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fxnj

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  1. I really didn't feel this one. The leg work wasn't particularly exciting and Tanahashi's dragon screw continues to not look good. Okada's leg selling alternated between high school play level acting and completely ignoring it. Then they squeeze in an Epic Elbow Exchange because every epic match needs to have one. Stretch run just looked like them running through their greatest hits and not a particularly great rendition of them. The reversals leaned more towards finisher square dance rather than feeling like a gritty struggle for control. The Omega match from next year's show has its flaws but I'd pretty easily take it over this.
  2. fxnj

    Tsuyoshi Kikuchi

    https://vk.com/video498684816_456239038 With regards to late 90's gems, this match with Hase rules. Love how these two guys just casually do some of the coolest matwork of the 90's on a random Korakuen undercard match.
  3. I don't agree that the authority angle has been played up in the same way as Austin/McMahon or Bryan/Triple H. It was made clear from when Triple H made announced Roman/Cody as the official main event that Rock couldn't just use his executive powers to do whatever he wants. It's possible that they're leaving the door open to some kind of power struggle later, but it's not really been explored yet. Rock's actions have been driven by his star power and ego with abuse of executive privileges not really being something he's resorted to. In announcing the tag it wasn't framed as "I'm the boss and you need to do this" but "here's an offer for you."
  4. fxnj

    Tsuyoshi Kikuchi

    His stock just keeps rising the more I watch of him. All-time great FIP anytime he was in a 6-man opposite Jumbo for his ability to take the most brutal looking bumps possible, get himself twisted in all kinds of knots, and sell his ass off. Does kind of get disturbing once you start watching the smaller show matches and the handhelds, though, for how you realize the sort of damage he was taking night after night. Also fantastic in regular tags with the Kobashi/Kikuchi vs. Can-Am stuff being a great trilogy of matches instead of just one classic match. The singles with Fuchi are super underrated and some of the best matches of 90's AJPW not involving the pillars. Then on top of that you have him reinventing himself for 2000's NOAH run, where he was pretty consistently entertaining even on smaller show matches and had a way of pushing the guys opposite of him to not just coast by.
  5. Here after watching their incredible interactions in the 9/15/1989 6-man, and what a disappointment that this is their only singles match together. Any hope for this being good pretty much got derailed when Tenryu chokes out Fuchi with a guillotine, who then spends several minutes knocked out while Hokuto tries to create a distraction. Not sure if it was legit or they just wanted to give Hokuto some screentime, but it was bad either way. It's not until the last 2 or 3 minutes that this stops feeling like a waste of time when they finally start stiffing each other. Also the great production mostly misses the impact of what looked like a ridiculously stiff brainbuster but makes sure to zoom right in so we can see Fuchi talking to Tenryu during the finishing pin.
  6. I was sure that I'd seen this before, but I didn't remember a thing from it while watching it, which would be weird for a match as good as this one. Definitely belongs in the top tier of 80's 6-mans and a likely point of inspiration for the epic Misawa/Jumbo 6-mans. As has been mentioned, what really makes this one stand out is how everyone gets their own distinct role and their own moments of looking awesome. Baba is a slightly more mobile late 80's Andre, Kawada's a striker, Fuyuki's more of a high flyer, Kimura has the hard head doing headbutts, Tenryu is Tenryu, and Fuchi plays the firey underdog role far better than I could have imagined. Loved how violent Tenryu came across in this and the part with him destroying Fuchi with a chair on the outside seems like the kind of thing that might have inspired 90's Jumbo. The match is loaded with too many great moments to list. One that stuck out to me was the Kawada plancha on Fuchi for how ridiculously smoothly they set up and executed the whole thing. Even with the best, it's often hard to buy into a guy just standing around and catching someone throwing their body at them, so I was really impressed with how believable they made it look despite their relative lack of big match experience. The other one was Fuyuki unloading slaps on Kimura, who completely no sold them before knocking down Fuyuki with a headbutt. That was so funny.
  7. I'm really liking these mid-1990 6-mans for how you can see them doing so much experimentation in the characters and the spots right in front of you. With this one, I found the beginning teases and set-ups for the awesome Misawa/Jumbo confrontation almost as interesting as the confrontation itself. Crowd is great for this since this is the Misawa and Jumbo's first match back since the 6/8 upset and there's clearly a lot of intrigue in what happens. That experimentation also a bit of a negative here as Kikuchi spends the first half or so trying to work 50/50 with Kabuki and Fuchi and it doesn't really work. Things pick up massively when Jumbo wrecks Kikuchi and he gets a brutal FIP section that sees his nose blooded. Up to this point, I'd always thought the Kobashi nose angle in the October 6-man was just a shoot that they went with, but now I wonder if it might have been planned after seeing how well it worked here. People in the thread for the 8/18 6-man saw that as the big coming out party for Kikuchi but this feels like the match where it was actually established how great he was at getting his ass beat. Anyway, Misawa is an awesome hot tag and it never gets old seeing him destroy people with elbows. It's a little weird seeing him elbow Jumbo off the apron without Jumbo losing himself in burning rage, but points like that where they're stills working out the kinks of the formula also serve to make it interesting. On that front, we also get some sections where Taue tries to imitate Misawa, even nailing several dropkicks over the course of the match. Hot stretch run and seeing Kikuchi do a missile dropkick with blood dripping into his mouth was a great visual.
  8. I loved this when it first appeared on the VAP Tiger Mask II set that released something like 10 years ago, and I think I loved it even more rewatching it today. Serves really well both as a high mark of the 80's AJPW 6-man style and an appetizer for what was to come in the 90's. Even though Hara and Misawa are the top guys on their respective teams, the focus on this seems to be more on putting the captains up against the plucky underdogs on the opposing teams. That means Hara/Ishikawa and Misawa/Kawada feel like the main pairings we see in this match, and both carry the same theme of the lower ranked guy getting their moments but still clearly being the lower ranked guy. Misawa looks really good in the Tiger Mask role with mixing high flying offense and stiff kicks. There's also a moment where he seems to accidentally invent the frog splash years before Art Barr. Since it's an 80's match, they keep a fast pace of mostly strike based offense, and that leads to some questionable moments, like when Kawada hits a jumping tombstone on Misawa and, and Misawa gets up just seconds later to catch Kawada's follow-up top rope move. To be fair, Kawada didn't hit the move that cleanly, so it's not the end of the world, but still annoying. The crowd was really interesting for how they were initially dead but the guys seemed to win them over and they got really hot for the stretch run. There's something about the acoustics in Budokan that makes crowd reaction feel so "big" compared to a place like Korakuen.
  9. I put this on just to have something running in the background but they grabbed me pretty quickly with the awesome Akiyama/Fuchi sequence in the beginning and I ended up dropping what I was doing to watch the whole thing. Fuchi is awesome here, looking like he's relishing this as a sadly increasingly rare opportunity to showcase his 6-man tag chops. Watching him stretch the shit out of Akiyama and Kikuchi was the highlight for me. The match is also interesting for being one of the few Misawa/Kawada 6-mans where Kawada is coming in as champ, which leads to Kawada looking a little more confident and Misawa being a little less dismissive of him than usual. We still do get an awesome mic drop moment late in the match, though, with Misawa knocking down Kawada off a single elbow and casually tagging in Akiyama to finish things. Akiyama gives a fun performance as an overmatched young guy and eats a nasty slam from the apron to the outside. Awesome last few minutes with Kawada laying complete destruction to Misawa's team and looking like a badass in the process. Feels like it belongs in the conversation for one of the better Misawa/Kawada 6-mans, though it's understandable why it doesn't get much talk given the quality it survives in isn't that great. I actually have no idea how we even have it when it doesn't look like it aired on TV or was on any comms that I'm aware of.
  10. Loved this one. First 10 minutes or so are almost entirely built around grappling, and it's great. They're nail the little things like Eddie making sure to wrench down big on a headlock or Angle bumping hard on a tackle, but then you also get some neat counters like Eddie hooking the leg to escape from an abdominal stretch. They continued to make things feel hard fought as they transitioned into high risk moves and suplexes. Eddie going for a flash frog splash, missing it, and selling big really helped get across the significance of the move when he finally hit it later in the match. Loved how they also went 14 minutes without throwing a single punch and when Angle finally used one that Eddie made sure to sell the hell out of it. Finish was something that I'd remembered as being great but it ended up being even better than I remembered. Loved Eddie mouthing "oh shit" when he saw Angle make his way back in from outside.
  11. Are you saying Russo wasn't responsible for booking Owen to have entered from the rafters?
  12. fxnj

    Negro Navarro

    Navarro's maestro stuff has aged like milk for me. Basically the type of wrestling people (used to?) accuse 90's juniors stuff of being. No struggle getting into holds, no struggle getting out, no narrative besides "watch how great these guys are." Just guys doing laughably convoluted holds and expecting the audience to get off on it. He seems pretty solid as a brawler, though.
  13. Another incredible one-two punch from Rock of the great long-form social media promo + top notch TV segment. What a run he's on right now.
  14. fxnj

    Roman Reigns

    Well said. Count me as another fan of that 2014-2018 run. Sucks that his Tribal Chief run doesn't touch his best from that period, but whatever.
  15. No impressions on Bryan/Akiyama? I thought it was a big step-up from the Kingston/Akiyama cringe, mainly because they actually tried to work a real match instead of a bunch of masturbatory tribute spots. Still, it kind of started off on the wrong foot as far as getting over Akiyama to an unfamiliar audience. Like, there was a pretty big dissonance between hearing Kingston put over Akiyama's amateur wrestling accomplishments on commentary while Danielson just gobbled him up on the mat and ran through his usual stuff without much difficulty. Once they moved past that it become a pretty solid bomb throwing match with minimal fat. I don't care a whole lot about the Bryan/Kingston angle the match seems to have been put together to advance, but I get the feeling they could have a great match if they had a longer rematch on something like a big DDT show.
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