DeportTV highlights focused mostly on the main event, but had clips of the tercera and semimain too. DeporTV’s camera seems now to be farther away than ever, but it worked out pretty well for the highlights.
Accion:
CMLL featured the main event Arena Mexico tag match. Mostly Mistico highlights, but everyone else gets a dive (or Guerrero Special in). Finish is shown as totally clean, two men simply beating two men, so Wagner attacking Mistico after the match (and ripping up his mask) has no justification
AAA went with the semimain spot show of Chessman & Charly vs Halloween & Extreme Tiger. Early highlights are of a normal match (with a seemingly pointless ref bump), then Chessman spears Extreme Tiger off the apron and into those wood panels. Charly takes a Halloween sunset bomb into another, and Chessman and Halloween boink heads when going for a spear. They’re KOed, and then they’re not as much so they can crawl closer together and put a hand on each other, and so it doesn’t come off as well as it might if they just did a double in-ring CO or a referee stoppage, but I don’t know if those finishes would been as accepted. This did not look as dumb as I’d thought (skipping the finish) in clip form, so maybe it’ll be an okay match. I have far more faith Halloween than anyone not named Halloween, it’s nearly indefensible at this point.
Other random things
– So I got a bunch of magazines, and see that Blue Demon Jr. becoming president of NWA Mexico was on a cover, before the NWA had announced it, before the CMLL had agreed to any sort of deal? That’s so not working out well. Set expectations to minimal.
– Couldn’t believe that, the week after the event, the first four pages of lucha coverage in Box y Lucha were on the DTU show. Is everyone who writes about lucha in Mexico convinced there must be a hardcore niche indy and trying to will into existence? I can only figure hardcore promotions are so the anthesis of normal and normal is so overwhelming, people mark out for it despite no hardcore promotion drawing or having a long consistent run.
Or these hardcore promotions do a better job of catering to press than a promotion who just runs every week. That seems reasonable.
– I never got around to linking Dr. Lucha’s interview with Ernesto Ocampo from last Friday, because it deserved more than a quick link but I don’t get around to doing more than that on a Friday evening. Sorry if you missed it, but blame Dave for not hyping better articles more than the random articles people get posted. I suggested questions for it a long time ago and don’t remember which ones were mine, sorry.
The one thing that stuck out to me, that wasn’t Ocampo bashing fellow magazine publishers in hilarious ways, was this one
15) There now exist various online-only lucha “magazines” (Halcon, Gladiatores, Pancracio), but none of them attracts any advertising or attempts to profit from their labor of love. Do you think an online-only lucha magazine could exist and yet attract enough revenue, either via advertising or subscriptions, to make it work?
I think is possible. The problem with the actual online magazines is their staff. All of them are amateurs, and they think are experts, but in reality are only wannabes. I expect the Super Luchas of the future will be much stronger.
I don’t think this was meant to be harsh towards the Gladiatores (since they’re the only one of the three who appear to be updating), but it sure came off that way. When I first read that, I was quite defensive, because I put those guys above myself (they go to events and take photos and talk to people, I make sarcastic remarks and occasionally include a picture) and thought it was disrespectful to the work they’re doing. Even if magazines increased their sales 10x, I don’t think they’d be sending people out to cover every Arena Neza show or all the IWRG shows. The lucha world is vaster than than a magazine staff can cover, and the efforts of people filling those gaps while doing it just as a labor of love should be respected.
On the other hand, Ocampo’s still right. They (we) are all amateurs who think they know what they’re talking about and may or may not. One of the reasons there’s no advertisements on this site is that (to me) it implies you’re paying for something with a certain level of journalistic standards, and I appreciate the oppurtinty not to have to live up to those. Would the general public be better off with someone who did? Well, you might not have a “Warrior and Toscano leaving?” story on the sidebar that’s since been quite contradicted.
There’s some in between ground here that I’m having trouble expressing here and I’m sorry about that.
Anyway, read the Q&A if you missed it the first time.
– WON awards turned up on the net this past week (1, 2, 3). Mistico was 6th as wrestler of the year, Cibernetico was 8th. Mistico was 3rd as box office draw, Cibernetico was 3rd in Most Charismatic, Apache/Billy was 9th for feud. No tag team in the top ten, no one besides Mistico was top ten flyer, AAA was a spot ahead of CMLL in promotion and TV Show, and no move in the top ten.
I was really fired up about the results a few days ago, but now I’m more thinking about how they’re just as good every year, so I shouldn’t really care too much about it. The general WON audience knows WWE on their own, knows CMLL on their own, knows some of Japan on their own, and know about 1% of lucha besides what Dave mentions. There’s some who know a lot more, but they’re more than outweighed who don’t. The awards, especially the minor awards, shouldn’t be taken so seriously.
Konnan’s gotta feed better hype about the Air Force more often to Dave. That’s the only way they’re going to get them noticed. We’re counting on you, Konnan!
