Found Footage Friday: BATTLE OF THE BAM BAMS~! Los Cadetes Del Espacio~! MARTINELLI~! JARQUE~!

Tony Martinelli vs. Gregorio Jarque New Jersey 1959

MD: New Wrestling Films find. Jarque was from Spain and I imagine if he was in there against Tony Oliver in Barcelona around this time, we would have gotten something special but there wasn't a ton to see here. This was a Bill Stern reel entitled "Rasslin' Ref" and the match was pretty much built around the ref getting rolled on top of during pins and then jawing with Martinelli. Solid stuff but nothing spectacular and a pale imitation of what was happening (even the comedy work) in France at this time, obviously, but I liked the consistency of what they were trying to do at least. They had a nice bit of trading mares towards the end until the ref got crushed one last time and just called it a draw.

Terry Gordy vs. Bam Bam Bigelow TWA 1/27/90

MD: This was a third Battle of the Bam Bams that we didn't know was even filmed but here we are. They had a strong sense of just what they had here and made every lock up feel like a clash of the titans. I expect Terry Gordy in 1990 to bump around and create motion a lot more and he did but only when he was charging towards Bam Bam in order to knock him down, just that extra oomph. He worked a little bit bigger than he did elsewhere in the year to signify the titanic struggle for the crowd. Bam Bam met him equally, as he's another guy that you expect to move around a bit more, and I don't just mean the cartwheels. But they kept this grounded for the most part, selling every knockdown as a big deal and working up to the next piece of contact accordingly. Despite this video being almost twenty minutes with very little before or after the match, there were some annoying cuts that made it hard to tell how thing went from Point A to Point B but you definitely got the overall idea. They worked in a chair battle at the end which gave everything a nice crescendo before the inevitable non-finish. 

ER: This is really exciting for me. We finally got the best version we're ever going to get of the Battle of the Bam Bams. 1990 was the only pre-coma year they fought and thus was the best time for them to ever cross paths. The best possible Gordy/Bam Bam match would probably have been either 1993 or 1987, but we know those don't exist and this is the best it's going to get. Also this match was not at all what I expected. I did not expect these two behemoths to go into Philly and work a slow-paced (not in a bad way) minimalist heavyweight clash. It goes on a bit too long but there was weight behind everything they did, and what's wild is it went on so much longer. There was a "20 minutes have elapsed" call at the 12 minute mark of the video meaning the 2-3 cuts to that point meant 8 missing minutes of footage (depending on how much the ring announcer was kayfabing the time call). At 12 minutes in, the match was already feeling a little long, but I love the majesty of the two largest men lumbering through a minimalistic 28 minute match at Temple University, an unlikely great wrestling venue. I love this venue as a Wrestling Venue, with those steep bleachers climbing up so high I don't think we ever saw the top. Both men took some great bumps, spread out well through the long run time. 

I loved Gordy's counters to Bammer's kicks and enziguiris, catching his leg and making him hop around, shoving him off into off balance out of control stumbles. Gordy takes a big back bump through the ropes to the floor and Bam Bam saves his biggest for the end of the match when Gordy head of steams his way through him for a clothesline to the floor. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised that Gordy made more interesting bump choices than Bam Bam but I am. The match peaked when the two giants squared off with chairs. Bam Bam swung a chair around more compellingly than almost any wrestler I've ever seen, in a way I have never seen him do. Bigelow was like an expert sign spinner, decades before that job existed. Bam Bam swung his chair around like a balletic Leatherface, a dangerous visual spectacle of a spot done as well or better than the ECW chair duels that came nearly a decade later. What an awesome showdown at a very good American college. I love these two daring to work a 30 minute clash of the titans, sending larger than life magic to the back row of a wrestling venue I'd never known before but now adore. 

Super Astro/Ultraman Jr./Solar vs. Divulios Negros I + 2/Sergio Romo, Jr. Arena Solidaridad

MD: A handheld match. I'm sure someone knows the dates and whether this one is found or new but it's new to us and it was a lot of fun. Very much what you'd expect from the Space Cadets, but worked well and balanced even better. They did pairings and matwork to start, fed right into rudo clowning (Super Astro with his little jump, etc.) and the tecnicos taking the primera. Pretty solid rudo beatdown in the segunda with Romo hitting from odd angles and a nice triple team submission and corner succession attacks. Plus some working over the mask. They had swagger. The comeback in the tercera came on a missed charge the tecnicos got their revenge, did some more clowning, and they built to the (very solid) dives and Solar tying up a Divulio for the win. Nothing revolutionary but getting to see these guys do their thing one more time is always a joy. 

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Found Footage Friday: MONTERREY~! CARAS~! ARANDU~! HERODES~! VOLADOR~! BRAZOS~! SATANICO~! PIRATA~!

Cien Caras/Javier Cruz/Arandu vs Herodes/Volador/Angel Azteca (Monterrey 1991)

MD: I started writing about lucha here in 2014, primarily because I couldn't make sense of the DVDVR 80s set. For any number of reasons, I'm glad I did. Probably top on that list? I can just dive into a match like this and ride it like a wave. What an enjoyable twenty+ minutes here. I'm mostly familiar with Herodes from the 80s set and his Japan excursions, but here he was the beloved Chacho, basically babyface Norman the Lunatic dressing up in fun costumes, everything but a teddy bear. Basically, he was a couple of comedy spots away from being early 2010s Porky in CMLL, that role on a tecnico side. This was a little too heated for that, which is a good thing of course. Cien Caras was paried with him and the rudos swarmed from the get go, including tearing off his doctor's costume.

Things settled back down quickly into a really solid primera though. I'm confident in saying that Arandu is a lost rudo base. He was there for everything Angel Azteca and Volador had for him over two exchanges, could shut them down well with strikes, and almost always took a crazy handstand bump over the top to the floor. Plus he had the crazy hair and was just larger than life, at least in a provincial sort of way. He's come out as the real star of the Monterrey footage. Cruz had a good bit with Volador where he acted like a Cruiserweight Bully, jamming all of his stuff until he got monkeyflipped three times. And Caras and Herodes were fine with their shtick. They didn't do much but they didn't have to as the crowd was up for it.

The segunda had a lot of Caras directing traffic for a rudo beatdown, and he was good at that. Not Satanico level but still probably top tier. The real good stuff was in between the segunda and tercera where Arandu lawndarted Azteca into the chairs as people threw trash at him and Caras beat Herodes around the ringside area. The comeback was spirited but the match got thrown out due to constant triple teaming/brutality by the rudos shortly thereafter and things devolved to challenges. I get that lucha can be a lot of things, but I'm way more sympathetic to this form of it than any of the others.

Los Brazos vs Pirata Morgan/El Satanico/Justiciero (Monterrey 1991)

MD: This was much more of a house show Brazos match than I was expecting considering Morgan and Satanico were in there. I thought we'd be getting more of a crazy brawl but I really did enjoy this. The primary pairing was Porky and Morgan, and the sort of matches I was thinking of, you don't really get a primary pairing like that, just violent chaos. Here, the beatdown was pretty gnarly, with Morgan and co. cutting through Brazo and Oro before leaving Porky alone to get beat upon, but it was alway sa little funn too. For instance, at the end of the fall, they tossed Porky into the post on the outside and he bumped into the lap of someone in the first row. Great balance between violence and mirth.

The rudos took the first two falls here, but at the start of the primera and for most of the segunda until the finish, it really was the Brazos comedy hour. Morgan tried to avoid Porky early, but ended tossed around and squished off the apron. All of the rudos had very giving performances here (easier when you're winning two falls in a row I assume). Satanico was more of a secondary player but perfect as always when, for instance, he was getting his hand bitten by Porky on a devious handshake attempt. And everyone hit everything clean, of course. Great punches by both Morgan and El Brazo. Very fun rudo miscommunication down the stretch. Justiciero wasn't going to stand out as much in a match with both Morgan and Satanico but he was fine as a cog in the machine. I would have liked it if they ramped up the violence a bit and got bloody, sure but for the setting, this was entirely enjoyable for what it was.

Marlin/Sergio Romo Jr vs Marabunta/Enjambre (Monterrey 1991)

MD: Full disclosure here: I was sort of dreading the almost 27 minute length of this coming in relative to the matches above, but it was actually a lot of fun. Since I'm feeling nostalgic, one of the best things about getting into lucha when I did was that CMLL was livestreaming both Friday and Monday shows. The Monday shows were from Arena Coliseo and had their own feel, almost always with Rey Apocalipsis and Toro Bill, Jr. in a tag match on the undercard. They were always very entertaining for their role, and I got that same feeling from Marabunta and Enjambre (Hijo de Espectro) here. Early on Marlin was getting Marabunta into holds for their first exchange, and Enjambre kept coming in to interfere, until Marlin chased him off. Good pesky rudo stuff, sure, but he came back from deep in the crowd with someone's cowboy hat on. Just amazing.

There was a ton of stooging in the primera, as you'd expect. I never got much of a sense of Romo or Marlin here, except for that they were game and capable. The finish in the primera was a dropkick doomsday device that was set up very organically. It was a great beatdown though, tying Romo's leg up in a chair, lawn darting Marlin, smacking faces into the side of the ring, hanging people upside down and kicking them on the way down, just swarming bug brutality from Marabunta and Enjambre. They had a great tandem submission of a seated satan's knot combined with jarring knee shots to the back of the skull. We miss the very start of the comeback (just seconds really) but it's all heated with the revenge spots you'd want and building to a dive train. Marabunta and Enjambre were the sort of guys you'd want to see low on the card week in and week out.

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Found Footage Friday: PANTERITA~! ANIBAL~! ARANDU~! TIGRE BLANCO~! DILUVIO NEGRO~! LENADOR~!

Zeus/Diluvio Negro vs. Sergio Romo/Johnny Curiel CMLL 1991

MD: Zeus is probably Ray Richard here. He'd lose the mask against Transformer the following year. So not the original. Curiel is new to me but he came of as an older journeyman tecnico. So much of this match was rudo miscommunications and he was great at being the straight man for that. I don't think I've ever heard a word in the lexicon for that role, he's almost "basing" for the antics, but he did a great job at it, just like Diluvio and Zeus did a great job of stumbling over one another.

Opening exchanges were good, with Zeus and Curiel putting a real sense of competitiveness and struggle to it while Romo and Diluvio were natural (and almost certainly well-rehearsed) rivals, quick and slick with stare downs (and a brief strike exchange in the tercera). They peppered in the comedy in all three falls and the beatdown only took up a bit of the segunda. I did like Zeus' segunda-ending submission though, which was in a sort of Air Raid Crash position. It was a good balance for an opening match, with a lot of the fat trimmed. They got right to it in the tercera with the tecnicos storming the ring to start the comeback right from the get go before cycling into the submission trading in the finish. Certainly a better twenty minutes than it would have been twenty-five or thirty.

 

Anibal/Panterita del Ring vs. Arandu/Tigre Blanco CMLL 1991

MD: Anibal was in the midst of a comeback here; he'd lose his mask in a big match the following year. He was relatively broken down but knew what to do to get big responses. He was primarily matched up with Tigre Blanco who was up there in age as well. It felt like another bit of rub for Panterita and Arandu, who felt more or less at the peak of their 'local star' power. Arandu came off like across between Estrada and Barbaro Cavernario here, big bumps to the floor, flailing limbs, wild shots and temperament, a surprising amount of superkicks. He and Panterita created the motion, both against one another and for their older opponents.

This had its share of rudo miscommunication too (and that's where Anibal shined the most, in setting it up) but with more purpose than sheer entertainment. Arandu and Tigre Blanco came to blows multiple times, all building towards a moment at the end of the match where Arandu had worked on Panterita's mask and it accidentally came off with a labored pick up slam on Arandu. That led to the DQ and gave the tecnicos the win and everyone, the commentators most of all, were very excited to see things boil over and have the rudos come to blows. I don't think we get what this led to, which is a shame, but it was fairly effective in the moment.

Trueno/Ausente vs. Lenador/Diluvio Negro CMLL 1991

MD: I can't pin down exactly who this Trueno was. He might have been Mascaras' godson, from the timing, but he had a pretty unique black frayed mask and look fitting the "thunder" gimmick that doesn't seem the same. He did have some interesting offense down the stretch though. Ausente is a pretty run of the mill tecnico, competent enough but not dynamic: he runs into the post headfirst well and has a fun leg-hooked surfboard submission. Lenador we'd seen once before and he is a fun stooge. The VQ meant that we missed some of the antics admittedly.

What stood out the most here were some of the exact same rudo miscommunication spots between this match and the last. They did the bit where the got the rudos to sunset flip one another and more strikingly, the bit where both stumble to the floor and a tecnico slides between them on the apron and slaps both on the back, causing them to start fighting in confusion. Diluvio Negro was the common thread (and he was smooth and sharp here too) but I wonder if it was just the zeitgeist at the spot; we'd seen that with French footage too. Sometimes spots just catch on and get overused. Some of this stuff I hadn't seen too much before or after but it's in both of these. As things didn't boil over for the rudos (they actually went over after an exciting tercera), it didn't have quite the same oomph, even with Lenador being over the top. So maybe less novelty for rudos fighting rudos but a looser, more chaotic match overall.

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