Super Dragon is the Original Subliminal Subterranean Titanium Criminal Minded Swift SD

Super Dragon vs. Mike Quackenbush Rev Pro 9/28/02 - FUN

ER: I had higher hopes for this one, as it never really felt like a match, much more like a fun exhibition of moves and submissions. Now, I was kind of expecting a fun exhibition of moves and submissions - these are two guys with plenty of both - but this literally felt like an exhibition as there wasn't much happening between the moves. There was a lot of move, stand up, new move, stand up, submission, stand up, other guy's move. It wasn't bad, but Quack is someone who can string together a match really well and none of that happened here. Neither guy did their wildest spots (no big crash and burns to the floor), with the biggest miss being a Dragon corkscrew senton that would have missed Quack by a couple feet even if Quack hadn't moved. But the few subs looked good, Dragon hit a hard clothesline right into Quack's chest, Dragon got nicely spiked on a DDT for a nearfall. And Dragon's finishing run combo of a German suplex, rolled into a Blue Thunder Bomb, turned over into a piledriver? Well, that's a brilliant looked finishing package. However, that finishing package came literally after that spike DDT that got Quack a 2 count, and Dragon literally just stood up and hit all of those moves. So nearly everything looked good, but it had the psychology of a Smackdown vs. Raw video game match.

PAS: I agree, this didn't feel like it had much of a structure or process. I liked the early matwork, but when the got up off the mat they just did some stuff without any of it really stringing together in a sensible way. This was a tourney match, and maybe it would have been better if it had been a PWG or Chikara main event, just didn't feel like they put much thought into this match. 

Super Dragon/B-Boy vs. Bobby Quance/Jardi Frantz GSCW 3/29/03 - EPIC

ER: Big spot tag with some fun location specific structure, with Jardi and Quance are heels opposite hometown boys Dragon and B-Boy, leading to some heel in peril sections and our faces working like the bigger jerks. It's a fun tone for a stiff spotfest tag to take on, and I like all of these guys together. I miss this era of wrestling as these were all guys I got to see live a bunch so I have lots of memories associated with these lunatics. Heel Jardi was an awesome part of 2003, a heel proto-Matt Riddle with more of the stoner vibe and none of the MMA vibe, but all of the violent bump vibe. Quance was barely 30 matches into pro wrestling at this point, but it adds to his ring work. He doesn't hold back on hits or misses, and has that same kind of excitement that Blitzkrieg had. And since he's so new to all of this, there's a rawness to his misses and a desire to impress on things that don't quite work. When a move is supposed to miss, he goes through with it like he expects it to hit, which leads to several of his exchanges with Dragon look like something out of early Zero-1. Quance would throw an elbow that Dragon would kind of duck, and the off balance positions Quance winds up in make it look like he was never expecting anything to miss. It looks so much better than moves today that are thrown specifically to be reversed. Quance seems confused by the heel reaction from the crowd, but Jardi leans right into his role as deadbeat stoner heel who was getting high with his friends in the drive-thru before accidentally driving directly into a girl on a bike.

Dragon and B-Boy throw nothing but stiff shots, everyone gets kicked in the back at least twice throughout this match, Dragon comes up throwing hard slaps a couple times against Jardi, and both of them really start teeing off on Jardi in the corner. Frantz is a great punching bag and rag doll, and it's crazy he is the heel here as B-Boy drops him to his butt with a high left kick, plasters him with his running corner dropkick, and really gets folded in half several times. His comeback offense is cool, like his leaping top rope tornado DDT on B-Boy or his super impressive springboard rana on Dragon. There isn't too much selling in this one, but it doesn't really matter once they all start stringing together big spots. The match could have been different as there's some fairly engaging submission work earlier once B-Boy/Quance started against each other, but I like the big spots breakdown. Quance and Frantz hit stereo shooting star/450, there are some nice pinfall saves, Dragon hits an awesome top con hilo past the ringpost into Jardi, and the finish itself is really great: Dragon goes for a Psycho Driver on Quance, Quance lands on his feet and tries a low dropkick which Dragon leans out of, leaving Quance prone to an awesome B-Boy shining wizard. Dragon even dives onto the pin just to prevent Jardi from breaking it up. The match was a little scattered at times, but I loved the way it played against dynamics, and everyone involved did too much cool stuff.

PAS: Crazy spotfest tag matches aren't my favorite style, but I think this is about as cool of match you can have within that parameter. You have a ton of big spots hit pretty perfectly (the Frantz single jump springboard rana would be an all time legendary spot if hit on a bigger stage), counters and reversals that actually looked good rather then just dance moves, some actual drawn heel heat by Frantz and a whole ton of sick violence. B-Boy and Super Dragon are a tremendous team of violent asskickers, and they find lots of ways to kick people really hard in the face, and I loved Jardi winding up Super Dragon and then taking a Super Dragon sized asskicking. Jardi really got the crowd worked up, so they went nuts when Dragon started pushing his shit in. Quance was a little dry, but he had tremendous physical body control and looked really good mat wrestling with B-Boy. These matches can often go on too long, but I thought this ended right when it should have with the three count coming right at the apex of the crowd engagement.

COMPLETE AND ACCURATE SUPER DRAGON

Read more!

Super Dragon Ain't The One For a Punk Motherfucker With a Badge and a Gun

Super Dragon/Rising Son vs. TARO/Excalibur Rev Pro 7/21/00 - GREAT

PAS: It is hard to remember exactly how ground breaking this stuff was when it happened. This was a couple months after the Low-Ki vs. American Dragon Super 8 final, but for most of the 90s US Indy wrestling was a lot of Stone Cold Stunners and maybe a Mark Shrader suplex. Here you have four guys in a warehouse in the LA suburbs breaking out crazy lucha dives and armdrags along with sick All Japan headrops and unprofessional stiffness, it was a total outlier. This was pretty early for all of these guys, and any time you try such high wire stuff you are going to stumble a bit, but when they hit they hit. Really impressed with Excalibur in this, as he was working a lot like Super Dragon, mixing in some nasty potato shots with his highflying. At one point he just walks over and kicks Rising Son in the side of the head. Not every dive landed, but they were really going for it. Super Dragon blows a Space Flying Tiger Drop, but then hits a perfect tornado Asai moonsault. Maybe needed to slice five minutes or so to be an all timer, but it was without a doubt entertaining. Finish was as gross as your expected, both TARO and Excalibur must have had spines made of superballs.

ER: This match was the main event of the first Rev Pro show I ever traded for, and while I went to a few Rev Pro shows they had moved out of their tiny gym space by the time I made the trip, these tapes had a huge affect on still teenage me. My wrestling tapes were expanding quickly into lucha and Japan, and it felt like these guys were all trading for the same tapes that I was devouring as quickly as I could. Turns out, they all definitely were. What stands out most for me about these early Rev Pro shows were how willing to try EVERYTHING these guys were, and how generous they all were in letting each other try new shit. They had enough character to not come off like over cooperative dance partners, as they filled in gaps between spots with stiff strikes and spots that lead to late match callbacks. So you'd get something early in the match that seemed like a fun dickhead spot, like Dragon just low blowing TARO as TARO fumbled with a headscissors, only for it to turn into a big moment late in the match when TARO low blows Dragon. 

Dragon had this funny habit of using his friends and enemies as weapons, and we got some good moments of him not necessarily throwing Rising Son to the wolves, but of sending him through for the greater good of the match. I loved the awareness of Rising Son going for an Asai moonsault but Super Dragon shoving him back into the ring to stop a charging Excalibur, loved the humor around Dragon hitting nasty dropkicks while TARO and Excalibur were both tied to the tree of woe (with Excalibur constantly lifting himself out of the way so TARO keeps getting merked). The flying in this is pretty insane, with everyone trying multiple dives to the floor. A couple don't work, but most work great. Excalibur's dive was beyond nuts, like he was trying to spring right off Dragon and fly to the back of the gym. Excalibur was always the nuttiest bumper of all of these guys, and that's some painful company to keep. Dragon's corkscrew moonsault was amazing, and I can't get enough of their willingness to crash hard on everything. These early Rev Pro matches had the energy and daredevil-but-still-learning enthusiasm of the best backyard wrestling had to offer, with cool innovation and great taste, with ahead of their time skill. I remember watching these matches while on SoCal wrestling road trips with friends and all of us losing our minds, and how could we not?


Super Dragon vs. Vic Grimes APW 10/5/03 - FUN

PAS: Their match the previous week in LA was really awesome with a terrible finish, this match had a fine finish but never really came together in the ring. Grimes took a ton of the match with Dragon working below, which wasn't what I wanted out of this. Both guys throwing potatoes is rad, Grimes working over Dragon with generic big man offense is less so. Grimes had some nice looking stuff, but a bunch of it was all set up, no conclusion. There was a cool spot where Dragon ducked a running boot and put on a leglock with Grimes leg stuck in the turnbuckles, and Grimes took a nasty spill down some stairs, but I was hoping for another hidden gem, and this wasn't that.

ER: I thought this kicked ass, and didn't have the same problems with it that Phil did. I went to tons of Gym Wars shows and thought I was at this one, but a lot of this didn't seem familiar. This was Grimes recreating one of his big Falls Count Anywhere matches from early Gym Wars (think 1997, and all the major changes that happened in wrestling from '97 to '03) opposite Erin O'Grady/Crash Holly. The stip isn't on this match, but the spirit was there. The APW Gym in Hayward was TINY, enough room for maybe 50 fans (if the roll up doors were opened) and I loved how these two took advantage of that small space and made everyone scatter. The best parts of the match were definitely the first 5 minutes (this was a 20 minute match with nearly half of it clipped out for whatever reason), where they were stiffing the hell out of each other with strikes. Both guys hit real hard, and I let out a loud OOF when Grimes ran a straight leg into Dragon's jaw. That straight leg being played for the coolest spot of the match was a neat touch, as Grimes shows super impressive flexibility by missing a corner yakuza kick, leading to Dragon literally hanging off Grimes' leg like monkey bars. 

As Dragon worked over Grimes' leg some guy yelled "you already fell 40 ft, how bad could this be?" I'll always love a big fat guy hurling himself into danger, and Grimes was big, built like Scott Norton if Scott Norton stopped lifting but kept the same diet. He hits several cool leg lariat variations and a great diving clothesline off the apron that sent both flying through vacated chairs. Back in the day Grimes actually climbed that roll up door like a ladder and leapt off. That didn't happen here, but I like how the memory of it happening was used as a tease. He didn't fall off it, but he did still get rammed mouth first into that door. I would have liked seeing more fighting upstairs, but liked Grimes falling down that narrow Gym staircase (the one Roland Alexander would lounge on with his belly out during matches). Dragon was great at taking offense from such a massive opponent and I would be stunned if Dragon ever worked anyone larger. Him throwing his body into Grimes was the best. He had a couple sick double stomps and a major springboard spinning heel kick that crashed his whole body into the back of Vic's head and neck. I miss those days. I have no idea how I missed this match.


COMPLETE AND ACCURATE SUPER DRAGON

Read more!

The Boy Super Dragon was a Friend of Mine, Till I Caught Him in My Car Trying to Steal my Alpine

Super Dragon/Disco Machine vs. TARO/Mr. Excitement Rev Pro 6/19/02 - GREAT

I had seen Mr. Excitement's name in results before, but I am not sure I had seen him wrestle before. His opening matwork with SD was fun stuff, with Mr. Ex doing some nice rolling kneebars and guillotine chokes. They both tag in their partners and TARO and Disco have an arm drag section with some fun flippy arm drags by TARO. They both shake hands and bask in the crowd applause and Super Dragon comes in to shake Disco's hand and offer a hand to TARO only to crack him right in the neck. We then get a long beat down section on TARO and no one beats a guy like Super Dragon, and few take the kind of beating that TARO takes. No surprise that TARO retired early, because he is hellaciously beaten every time I see him. Some of the suplexes he takes would make Misawa's ghost cringe in horror, during the final run he takes a backdrop driver straight vertical on his neck like Kobashi or Oro, and he takes four or five other really nasty fold up neck bumps on germans. TARO doesn't really have the offense to fire back in this match, although he does use his rana's really well as momentum shifters, and hits a big dive. There was a bit of a lag right before the end where, Super Dragon piledrives Mr. Excitement and then puts on a chinlock seemingly to let him get his bearings together, but otherwise this was a great all action tag with some huge violent highlights.


COMPLETE AND ACCURATE SUPER DRAGON

Read more!

Super Dragon Has a Crime Record Like Charles Manson

Super Dragon v. TARO Rev Pro 7/7/00 - GREAT

This was the earliest Super Dragon match I could find and I was surprised at how well it held up. Dragon had mostly developed all of the traits I liked about him, even as a babyface he is still a crowbarring asskicking motherfucker. TARO is a stick skinny dude in a lucha match, he looks like he has DJ Qualls physique, but he can take a hellacious ass whipping. SD dumps him on his head, slaps cheek tissue out of his mouth and even rocking chairs his head into a wall. The Psycho Driver SD lands to finish the match was grotesque. TARO gets most of his offense off by cheating and outside interference, but I did like some of his reversals including a snap rana out of a Tiger Driver. Might have gone a bit too long, and it was hard to buy TARO near falls, but this was damn fun stuff, and I am excited to revisit more pre PWG Dragon.


COMPLETE AND ACCURATE SUPER DRAGON

Read more!