Found Footage Friday: PANTERITA~! WHITE WOLF~! WHITE WOLFIE D~! SHEIK WEINGEROFF~?! BRAVE EAGLE~! JOHNSON~!

Chief Brave Eagle vs. Karl Johnson Big Time Wrestling 1930s?

MD: We lose the end of this and I think the first fall is a little clipped too but it's over twenty minutes of action from very long ago and probably worth taking a look at. I'm not sure about the 1930s designation but the only thing I have to make me doubt it is that the commentator compared Eagle to Japanese sumo wrestlers and pro wrestlers because he was bald and barefoot and had a particular stance. He was billed from Canada and Johnson from Sweeden. They made a very big deal out ofthe fact that Eagle was 270 pounds and Johnson was 250. That was considered quite big back then apparently. The first two falls had more cautious approaches with cheapshots off the ropes by Johnson and Eagle trying to fire back. Finish to the first was Johnson pressing in with clubbering shots and getting a fireman's carry and a knock down shot in the first and then Eagle recovering and hitting his own shot after the fireman's carry in the second. The third was more hold focused with Eagle locking in a Stepover Toehold and Short Arm-scissors that felt like they'd be totally valid forty years later. The bald head of Eagle was apparently so novel that they played up Johnson being unable to grab the hair to escape (he grabbed the tights). The footage cuts off with Johnson with a rear cross toehold. Again, I'm not entirely convinced it was from the 30s but I don't see a big difference in the actual work between this and something from, let's say the 50s, even if the way it was filmed did feel different.

Hubcap on a Pole: Wolfie D vs. Sheik George Weingeroff Powerslam Pro 5/27/94

MD: Bryan Turner says this was '94 which is after we have any record of Weingeroff still wrestling. He was apparently pretty much blind by this point regardless. He does the Sheik gimmick with costume and praying before the match and a couple of mannerisms, but it's pretty out of place. The fans were behind Wolfie against him for the most part. This was a hubcap on a pole match but didn't really follow the sort of logic you'd expect. The presence of the pole usually works to set up transitions. If a babyface has control and goes for it too early, he's vulnerable to the heel. If the heel is in the midst of a subsequent beatdown and tries to go for the weapon, the babyface can have his comeback, etc. They didn't lean into that here. Part of the problem was that the hubcap fell down midway through and someone had to put it back up while they were working holds. There were a decent amount of those for a match with this gimmick, and not just due to the technical mishap. It ended like these usually do, with the heel getting the weapon but the face nailing him before he could use it. Wolfie took out everyone, including the manager, and including the ref by accident, and someone came out to sneak attack him so that Weingeroff could win and leave with the title. Post match, Wolfie got some revenge. The audio was rough on this so I'm not sure who we were dealing with but at least the gimmick was self-explanatory. The actual work was ok for a mostly blind guy working an out there gimmick. You end up kind of glad he didn't work a few years later to the point where people would have expected him to emulate Sabu more. 

Mask vs. Mask: Panterita del Ring vs. White Wolf Monterrey 11/22/98

MD: I'm trying to stick to the post-order on these so I don't get lost, but Roy posted an apuestas match and Phil rightly noted that I should probably prioritize it. Since there seem to be no matches in the build to this, I'm giving it a go. Lobo Blanco is Andy Anderson, aged 23, who would be in the WWF system not long after this, primarily working in MCW and then with a fairly lengthy run in Puerto Rico. He had a pretty elaborate Wolfman style mask here. Plus side is that it stood out. Downside is that even though he took a posting on the outside at one point, it wasn't the sort of mask you could rip and get color with. Anyway, this comes in right at the end of the primera with the ref (Cuate Guerrero? who I think was the mainstay Monterrey ref for a lot of this footage) clotheslining Panterita so that Lobo could sunset flip him to win the caida and I was kind of wondering why I wasn't watching Fabuloso Blondy in 1989 instead. Immediately thereafter, Panterita did something I'd never seen which made it all worth it though; he started to bug the local commissioner about getting a new ref. It didn't work but I admired the refusal to just accept this bullshit.

Lobo took the initiative to ambush him during this, but he ate a back body drop and the aforementioned posting. For the rest of this match, including a fairly back and forth and actually exciting tercera, whoever was in the studio for this one kept rolling fast and loose with things; they'd be so excited to do a replay of a roll up that we'd miss a plancha, that kind of thing, so you were eventually watching a string of replays. That included the roll up that won Panterita the segunda, by the way. We saw it in replay form (they were showing us Panterita accidentally pulling Lobo's mask off in replay form during the initial roll up). Like I said, the tercera was pretty back and forth and exciting. Anderson wasn't afraid to let Panterita dive onto him including a flipping senton to the floor. Eventually, Guerrero got what was coming to him, body an errant Panterita dive and a Lobo dropkick; Lobo got his phantom pin off of a splash mountain style power bomb, but there was no ref. When Lobo tried it again, Panterita got the win. This was pretty good for what it was even if we missed the primera and the rudo ref infection had overtaken things by 98. Panterita was certainly confident in his own skin by this point and milked everything as much as possible for the crowd which isn't a bad thing for a local hero.

ER: I didn't know Andy Anderson was working Mexico, but he's a perfect fit. It's like Todd Morton working Mexico, if Todd Morton was a guy with enough gall to embellish his size on Cagematch to 6'2" 266 lb. Nobody has gone out of their way to tell me to watch as much Lobo Andy Anderson in Puerto Rico as I can find, and one of you should have. It's possible one of you did, but this match is what's going to make me go and do that. We never got Todd Morton working outside the states, and Anderson is an excellent proxy to show us what that might have looked like. He is the White Wolf, and his attire is impeccable. His pants are a shiny black, with white fur down the legs; his mask is Ke Monito, had Ke Monito been a werewolf inspired by Oliver Reed in Curse of the Werewolf rather than a monkey. It is a furry fluffy white mask which would look incredible matted with blood. Maybe there's a bloody match that led to this mascara contra mascara where we could see that bloody matted mask, but I doubt Anderson was walking around with more than one of these. 

White Wolf bumps exactly like Todd Morton, meaning he is an incredible bumper. He out bumps Panterita - except for one time - the entire match, taking a wild flipping Slaughter bump to the floor, a running backdrop on the floor, an excellent posting that would do Lawler proud, and countless more hard bumps into an ungiving ring. Panterita has a pescado with fine follow through and a slingshot senton to the floor that might have been 20% less effective than Super Calo's, but the drop was steeper and the Arena Coliseo Monterrey floor much harder than the WCW floors Calo was showcasing it on. Panterita and Wolf showed great strength in the way they integrated nefarious referees, somehow bumping subtly and with nuance for a Monterrey feature that is usually so broad and overplayed. There were a lot of great little things, like the way Panterita broke out of a low abdominal stretch with pointed elbows to the meat of Wolf's thigh...but then Panterita missed an insane flying shoulder block into the bottom buckle - into a chair - in an angle and trajectory I have never seen before, flying in like a dive knowing full well he was hitting a drained pool. The heat Wolf drew on his splash mountain showed how durable he could have been working Mexico for life. The fans he was egging on really hated him, and not just in the way you root against a man, there was hate in these men's eyes. But Andy Anderson didn't wrestle too often in Mexico, and he knows not what happens to men who attempt two Splash Mountain bombs. I loved this.