Month: October 2004

Couple tidbits from the Observer:

–CMLL is going to copy the Taboo Tuesday concept with fans voting on matches maybe one out of every four show. They’ve done stuff like this before, but never to this degree.

–Dos Caras Jr. quit AAA. While he wasn’t a big star, it comes at a bad time, since Perro Aguayu Jr. and Hector Garza having left the company a while back as well. Dave doesn’t mention it but you’d have to imagine he’d be showing up for CMLL soon.

Get this: Caras has done a fair share of shoot fights in Japan, mostly for the DEEP promotion (although he did appear at the first Pride Bushido show to get murdered in 46 seconds by Mirko Crocop). Antonio Pena made a play to get Shocker, and his big idea for an angle would be Shocker would have a shoot fight with Caras (which would be worked) and win. Caras refused, saying it would make him look bad in Japan (it’s dubious anyone would care, and he hasn’t been booked over there in ages). Shocker ended up not coming in anyway.

What a dumb sounding angle. Shoot fighting has already seeped into wrestlig in Japan, do we really need it infesting Mexico as well?

Some news from last week’s Observer:

Good crowds continue as the 9/24 Arena Mexico show (headlined by Negro Casas vs. Perro Aguayo Jr) drew 8,500, while the 10/1 show (with Atlantis & Santo & Mistico & Casas vs. Ultimo Guerrero & Rey Bucanero & Tarzan Boy & Averno on top) drew 9,000.

Some more notes on the original Dr. Wagner:

The name Dr. Wagner came about in 1962, when North Mexico promoter Elias Simon wanted Manuel Gonzalez to take the name El Hijo del Medico Asesino (the original MA had died two years prior). But Gonzalez didn’t want to be the fake son of a wrestler.

Later, Gonzalez was either listening to music by composer Richard Wagner, or reading a book about him, and came up with the name Dr. Wagner. Interestingly, there was already a Dr. Wagner in Mexico who used the name back in 1941 and didn’t last long.

Talking about the original Medico Asesino, Meltzer notes there were tons of copies over the years, and “the idea of an evil doctor who laughed about screwing up paitents went back years in Lucha Libre tradition.” Someone should write a research paper about that.

Dave also had an obit on Enrique Yanez, who went by Enrique LLanes (so it would be easier for the fans to remember). He and Tarzan Lopez were a top tag team known as La Pareja Ideal (the Ideal Pair). Some interesting tidbits.

–He was working as a locksmith when he started watching the early days of lucha. He idolized Lopez, and when they met, Lopez agreed to train him as a wrestler while LLanes returned the favoe and trained Lopez to be a locksmith.

–Llanes was best friends with Gori Guerrero, and in fact Guerrero married Llanes’ sister Herlinda, who was on Smackdown a few months back having a heart attack thanks to JBL. The Guerrero-Llanes family may very well be the most successful in history, as besides all the Guerreros, Enrique’s brother Mario and Sergio, along with son Javier, all went on to become decent sized stars in the business.

–He had a tournament match with Lopez that was so good, fans pelted the ring with money afterwards. The tournament was to get a #1 contender for Sugi Sito’s NWA World Middleweight title, at the time the most important belt in Mexico. Llanes won the tournament and later the title.

–Best story ever. He had a mask vs. hair match with the original Santo on July 3, 1949 in Arena Mexico. Santo won, of course, but the match was so emotional fans stormed the ring and carried LLanes backstage to avoid the haircut. Booker Francisco Flores told him to go back out and get his hair cut, but the fans blocked the aisle. When he got home, his mother started crying because she saw he had his hair and thought he unmasked Santo. When he told her what happened, she told him he had to live up to the stipulations and made him shave his head right there. As Dave asks, “where are mothers like that in wrestling today?”

busy! bad time managment!

In addition to picking up the Heavyweight title on Wednesday, Universo 2000 is your 2004 (3rd) Leyenda de Azul winner, getting a victory back over Canek in the deciding fall. Blue Demon did appear to award the belt and plaque, and nothing was broke this time. The point of this and the title change is to declare Universo as good without the mask as with the mask (so he’s not going anywhere for quite a while.)

Other results:

– Sombra de Plata & StarMAN over Ramstein and Super Comando
– Arkangel/Dr. X/Violencia over Texano Jr./Tony Rivera/Chris Stone
– Mistico/Negro/Shocker over GdI (Rey/Ultimo/Tarzan)

‘ccording to KrisZ, the main event only went 5:23 but was a pretty good 5:23.

Dos Caras Jr. will debut soon. Santo and Panther were in England last week as part of an art exhibit (I think it was a different guy the other ones, but I can’t find the link), and Santo will be back in CMLL next week.

There’s some storyline controversy about tonight’s main event. The whole card looks like this:

– Sombra Plata and Explosivo vs Super Comando and Flecha
– Virus, Tony Rivera, Neutron vs Nitro, Dr. X, Sangre Azteca
– Misterioso Sr., Misterioso Jr., Zumbido vs Olimpico, Okumura, Mr. Mexico
– Capos (Universo 2000, Cien Caras, Apolo Dantes) vs Pierroth, Vampiro, Hijo de Pierroth
(HdP’s debut)
– Dr. Wagner, Shocker, Negro Casas vs Hector Garza, Tarzan Boy, Terrible

Yes, Dr. Wagner on the tecnicos team. Wagner’s said he’s neither rudo nor tecnico, just a professional, and the other guys on his side have similar in-between backgrounds. It also has the effect of spicing up a card that’d be pretty familar and unimportant looking with Atlantis or Niebla or Warrior in that slot.

The rudo trio is refered to as La Ley de Notre, which is consistent with what Garza and Aguayo were talking about on this past week’s TV. I appericate groups of people having names to save space.

I don’t know if I’m tripping on the booking, but Dr. Wagner happens to be born and started wrestling in the North as well…

Weird week for the lucha schedule.

Saturday: If things were all normal, we’d be getting a Perro Aguayo/el Hijo Del Santo main event this week. However, that was the first weekend where coverage of lucha libre was preempted for coverage of the Olympics. Past experience is when a CMLL episode doesn’t air on Televisa, the tape’s never going to make it to Galavision (assuming there’s a tape sent, and they don’t just record it off the Televisa feed.)

Skipping past those episodes, Gala probably will air a show with a partial rematch of last week’s show, with Casas and Atlantis being replaced (upgraded) to Park and Shocker.

The upside to the skipping is we’re three weeks closer to being up to date, and one week away from the Anniversery show, so there’s a lot of hype cut out. The bad side is we miss this Perro/Santo main event (which sounds good) and the Gran Alternativa tournament (which didn’t sound impressive match wise but it’d be cool to see different faces.)

Of course, there’s no way to be sure what’ll happen till it happens; whatever shows up on TLN (assuming it is even CMLL!) Friday night will give a good indication. I’ll update the schedule just as soon as I figure out what’s going on.

Sunday: Lucha de Vuelta is cut down to 90 minutes for whatever reason, which is fine because I didn’t like this episode. They’ll probably either cut the opener for CMLL or part of the AAA show, but again it’s not something they’ve bothered to announce ahead of time. I miss when they used to do those sort of things.