[2000-03-14-Onita Pro] Atsushi Onita & Atsushi Onita Jr & Dick Togo & Fake Onita & Shigeo Okumura vs Kendo Nagasaki & Shoji Nakamaki & Ichiro Yaguchi & Yase Yaguchi & Yuichi Taniguchi (No Rope Barbed Wire)

[soup23]

I am starting to turn against Onita Pro. I am a Onita mark and death matches are my soft spot so this is tough but here we are for the third month in a row with a big multi man match where a lot of the end result doesn’t have any rhyme or reason. There still is enough Onita fire and big spots to keep me somewhat entertained but I want more substance. It is compounded by the fact that even though I feel like I am fairly astute at Japanese wrestlers in history from this timeframe, I had huge troubles distinguishing many people in this match. It felt like a lot of the match was Onita and everyone else and that includes great workers like Togo who just weren’t the focal point until the very end where he gets the pin. I do still dig the finishing runs where the crowd is right around ringside making everything feel more chaotic. **1/2

[Loss]

I liked this more than Chad, but I agree that Onita Pro has lost something since 1999, when the heat was off the charts and everything seemed a bit more wild and fresh. What a difference Tenryu made! I still think the action is pretty good, and I enjoy garbage wrestling, but when blood and gore becomes as routine as brushing your teeth or taking out the trash, there's a problem. I'm still on the Onita Pro train, but I do see the warning signs coming. There are some big moments coming that I hope correct course. This match, like all the rest, is a vehicle for Onita, with everyone else pretty much indistinguishable (there are three versions of Onita on his team!). It's cool to see Kendo Nagasaki still popping up in good stuff too after having one of the first great brawls of the FMW garbage style in 1990. This doesn't have the energy that this much chaos and action should, and I think that's because it's too predictable. They're doing this not because they hate each other, but because it's the house style, and that really feels like the wrong reason to do it. ***

[Tim Evans]

Dick Togo in an Onita death match is something I wasn't expecting. This is the lesser of the Onita pro matches I've seen so far but it's still entertaining. I love the atmosphere of these shows. People are crowding the ring and it's total chaos the whole time. Ichiro bleeds like usual and one of the Onita's takes a crazy bump. I'm still team Onita pro all the way.

[cramerjason87]

After watching the other Onita Pro six man tags from the year it has become clear that these are just hard to follow. Everyone fighting at the same time just leads to it looking like nothing is happening. The finishing sequence is pretty good though. Still love Onita.

[Edwin]

The biggest problem with these Onita Pro main events is that once you've seen one, you've seem them all.

 

They're worked exactly the same and feature pretty much the same core group of guys with some 1 or 2 variations coming in ever so often.

 

I personally like Onita and these types of matches, so I don't mind the repetitiveness, but I could see how this could be uninteresting to some.

 

Togo is a new addition from the previous matches and he looks really good in it. He eventually becomes to these Onita Pro main events.

 

One of the bits that made me appreciate this more than the previous matches was that a lot of the action took place in the ring and it was easier to keep track of all of the chaos. Plus they tore down the barbed wire which was something they hadn't done in the previous matches and the mess of chairs in the ring was a nice touch too.

 

***1/2