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If you're in the mood for shootstyle then Real Hero has been uploading some classic stuff lately For example, Daisuke Ikeda vs Yuki Ishikawa from Fu-Ten, 24/4/05, one of the higher rated Battlarts style matches of the era https://twitter.com/MVH_PW/status/1240058304187031553?s=20 Very good thread with a different show recommended almost daily. First one though, wow. It's almost every episode of All Japan Women Classics. Other than the AJW Classics, you've got some Big Japan, some Sendai Girls, OZ Academy, AJPW, NOAH, & one of the annual Kenta Kobashi produce shows which are always fun. Like this thread idea but need to be going to bed. In the morning I will try to find links to some of my favourite matches. But I'll leave one match before I go to bed, my favourite from the first 2 years of Ring of Honor AJ Styles vs Paul London, ROH Night of Grudges - 14/06/03 This was for the ROH #1 Contenders Trophy, possibly one of the silliest "titles" in wrestling history. One of the great revelations of rewatching early ROH was how amazing Paul London was. Really, really impressive stuff from the latter half of 2002 to through to his final match with ROH in July 2003. Watching him grow from a pretty green guy to this incredible babyface was such a joy and this was about the peak of the run, his 2nd last match before riding off into the sunset of WWE. Obviously AJ is AJ, he was already great, and it makes for a really great wrestling match. KENTA vs Low Ki, ROH Final Battle 2005 - 17/12/05 Okay, one last match before bed. It's KENTA vs Low Ki for the GHC Jr Heavyweight belt (that's the NOAH belt for those unfamiliar), headlining the final ROH show of 2005. This is a really great way to end a year, with a super stiff clash in KENTA's 2nd ever trip to the US & 1st ever ROH appearance. I know this board is down on Low Ki because Low Ki is an insecure and unpleasant idiot but this is the best match of his career. And if you've never seen prime KENTA you're in for a treat.
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Mar 24, 2020 02:08
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Punch McLightning posted:Per F4W/WO, a bunch of the WWE Network is free now. Oh hell, then everyone needs to watch Bret vs Owen from Wrestlemania X. That poo poo ruled.
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Mar 24, 2020 02:09
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Have one of the best matches in the career of Chris Hero, his match with Bryan Danielson at PWG Guerre San Frontieres in 2009
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Mar 31, 2020 20:30
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IceAgeComing posted:https://twitter.com/francescoakira/status/1269076221943443457?s=20 Just came to post that. Not seen it yet myself but yeah, I mean, the show starts with Yoshitatsu (who you will recognise from WWE Superstars a decade ago) & Kento Miyahara (who you should recognise as Best of the Best) against Jun Akiyama and young boy Dan Tamura, an All Asia Tag Title match, it's definitely worth your time & cool of All Japan to put up. (Though if I was them I might've uploaded the 2 New Years War shows from January to give a closer look at AJPW at its peak in 2020, which has a higher chance of encouraging people to sub to AJPW.tv imo) In fact, here's the lineup of this show Kento Miyahara & Yoshitatsu vs. Dan Tamura & Jun Akiyama Black Menso-re & Yuma Aoyagi vs. Hikaru Sato & Shuji Ishikawa Hokuto Omori & Koji Iwamoto vs. Evolution (Suwama & Yusuke Okada) Yusuke Kodama vs. Akira Francesco Takao Omori vs. Jake Lee All Asia Tag Team Title Match Yankee Two Kenju (Isami Kodaka & Yuko Miyamoto) (c) vs. KAI & TAJIRI Enfants Terribles (Kuma Arashi & Shotaro Ashino) vs. Purple Haze (Izanagi & Zeus) Definitely worth 3 hours of your time.
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Jun 6, 2020 19:14
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Vagabundo posted:How did AJPW fall so far to begin with? In 1999 Giant Baba died. His wife ran the business but quickly clashed with the talent, lead by Misawa, the biggest star and booker. Eventually things come to a head and Misawa leads an exodus of all the native wrestlers in AJPW bar two, Kawada and Fuchi in the middle of 2000. They form NOAH and take the AJPW TV slot on Nippon TV too. It's really all descending from there, losing the stars, losing the next generation of guys in their dojo like KENTA, Morishima, Marufuji and losing the broadcast TV.
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Jun 7, 2020 03:57
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Vagabundo posted:Didn't they nab a bunch of dudes from NJPW like Mutoh after the NOAH exodus? I guess that didn't work out for them? TL;DR version is that it's hard to be successful when you aren't able to replace your broadcast TV deal. NTV owned a stake in All Japan at the time & so even as they cancelled AJPW & gave the slot to NOAH they refused to let them negotiate another broadcast deal so all All Japan had was Samurai TV & Gaora, & to subscribe to both of them today is going to be about $35/month. I'd also say you have to be careful not to overstate how quickly AJPW fell. All Japan still ran the Budokan until 2004, & were still doing over 10,000 at Ryogoku Kokugikan in 2007. It was a gradual fall-off I guess as they just struggled to bring in new fans because of the TV situation. It's lovely, cold & wet outside so lets go into this since I have nothing better to do. The first post-exodus tour has such a weird lineup. Kawada vs Fuchi in the main event of the first show at a time where Fuchi was basically a midcard multiman tag guy but is a decent little match. After that you've got 51 year old Yoshiaki Fujiwara & Okumura who are both freelancers, Michinoku Pro regular Jinsei Shinzaki (aka WWF's Hakushi) & Yuto Aijima who has one match on Cagematch with the Joshi promotion NEO in 1999 before he goes to All Japan. And then a weird crop of foreigners: Steve Williams, Taiyo Kea, George Hines (aka Jackie Fulton from Smokey Mountain), Wolf Hawkfield (Jungle Jim Steele from WCW), Giant Kimala (Botswana Beast from World Class) & Johnny Smith who were regulars in All Japan, and you have Mike Barton aka Bart Gunn & Too Cold Scorpio who were also regulars in '99 & '00 after being let go by WWF. So it's not exactly a packed roster, of those names really only Dr Death & Kawada are remotely draws. First Budokan show they ran post-exodus they brought in Stan Hansen & much bigger, Genichiro Tenryu, which was a huge deal. He left All Japan in 1990 to work for SWS, a new start up funded by a really rich money mark & his name basically became dirt to Baba. But Mrs Baba brought him in for the Budokan show, his first match back in All Japan in a decade, & he'd go on to be a really big guy for them despite being up there in age. The next big name they bring in, for the September Budokan show, is Masahiro Chono, which is the start of some cooperation with New Japan, obviously an unthinkable thing 6 months prior. All Japan was very much an isolationist group, they didn't use many native outsiders & freelancers, but needs must, this tour had Sabu on it, 4 luchadores including Super Calo & Damien 666, & there's 6 guys from Toryumon adding some junior flair in the undercards. They also brought in The Cedman who is a southwestern US indie guy also known as Cedric of Hollywood and I have never seen him but man. Just reading 2000 All Japan cards is such a blast for how weird some of the names they bring in are. October 2000 is all about a tournament to crown a new Triple Crown champion after Kobashi vacated it. You've got Kawada, Smith, Williams, Shiro Koshinaka (NJPW), Hansen, Shinzaki, Tenryu, Barton, with Tenryu beating Kawada in the final. Bart Gunn was in a tournament to crown the first Triple Crown champ of a new era. During Real World Tag League you've got Mike Rotunda, Kendall & Barry Windham, Dan Kroffat, & the shoot style wrestlers Masahito Kakihara & Mitsuya Nagai, & shoot style was always much more strongly associated with Inoki & New Japan. 2001 was when the cooperation with New Japan ramped up, the last ever AJPW Dome show happened & you've got Liger, Kensuke Sasaki, & Muto all on it with other outsiders like Terry Funk, Onita, Curt Hennig, & Hiroshi Hase comes back which is a big deal. He got "blamed" by Inoki for All Japan eventually poaching Muto & Kojima (he demanded Hase resign from the Diet which is some dumb carnie poo poo) & as the year goes on you've got Team2000 & G-EGGS coming in from NJPW & in June Muto beats Tenryu for the title; there's even a Muto vs Chono Triple Crown match in October. 2002 sees an end to the New Japan cooperation & Mutoh, Kojima & Kendo Kashin all jumping from New Japan to All Japan & things start settling down into the Mutoh era until 2013, where you then have another exodus, with about half the roster leaving with Muto for Wrestle-1 while a bunch of guys like Jun Akiyama jump from NOAH back to All Japan because they were upset with how Kobashi had been treated. I think part of the issue is we obviously see Japanese wrestling through a western perspective & western All Japan fans mostly jumped to NOAH who were the promotion in the first half of the 2000s for when I first started posting on wrestling forums. I only really heard about All Japan a fraction of the time I'd read people discussing NOAH & New Japan & maybe even Toryumon. Even now, there's not actually much of that era of All Japan footage out there. Take Cagematch ratings. It's dominated by 4 Pillars era: the top 18 rated AJPW matches on there are all featuring at least 1 of the 4 Pillars. (19th is Tenryu vs Jumbo from '89, 20 is Miyahara vs Nomura from September 2019) while the highest rated match from the post-exodus until Mutoh leaves is Satoshi Kojima vs Toshiaki Kawada from 2005 at 29th. And it's a loving rad match. Of the top 100 matches you've got 7 that I count from that era & 34 from the 2013-today era. Part of that is just it's so much easier to watch current stuff since AJPW.TV launched but I think it does highlight how overlooked that 2000s All Japan is. Including by me on the whole.
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Jun 7, 2020 15:07
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El Gallinero Gros posted:AJPW also brought in a guy named Chris the Bambikiller, pretty sure he did multiple tours too I would always have to sign him in EWR because that name is so great. I think I first remember reading about All Japan in the era where the big stables were Voodoo Murders & RO&D (the group that had D'Lo Brown & Bull Buchanan & The Wall & Rico Constantino & Jamal & Rosey & was founded by TAKA Michinoku). RO&D stood for Roughly Obsess and Destroy. And of course there was BATT, Bad rear end Translate Trading. I love Japanese stable names. Just reminding myself of the Voodoo Murders lineup. Taru, Chuck Palumbo, "brother" YASSHI, Johnny Stamboli, Shuji Kondo, Giant Bernard, Suwama, Joe Doering, Satoshi Kojima, Shawn Daivari. Such a weird mix of guys. forkboy84 fucked around with this message at 15:22 on Jun 7, 2020 |
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Jun 7, 2020 15:14
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IceAgeComing posted:Just to be pedantic here: they claimed 10,000 in 2007: I've not seen that particular show but knowing what we know about the real capacity of Sumo Hall I'd be stunned if they actually did 10,000+ in 2007. Yeah, that's fair pedantry, I should've mentioned that until Bushiroad got involved with New Japan most attendance figures in Japan were inflated dramatically but you can only go off the numbers you have. Also agree that the financial future of All Japan is far from rosey despite the in-ring product being very enjoyable: certainly as far as the empty arena shows go I've found All Japan's the easiest to watch. But I can't control the financials, all I can do is give them my money for AJPW.tv & try to encourage others to give them a fair go & just enjoy the wrestling.
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Jun 8, 2020 21:07
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Here's a really novel thread with 10 matches from French wrestling in 1957 https://twitter.com/secretwrestlin1/status/1270267250981965827?s=20 So if you want to see something firmly outside of the modern wheelhouse this seems like something.
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Jun 9, 2020 14:27
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Remember this thread? Well, Coronavirus is still going on so why the hell not? Someone on the AJPW Reddit has linked to their Dailymotion account where they've uploaded all but 2 of the AJPW Triple Crown Championship matches https://www.reddit.com/r/ajpw/comments/i4ujux/every_ajpw_triple_crown_match_ever_minus_2/ Why is this cool? Well it's a belt that's been won by some of the all time greats: Jumbo Tsuruta, Genichiro Tenryu, Stan Hansen, Mistuhara Misawa, Kenta Kobashi, Terry Gordy, Vader, Steve Williams, Toshiaki Kawada, Akira Taue, Keiji Mutoh, Satoshi Kojima, Kensuke Sasaki, Minoru Suzuki, Shinya Hashimoto, Jun Akiyama, Kento Miyahara. And while a lot of the footage is easy to find out there, especially the 90s Four Pillars stuff, 2000s post-NOAH split AJPW is incredibly hard to find online, & AJPW.tv only goes back to 2018 I think. But as awesome as all this is (& it is) they haven't been uploaded in any real order. But he's helpfully put up playlists by year: https://www.dailymotion.com/sugarlipsjohnson/playlists from 1989's first match, Jumbo Tsuruta vs Stan Hansen all the way to Suwama vs Shotaro Ashino from June this year (he's not uploaded Ishikawa's title challenge yet but that's easy enough to find if you're a completionist) The missing matches are the 29th June 2014 Takao Omori vs Suwama match which is the only Triple Crown match not filmed as far as we know & one of the missing matches is the 1st half of Minoru Suzuki's 29/8/10 defence against Suwama because the uploader had some problems with Kaze Ni Nare but here's the full match: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x17mzr9 So I know what I'm doing instead of anything useful.
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Aug 11, 2020 11:37
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It's been a year, we all still can't do anything outside unless you live in Australia or New Zealand or Vietnam so hey, time for another dumb of free wrestling https://twitter.com/KVR216/status/1354251867908431876?s=20 Osaka Pro is a Japanese indie company that mixed high flying action with comedy wrestling who ran largely in Osaka. A big influence on Chikara. Founded by Super Delfin who you may have seen in his New Japan appearances (he was in the first Super J Cup & the first Best of the Super Juniors), he had spent the 90s mainly wrestling for Michinoku Pro who were focused on running mostly in Tohoku. Anyway, there's an awful lot there to dive into.
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Feb 6, 2021 13:57
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https://twitter.com/ChrisHero/status/1362936058850267137?s=19 If you haven't seen this match between Danielson and Hero from PWG, it's free on Highspots now and you really should watch (Bad news, it's Excalibur and Joey Ryan on commentary. I'd forgotten that) forkboy84 fucked around with this message at 02:46 on Feb 20, 2021 |
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Feb 20, 2021 02:37
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Doing some thread necromancy for the coolest thing I've found online in a while https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1fb41137Qg Yes, it's a playlist of every 2002 ROH show. Someone has uploaded 2002 through 2008. Pretty rad.
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Jan 19, 2022 02:20
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