New Footage Friday: Moondogs, Aoyagi, Mr. Fuji, State Patrol, Can Ams, Matsunaga

Moondogs/Mr. Fuji vs. Pedro Morales/Ivan Putski/Tony Garea WWF Kuwait 1983

ER: I loved this! I loved it so much I wound up watching it twice, back to back. That is the first time that has ever happened with any match involving Garea, Putski, Fuji, etc. But here it is and it's totally great. These Kuwait shows seem like an absolute blast from the wrestlers' perspective, as every old gag gets a gigantic reaction. The crowd responds huge to every single thing they're supposed to respond to, so we get a simple match with a ton of heat and rabid excitement for the simplest exchanges. Fuji is fantastic in this playing a great stooge. He gets his salt knocked out of his hands by Putski, pinballs around so he can get punched by all the faces a couple times, does some funny misdirection, scrambles on his knees to tag out, all the exact things this crowd wants to see. The faces don't need to do much, the fans are reacting to Fuji and the Moondogs (if that doesn't sound like a cool as hell Hanna-Barbera crime solving show I don't know what does) reacting to the faces. Putski has a lot of energy and the crowd rightfully reacts huge to all of his headlock punches, and I cannot imagine what they even thought of the round hairy Moondogs. Garea comes in and does a lot that one headlock that you've seen Garea do, but soon you got Rex holding him in a long as hell bearhug, building to that tag, and Kuwait warms my heart by getting so damn into this bearhug. It's beautiful. We get the Moondogs cutting off the ring and it's satisfying as hell, because you know the roof blows off the place when Garea finally tags in Putski. It wraps pretty quickly after this (all of the Kuwait matches we have end very suddenly on things that weren't typical finishers), but honestly they could have kept this up for 30 minutes. This was simple, insanely effective wrestling, and instantly became my favorite match I've seen of several of these guys.

PAS: Pretty fun to watch the crowd go absolutely bananas for really simple wrestling. Every time Putski throws hands they totally lose there shit. Moondogs and Fuji are fine as foils, and everything was executed well (outside of the finish which looked botched) This exact same match wouldn't work well in the Boston Garden, but in front of a crowd that hadn't seen all the shortcuts before it was a total blast.


Ryuma Go/Masahiko Takasugi vs. Masashi Aoyagi/Mitsuhiro Matsunaga Pioneer Senshi 1990

PAS: This is exactly what you want it to be. Go throws the prematch flowers at Aoyagi and gets met with a big spin kick and we are off. It feels ragged and unprofessional like the best Karate Gi matches do. Go bleeds early and Aoyagi bleeds in the middle of the match, and blood all over a Gi is still one of the coolest visuals in wrestling. The Go/Takasugi team is perfectly willing to deliver dangerous looking stomps to the back of the head. Really fun to watch young lion Matsunaga working as a Aoyagi dojo boy, what a weird career he had.

ER: I dug this, as I am going to do with a loosely constructed karate gi guys vs. trad pro wrestlers match. It took a little while to really get percolating, overcame some stumbliness from Matsunaga, and blossomed into a great mix of blood and shoot throws and unprofessional kicks. Go and Takasugi were the owners and headliners of Pioneer, and I love when a couple of karate goons kick the tar out of authority. I didn't really see how Aoyagi got busted open, but it's a real gusher, sending rivers down his chest and covering his face, and around this time Aoyagi and Matsunaga start really taking things out on Go. I really liked the Aoyagi/Matsunaga dynamic, with Matsunaga throwing off balance kicks and kind of getting in over his head, occasionally getting his leg worked over or picked up and slammed hard, with Aoyagi always coming in to save him by kicking Go or Takasugi in the head, and Go especially takes the messy end of these kicks. I love those moments in Aoyagi matches where he violently kicks someone to the floor, always landing one of his hardest kicks in the match and then shoving someone unceremoniously to the ground with both feet.


State Patrol vs. The Can Am Express AJPW 6/4/91

ER: This was a good match, but not as great as the match I had built up in my head. This didn't quite have the cohesion or build that the greatest AJ tag discoveries have, and doesn't seem to ramp up as much as it should. It's a 18 minute match that feels more like they were pacing out 27 minutes, so we somehow get a ton of action while also feeling that we got things cut short. We don't have a lot of State Patrol in All Japan even though they did several tours. They were a team I always loved in WCW and feel like part of a whole wave of WCW guys who got overshadowed at the time by people who liked Benoit, Regal, and Malenko, even though undercard guys like Buddy Lee Parker or Gambler or even Vincent were working similar, or complementary styles at the same time to much less acclaim. So here's the State Patrol against one of the thee tape trading teams of the 90s. Kroffat/Furnas were an incredible on paper team who didn't always deliver their on paper potential, but always had a high floor due to the unique athletics of both men.

Tom Magee is a guy getting talked about a lot now, which is funny for several reasons, one of which (that I haven't seen discussed) is that Tom Magee's ceiling was Doug Furnas. We have 10-15 years of Furnas footage out there that was hot at the time but nobody cares about now, where you can see every positive Magee trait executed by a guy who was as good as he was gonna get. Furnas got effortless height on leapfrogs and could snap off a few press slams like it was nothing. Tom Magee was never going to be Hogan and it's foolish if anybody ever actually said that. It's unfair and stupid when current baseball prospects get compared to Mike Trout. There is zero chance of that happening. But Doug Furnas was cool and he's the best possible Magee. State Patrol are two guys who can work stiff and dish back, and so are the Can Ams, so at minimum you knew you were gonna get a couple hard forearm shots, a couple tough suplexes, and a couple nice double teams. We got it all and it was good.

James Earl Wright is a fun guy who got even less exposure than Buddy Lee Parker, as he never had that "Power Plant Trainer" fame like Buddy Lee. But Wright was damn good and threw himself into offense really well (always taking high backdrops and fast suplex bumps) but also committing to his own offense. He throws low fast clotheslines and I love the State Patrol's forearm/German suplex spot. Both guys do nice elbow drops which is a favorite move of mine that has been slowly phased out without anybody noticing the past decade. Kroffat throws a mean sidekick and fastest possible snap suplex, Furnas hits hard pivot belly to bellys, we get a cool misdirection into the finish with State Patrol hitting a top rope shoulderblock to each other when Kroffat flips out of a suplex, and the crowd did keep getting louder. But I think these teams have even better in them, so I'm left merely smiling that I got to see them fight at all.

PAS: I actually think Eric is underrating this, which is surprising because this is the sort of thing I would expect him to overrate. This was just a tightly worked powerhouse tag match, the kind of thing you might expect from a great Stieners match. State Patrol landed everything with a thud, especially great work from James Earl Wright, who was throwing heat, great looking lefty lariats, big elbow drops, nice forearms. That forearm/German suplex double team was completely awesome and should be stolen by a half a dozen indy wrestling teams right now. Loved watch Furnas stretch out and show off, and his Frankenstiener finish looked about as good as that move has ever looked.

MD: This is from a stacked show, stacked enough that I thought about pressing us to review the whole thing. Instead, we'll fill in gaps with the five, or so, key matches over the next year. The context matters. On the one hand, yes, this is part of the AJPW handhelds, and part of a great show in specific. On the other hand, this is the State Patrol. I don't think it could ever live up to what was in Eric's head, unfortunately.

This is a really cool Worldwide main event about five years before its time and with twice the room to breathe. All the little things worked well. Kroffat and Wright had an especially good bit of matwork. The State Patrol moved in and out of the ring really well, just somehow always in the right place at the right time against two opponents they probably hadn't faced off against too often. They cut off the ring well, allowing for a very effective face-in-peril run for Furnas.

We knew a lot of that already though. What the match has as well are some crazy State Patrol double teams (that German/forearm looked great), rapid fire elbow drops, Buddy Lee Parker rope-walking successfully, and some fairly complex bits of positioning on tandem spots. Where I'm with Eric is that I was left wanting more.

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The King Reads Idea Books and Has Pretty Looks

Jerry Lawler/Austin Idol Jeff Jarrett v. Moondogs/Big Black Dog USWA 2/10/92 - GREAT

ER: Out of control brawl that these guys can have in their sleep. Lawler looks awesome in this and Jarrett does the lord's work by getting paired up mostly with the debuting Big Black Dog, who is a large black man in his first match, who wrestles as if he's a large black man wrestling his first match. Jarrett makes a Dog clothesline look way better than it was, holds on for life on a bodyslam where Dog looked unsure how to drop him. The other Moondogs break out some nice spike shots and everybody gets hit with chairs and trash cans and upended tables.

PAS: I pretty much love all of the Memphis Moondogs clips I have seen from this period and I am jazzed a full arena match has shown up. This doesn't have any structure or anything, pretty much all six guys wander into the ring and throw chairs, garbage cans and tables at each others heads. I loved Richard Lee having the chairs with RIP Jeff Jarrett and RIP Jerry Lawler painted on them. Big Black Dog gets the pin over Lawler but it doesn't really matter as everyone just kept brawling. Totally fun.

COMPLETE AND ACCURATE KING

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WWF 24/7 BOSTON GARDEN THOUGHTS

Boston Garden 6/27/86

Les Thornton/Tiger Chung Lee v. Danny Spivey/Mike Rotundo

I grew up on WWF Superstars, where guys like Lee and Thornton got beat in five minutes, it is fun to see them work a long competitive match. The Thornton v. Rotundo sections of this match were really great, the Chung Lee v. Spivey parts of the match, not so much. 1986 Spivey really stunk, and Chung Lee had a couple of amusing comedy bumps, but not much else. Thornton was super, he had a cool mat section with Rotundo, nice European uppercuts, nasty knees etc. I am really digging a lot of the WWF enhancement guys. Thornton was no Bobby Bass but he was pretty great.

Handsome Harley Race v. Tony Atlas

Tony Atlas was always really bad, and by 1986 he was way past his prime, but Harley Race is a guy who worked as a touring NWA champion. He knows how to work a fun match around a useless black babyface working a hard headed ethnic gimmick. You have to figure Harley probably had multiple 60 minute matches with Rufus R. Jones and he can pretty much graft that match structure on this match. Race has a lot of different "I am headbutting a black guy" spots, the initial headbutt which establishes the thick skull, various revenge spots from Atlas, and then an almost Fujiwaraish headbutt to the jaw which circumvents the think black skull. For a match that wasn't very good, this was pretty good.

King Tonga v. Duke of Dorchester Pete Doherty

This was a little disappointing. The Duke is really not a high end WWF 80's WIMPY. Tonga is really athletic at this point, but the match wasn't much. They worked the match around Tonga's thick skull, in the match right after they worked Atlas with the same gimmick, all that was in addition to the JYD match in the semi-main. Who was the road agent for these shows Orval Faubus?

Pedro Morales v. Moondog Spike

I was excited for the chance to see the Moondogs work in separate singles enhancement matches. Still 80's Pedro Morales is rough. I did enjoy the finish which was Moondog Spike and Pedro Morales working a two count roll up sequence. I almost expected them to do stereo kip-ups and a pose to crowd applause.

Jake Roberts v. Ricky Steamboat

There were two of these on the WWF 80's set, and this was better than the Toronto match but not as good as the other Boston Garden one. This was worked as a brawl with Steamboat breaking out all of his illegal karate, and Roberts bumping around more then I remember him doing. There was some great sneaky Roberts, although he was on defense for the majority of the match. He really is great at the little things. There is a spot where he can't get his snake bag open, because of his sweaty hands, he just kept getting more desperate and it was a great way for Steamboat to get back on offense. Every time I see WWF Steamboat I am shocked at how roided he was, in the Wellness WWF he would be booked like Bobby Lashley. The match ends with a count out, and Roberts totally splits his head open in the post match, which was weird to see on an house show.

Hulk Hogan v. Randy Savage

This was your standard match between these two guys. Savage bumps all around the ring for Hogan's crappy looking offense, Randy gets a couple of offensive moves before hitting his top rope elbow which Hogan completely no-sells. Then Hogan hulks up and squashes him. No wonder Macho Man wants to stab Hogan today.

Moondog Rex v. Billy Jack Haynes

Yikes, WWF Moondogs are not Memphis Moondogs. Billy Jack really blows, he kept throwing these godawful dropkicks, over and over again. For a guy who was working a strongman gimmick he was clearly less roided than Steamboat.

King Kong Bundy v. Junkyard Dog

This was shockingly great, maybe the best JYD singles match I have ever seen. JYD has really nice pacing in all of his matches, but his big flaw is that he is a punch, kick, headbutt wrestler with shitty looking punches, kicks and headbutts. They all looked great here though, Bundy must have been leaning in to them. There was a bunch of cool punch exchanges, and Bundy doing sneaky shots with the chain. There was a great fight over the chain which JYD won by landing a really great looking headbutt. JYD actually had a giant encephalitic head, when you add that to his being Black, you really bought him having headbutts stronger then anyone else's, it must have been like getting hit with a frozen turkey.

Don Muraco v. Paul Orndorff

This was as boring as Don Muraco v. Paul Orndorff. I think I fell asleep four times in an eleven minute match, and I was watching in fast forward. I can't believe anyone ever liked either guy

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