QEPD Super Porky

Brazo de Plata/Brazo de Oro/El Brazo vs. Solomon Grundy/Chavo Guerrero/Popitekus CMLL 4/8/90

ER: It doesn't get more portly than this in lucha, and this match was filled with a ton of belly busting. The big draw here is Porky/Grundy and it delivers in every way you'd want it to. In a match with no dives we still wind up with a ton of big boy gold. Outside of a few nice armdrags we don't really get any Popitekus (but with his gorgeous hair he looks like the fattest possible Ramone), but we get a lot of Porky picking on Grundy, building to a huge sumo war between them to end the tercera. Grundy dwarfs Porky but Porky throws harder fists, throws an uppercut into Grundy's neckbeard, and then bumps him to the floor with a belly bump. There are a LOT of belly bumps in this match, and they're all great. 

I love Grundy's slow bumps to the floor, feels and looks like a glacier falling into the Antarctic. He falls to the floor, Porky hits a lariat off the apron (felt like it was supposed to be a plancha but Grundy moved), and then Porky splatted him with his running belly bounce. Later Grundy takes the absolute slowest Harley Race bump, and I love it. The match is filled with entertaining misdirection, a lot of Porky accidentally hitting splashes and avalanches on his bros and then blaming them for it. Porky even shoves Grundy backwards onto his brothers! There are some classic moments, like Porky being knocked from the apron onto Oro's shoulders, who dumps him butt first onto a front row fan! I also loved the big build to Grundy hitting an avalanche on all three Brazos, with Porky doing a hilarious bump where he runs most of the way across the ring before just taking a normal back bump. The final sumo showdown between Porky and Grundy was fantastic, with Brazo shoving a ref in between them to get Los Brazos DQd, the ref getting a full stretcher job post-match to sell the Porky/Grundy loose meat sandwich. This match might have the most belly bumps I have ever seen, so of course it comes with the highest possible recommendation. 

MD: Great build here as they really milked a potential Porky vs Grundy encounter all the way to the tecera, with a couple of false starts along the way. The first was best as they teased it only to have the other Brazos rush in, kicking off the transitional beatdown. It wasn't just all Porky either as Grundy showed some decent physical charisma in his bumping and in building the anticipation. And of course, yes, he'd eat Porky's clothesline to knock him out, catch Porky's clothesline off the apron and get crushed against the barricade for good measure. The funniest bit of this one was when Porky ended up in some guy's lap in the first row. That shows protecting people with control of your body right there. This ended with one of the most satisfying bits of ref flattening you'll encounter. It was hardly definitive but I doubt anyone cared about that given the effort they made to stretcher him out.

JR: I don’t know if this is a personal failing or an issue with the narrative overall but I feel like far fewer words have been written about rudo Brazo de Plata, so I’m glad we can touch on it here. I think it’s instructive for how gifted a performer Porky truly was. He has great timing and great cut offs and when he does his normal spots minus the flourishes that made them so well loved otherwise, they stand out as tremendously impactful. He is a performer that can use his body in so many ways, or rather, can use his body in one way but change enough about it to make it feel so different. As he rushes forward, with good but rarely seen punches and headbutts and body checks, Super Porky feels inevitable.

Of course, as the match goes on, specifically in the third fall, we get to see the rudo comedy that one would expect from Porky, where he is essentially the incompetent henchman deployed by his slightly more competent brothers. Nothing here is exclamatory per say, or groundbreaking, but at the same time there is value in being able to play the hits and do so without any major faults. This match is fine, more of a Brazos exhibition than anything to talk about on behalf of their opponents, but at the same time it is nice to see Porky show off different shades and viewpoints rather than the standard fare we talk about most often.

Brazo De Plata/Negro Casas/TAKA Michinoku vs. El Hijo Del Gladiador/Gran Markus Jr./Satanico CMLL 5/30/97

MD: Fun trios. This was sort of a sweet spot where Porky was still imposing, to the point where he was, of course, funny, but could make someone like Hijo de Gladiador beg off when he was taking liberties. Within a decade, that would be over and he'd be there just for laughs. Great laughs, certainly, but here he could serve more roles within a match. He could also make like Shawn Michaels posing in the ropes while his partners were in the ring, so it was a balance. And when it was time for him to come in, the fans buzzed in a way that they didn't for Casas or Satanico, for instance. The end of the primera was fun stuff with Casas hitting one big DDT only to get jammed on the second, setting up Porky to come in and accidentally knock him onto Markus only to teeter him back to a sitting and pinning position and then squashing Hijo de Gladiador on a sunset flip attempt. They got the pin while shaking hands like gentlemen. Not much else to say here except for that TAKA (more Taka here than TAKA) was paired well with Satanico both in the primera and in the closing exchange. Satanico was pretty giving against him and looked as great as always; his big interaction with Porky was slapping him in the corner only to get crushed by a series of headbutts out of it as the crowd popped big. The final tecnico comeback was picture perfect Porky use too, as Hijo del Gladiador was trapped behind him in the corner so every time he got whacked by Satanico and Markus he was crushing HdG. Not only does that never get old, but here it was effective and pro wrestling believable in switching the momentum for that final time.

ER: Wow. I actually had no idea a match existed that had Satanico tearing it up on the mat against Taka Michinoku (I trust we do NOT have their singles match a couple weeks after this?), and it's only one of several very fun things happening here. Porky is really treated as the biggest name in the match, and he worked the match as someone who relished the role. This was always building to a big Porky/Markus chubby boys showdown, but all the pairings here worked really well. Gladiador and Casas gave us some quick exchanges before Satanico and Taka came in and outquicked them, and I loved all the rudos scrambling away from Porky whenever he came in. Gladiador hit a questionable strike on Casas and Porky runs in and just plasters him into the corner. We get a lot of classic Porky comedy mixed in with actual strong ringwork, so we get him bumping his butt into Gladiador's face when getting punched in the corner, but we also get an amazing sequence where Satanico starts punching and slapping Porky over and over in the corner. and I'm expecting Porky to start his crying routine. Instead, he had enough and charges out of the corner with a half dozen wicked headbutts that backs Satanico all the way across the ring. Porky hits a big dive into Markus (Markus had landed two very stiff punches earlier during Irish whip exchanges and I couldn't wait for Porky to flatten him) and Taka finishes things with his nice missile dropkick to Satanico's chest, then plants Satanico with the Michinoku Driver. Loved the vibe throughout this whole match, great mix of classic lucha and comedy and stiff strikes. 

JR: I must confess that I haven’t watched a ton of this 90s lucha since the pandemic, and returning to it here is like putting on an old pair of comfortable shoes. Seeing prime Casas and Satanico and remembering the things they did every night was so gratifying. It made me love wrestling for a moment.

But Porky! A revelation every time. People talk about Tajiri being a silent film star with his body language, but I see Porky do sequences here, with a stylized hip attack and a rope running sequence and I can’t help but think of Charlie Chaplin films, in which he is toeing the line between genius and accident. Porky does that here; getting kicked in the gut, but the momentum causes his ass to hit someone in the face, or flattening his own partner so hard that he bounces back up into a cover of his own.

Really, this is sort of the platonic use of porky in a match like this. Casas does the heavy lifting and holds everything together long enough for Taka to shine and change the pace and for Porky to have a few huge moments, including a tremendous plancha. This isn’t what I’d call an all time Porky match or anything, but I think it’s the blueprint of one.

Brazo De Plata/Brazo De Oro/Brazo Cibernetico vs. Villano 3/4/5 Acapulco 11/20/04

PAS: I think I have probably called 15 different lucha cage matches "the only good lucha cage match", but I am doing it again. Here is the only good lucha cage match and it is great one. You can put together any combination of wrestling's Hatfields and McCoys and they are going to try to murder each other, and this was an awesome combo. Nothing funny about Porky here, he was looking to put Villanos in the ground, and there was some big chop and punch exchanges and a fair amount of spilt blood. I liked the finish with V5 and Oro left in the cage only for V3 to break a bottle through the cage on Oro's head so his brother could escape. I am not sure how we didn't review this match when it arrived on the internet, but it is another chapter in this endless family feud. 

MD: Nothing is bad in a bubble. Lucha cage matches tend to be bad because they're a bunch of singles guys stuck together, a few of them maybe with programs or build, but with the primary goal of escaping in the midst of the chaos so that they're not one of the last two in there. Team vs team cage matches probably work better because there's much more hesitation for wrestlers to just scramble out at the first opportunity; to be doing so would be to leave their partners in danger. More so, there's generally a more visceral feud as was the case here. Finally, you have to factor in how hard it is for Porky to get up and out of the cage by this point, so they really had to do some damage to the Villanos to allow for that. Put that all together and you had a recipe for a good lucha cage match. 

I loved how this was filmed. You weren't going to see all the action but then that was impossible given the sight constraints and the size of some of the wrestlers and how thoroughly they were intent on beating and bloodying one another. Instead, it almost felt like you were on one of those rail rides at an amusement park, except for instead of the figurative horrors of It's a Small World, you were able to look left or right and see the real horror of a bloody Porky getting battered in the corner or Platino scrapping hard in a fist fight. It was less on the big memorable spots and more on the steady violence then, at least until the ring started to clear a bit. Thankfully, it all led to the most memorable moment of all, when Villano III smashed a beer bottle into the cage as Oro was trying to climb out, shattering it against the cage and sending glass right into Oro's face. Brilliant, unsafe spot, that was only lessened a little by the fact the Brazos weren't immediately on top of him to get vengeance.