with it on top of him. Later on, Love Machine gets some great revenge, taking Casas's head and driving it down into the ground from the apron before chasing him into the crowd. And then towards the end, we get the spot that closes the circle, with Love Machine basically punching the table towards Casas. It's just a joy to watch these guys do their thing. Completely iconic stuff.

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MLJ: Recent Uploads: Love Machine, Último Dragón, Vampiro vs Black Magic, Negro Casas, Pirata Morgan

1992-09-18 @ Arena México
Love Machine, Último Dragón, Vampiro vs Black Magic, Negro Casas, Pirata Morgan

I really meant to get back to Sombra and I will soon but Dataintcash has been uploading so I wanted to give some of these a look. There's another Robin Hood match up and an Estrada vs Fiera match which I'm going to give my vaunted colleagues a few more days to get to before I look at, but it sounds great on paper. This, though, took me by surprise. I'll watch any Negro Casas match that comes down the pipeline, but I didn't really have high hopes for this one. I was wrong.

It was one of the craziest lucha brawls I've ever seen. It didn't have the sort of brutal fury you get from the 80s rudos vs rudos wars, but it was just constant action, with all of the rudos playing their roles so well, and all of the tecnicos as endlessly spirited and fiery, even as a framing device, which I'm not sure I've ever seen before. Usually, when the rudos are beating on one tecnico, it's because they've managed to neutralize the others. Here, it was often two on one because one of the other tecnicos was chasing the third rudo around the ring. Crazy stuff with a lot of visceral hatred.

Morgan immediately felt like the best possible Vampiro opponent here. All Vamp really needed to do was bleed and sell and occasionally dive across the ring at whatever rudo last wronged him, using his height to make that visually striking. It didn't often go so well for him, save for one big revenge spot where he got to suplex Black Magic outside of the ring. Morgan was just awesome at bullying him and bleeding him, with all three rudos constantly cutting him off. There's a hair match between Morgan and Vampiro and I actually want to watch that now; it's nothing I've ever really thought of seeking out before.

I think this was shortly after Magic's turn and he and Barr got the very most out of that, with Barr first frustrated and then increasingly furious and deranged in his attacks. Casas was glorious, both as the rudo getting chased around the ring the most and as the guy taking the most sheer enjoyment from the beating they were giving out. He was always in the right place at the right time to help with a cut off or push someone off the ropes or get in an extra shot for good measure, and he made Dragon look like a million bucks by bumping for his kicks. I value old Casas just as much as young Casas, but I'll also freely admit that physically, he could do things well above and beyond when he was younger. He never had to, but they almost always add something unique and special to a match.

This was one of those vaguely unsatisfying two fall matches with the rudos controlling most, the tecnicos getting a comeback win in the middle, and then the rudos getting disqualified in the end. Of that sort, you either have the desperation DQ foul because the tecnicos are too much or when the rudos get DQ'd because they're just beating on the tecnicos too much. Both build heat for another match, but I kind of like the latter since it allows for more face saving on the rudo side. That's what we had here. I'd suggest watching this just for the breathless energy of it and Morgan and Casas playing their roles so well. This was really the way to manage Vampiro at this stage.

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MLJ: Recent Uploads: Espectro Jr., La Fiera, Satánico vs Black Magic, Love Machine, Último Dragón

1992-04-10 @ Arena Coliseo
Espectro Jr., La Fiera, Satánico vs Black Magic, Love Machine, Último Dragón

I don't know about you guys but my favorite lucha themed holiday isn't Dia de Muertos but "whenever dataintcash posts new lucha." I realize that there's a near endless amount of lucha I haven't seen. I realize I never exactly finished the DVDVR 80s set. I realize this, but it's still kind of a blast when something previously unavailable online pops up.

I like nice tight little series, a trios or two and a singles match at the end of it. Here, we've got a Coliseo mini feud, a trios match, a singles match. Nice and neat. Norman Smiley is a guy who got good at some point but I'm not convinced in the least that 1992 was that point. I haven't been impressed yet as he seemed to almost be working a strongman gimmick with lots of posing. I have a feeling his rudo work is stronger than his tecnico work (which is true for just about everyone, it seems) but I haven't seen much of that. Frankly, I'm more interested in this as a Fiera showcase. It's another singles match for him from the early 90s. We've just got to get to it through a pretty crazy trios.

I've seen very little Art Barr in Mexico. This seems early for him there and he was a tecnico which also seems wrong somehow. This was just a week after the Panther mask match, and yeah, how have I not seen that? Just looking online quickly, most of the build isn't online so that'd be frustrating but I have to still check it out at some point. I go around looking at random Panther lightning matches and not that? Anyway, yeah, this was a week after that, and Panther was hanging out with the rudos selling the piledriver that finished it, neckbrace and all, well-appreciated in an age of Rush doing package piledrivers and what not. Also appreciated was Love Machine bursting out to attack Panther. Hell of a way to start the proceedings. Here's the newly unmasked Barr sort of basking in it all:

Probably the best part was that right after the assault, after the other rudos batter him away from Panther, Fiera, who had a dog collar and a chain around this time, immediately smashed Magic with it and hung him over the top rope. They didn't waste any time getting into it while still building off of the giant match that had just happened between Panther and Machine. So we had a more than solid rudo beatdown. Rudo Fiera certainly was spirited, blasting Magic and Dragon with the chain, and finishing the fall off with a foul while the ref was distracted.

The match never really settled down into something that felt controlled or structured. There was always something wild about it, as if it'd get thrown out at any moment. I think that's an energy Barr brought to the table really, even when he was getting swarmed. In the segunda, the tecnicos kept trying to fight back but couldn't get traction until Magic reversed a whip. Dragon was happy to blow mist all over the place (though never at his opponents); it's funny how that part of his gimmick disappeared over the years. Eventually things ended up as Magic vs Fiera again, finishing with a German from Magic. I have no idea what happened, though, as while it was a nice suplex, Smiley couldn't hold the bridge. I think he might have landed on his head. The ref just gave it to the tecnicos.

Segunda was a bit of a reset, with the highlight being Satanico and Dragon having a short but really good exchange. Satanico never disappears in these matches. Here, he seemed to be directing traffic, like always, with the express intent of getting revenge on Machine for what happened to Blue Panther. I love watching Satanico do his stuff: just little things like his mannerisms here as they were triple goozling Magic in the corner:

It's hard to say that this broke down at the end, since it had never really come together except for as a slightly focused brawl, but it became even more chaotic in the end, with Dragon hitting the Santo corner tope on Satanico, and Espectro (who did pretty much disappear in the match) just rolling around with Barr for far too long in order to distract the ref and allow Fiera to crotch Magic to set up the match for the following week.

We end up watching plenty of matches that are ultimately a mess. This was one of them but it was heated with some great punches from Fiera and Satanico and a lot of energy from Dragon and Barr. I'm real curious what Smiley is going to look like in the mano a mano match and we'll look at that next time.

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