Todo x El Todo: 2013-12-22

taped 2013-11-30 @ Gimnasio Juan De La Barrera

I think the best part of the show might have been dramatic coin tossing music.

Villano III & Villano IV vs Hijo de Pirata Morgan & Pirata Morgan in a Ruleta de la muerte semifinal match: Hijo decided to work over Villano IV with moonsaults and his father took an amazingly leisured trip out of the ring, so there’s this match. Villanos generally move in slow motion, and it seemed like C3 couldn’t even get up for some spots. He was also super obviously calling spots at points. The double tapatia crawl thru looked amateur. Finish was great, in that it got the match to end.

Cien Caras Jr. & Máscara Año 2000 vs Angel Blanco Jr. & Höruz in a Ruleta de la muerte semifinal: I’m being repetitive, but these shows make no sense when watched together; Angel Blanco is used differently on every single show. Every other team is a team of normal partners except for the Angel Blanco & Höruz team, and there’s no real attempt to explain it. Angel and Höruz work técnico in a match too simple to get met create a gif. Big new star Höruz jumps into his own doom.

Angel Blanco Jr. & Höruz vs Hijo de Pirata Morgan & Pirata Morgan in a Ruleta de la muerte final match: Match picks up with Angel Blanco bleeding heavily, which is really poor editing and probably unnecessary for this tournament. The story of Todo x el Todo, as much as I can figure, is about Hijo del Santo being hassled by evil Angel Blanco Jr. and Solitario, so this is really a tournament about making Angel Blanco Jr. sympathetic. Höruz, who’s supposedly here to be a new técnico star, is just the other guy who happens to be here. It’s so weird. Second straight match where Höruz attempted to do something, failed, and lost soon after (though they missed the move that set it up live.) Pirata beat both guys; no one under 40 can get a win here. Match OK for a TxT tag but nothing I’ll ever think about seeing again.

Angel Blanco Jr. vs Höruz, mask vs hair: and so Angel Blanco immediately turns back rudo here. This seemed like it would’ve been the moment for Höruz to look good in a loss, but instead it’s six minute turn taking match with rudo winning absolutely clean (and Höruz never really having a moment where he was going to win.) Crowd didn’t react to much until the valagueza. Höruz has lost every single match since joining TxT, seeming less like a guy excelling when he got a chance and more like the guy brought in to ‘prove’ this promotion is much better than other.

El Hijo del Solitario vs LA Park vs Dr. Wagner Jr.: Solitario is treated like a non-entity by both Park & Wagner in large portions of this match. Park and Wagner worked stretches of the first half just against each other with Solitario limited to being an annoying fly to be swatted away. They later did normal Park comedy tag spots, where Solitario was just a generic opponent. Even before the match, Park asked the crowd if they were behind him or Wagner, ignoring Solitario. No one would’ve cheered much for Solitario if asked, judging how now one really cheered for him during the match, but Solitario still ended up winning despite how irrelevant he was treated. It was usual TxT garbage finish action – a mask toss DQ on LA Park (where the C3 replay exposed Solitario’s mask in slow motion) and a foul on Wagner – but it’s weird to treat Solitario as not on the level as the other two guys and have him win anyway. They were probably just screwing around, and maybe setting up new opponents for Solitario to face in a mask match if Santo can’t return, but it was another instance of weirdly laid out TxT matches. Match itself was low intensity for the part with all three, and Solitario and Wagner didn’t do anything interesting when they were they were on their own. This whole show dragged for me.

In 2013, I said I’d recap every TxT show I could, and achieved that. I’m definitely not making the same promise for 2014. There are occasional interesting matches, but a lot of long matches I have trouble caring about, and not great prospects going forward. I’ll pick and choose going forward.