We’re shown a MASAMUNE promo, but it’s entirely in Japanese so… yeah. Thing to note about CHIKARA is that usually the commentary is really good. UltraMantis Black, Larry Sweeney, Bryce Remsberg, Mike Quackenbush, Leonard F. Chikarason and later Gavin Loudspeaker are all at least bearable. For this match, we’re given the team of UltraMantis and Icarus. Oy. Icarus and commentary do NOT go well together. He mumbles, tries too hard to play it straight and any jokes fall completely flat.
On the other hand, Akuma vs. MASAMUNE itself is pretty good. The two are very similar in style and it seems that MASAMUNE is supposed to be just as much a heel as Akuma. It’s brought up that MASAMUNE is a tag champ in Osaka Pro, adding to the idea that the two of them are evenly matched. In a good opening bit of grappling, Akuma gets the best of the exchange and armdrags MASAMUNE out of the ring. MASAMUNE angrily throws a chair, making it a point that he isn’t any more virtuous than the despised Akuma after all. Akuma doesn’t play face either, as once MASAMUNE reenters, he knees him with a cheap shot. While the chemistry is definitely there, the match appears to go into a pattern. They do a strike war against each other (chops, kicks, forearms), then one gives the other an elaborate submission hold that won’t take. Akuma goes for the Yoshi Tonic, MASAMUNE escapes and then hits Akuma with an Ace Crusher. While grappling with Akuma from behind, MASAMUNE briefly shoves the ref out of the way out of annoyance. During that diversion, Akuma gives him a mule kick to the balls, rolls him up and puts his legs on the ropes to get the pin.
The show starts out, uniquely enough, without a match. As it turns out, there’s a huge blizzard going on and the ring doctor hasn’t arrived yet, so the fans in attendance have to sit on their hands for a while and wait. To warm up the crowd, the Order of the Neo-Solar Temple arrive along with referee Bryce Remsberg, who looks like he’d rather be anywhere else. Accompanied by UltraMantis Black and Crossbones, we see that Hydra is wearing a blue bathrobe for some reason and is straining to drag a chair towards the ring. Bryce gives him a hand by easily picking it up.
Upon entry, UltraMantis announces the return of the Hydralock Challenge (occasionally pronounced “hydraulic”). Remember how Chris Masters used to do his Masterlock Challenge in mid-00’s WWE? Hydra’s decided to take it to another level. UltraMantis takes a second to rail at the crowd for being stupid enough to come to a wrestling show in such terrible weather and then has Hydra remove the robe. What a specimen.
The last time they did this bit, they made a teenage girl tap out (or should I say, UltraMantis tickled her and claimed her giggle was a sign of surrender). This time, he wants a challenger with more panache. When he’s about to announce the prize, a fan asks, “A bathrobe?” Angrily, UltraMantis calls him a rapscallion and shows that the winner will get $50,000, as shown in the roll of cash in his hand that he swears is not just a bunch of singles. A handful of fans raise their hands to volunteer, but UltraMantis refuses to acknowledge them. Then Robbie Ellis shows up, poses a little and volunteers to see if he can withstand Hydra’s “unbreakable” full nelson.
My favorite little fan moment in this is when he sits down and flexes, someone in the crowd yells, “He’s bringing sexy back!” and gets a good laugh from some of the others. Hydra does a lot of stalling, but finally secures the Hydralock. In an instant, Ellis taps out. UltraMantis boasts at how unstoppable Hydra is while slipping Ellis the wad of cash behind his back. Ellis smirks for a bit until inspecting the money and seeing that it isn’t the amount they agreed on. Ellis’ partners Mitch Ryder and Larry Sweeney run in, offended at the Neo-Solar Temple for trying to swindle a legend like Ellis. Ryder cuts a promo about respect and then makes a challenge for a pose-down: Sweeney vs. Hydra.
Hydra accepts. To his own theme song, he rubs oil on himself and does some lackluster posing. Then it’s Sweeney’s turn. He turns to referee Bryce and says, “You always walk around with a bottle of oil on you, right?” He does! Oiled up, Sweeney poses to cheers despite being a rudo. UltraMantis insists that it’s a draw and ups the challenge to a 6-way pose-off. The Fabulous Three oblige and flex their guns. Realizing they’re sunk, UltraMantis leads his henchmen to cheese it, declaring, “You planted this audience!”
Starting September 14th and ending September 16th, CHIKARA Pro, my favoritest wrestling organization, is holding their 6th annual King of Trios tournament. I’ve discussed CHIKARA at length before and even wrote up a primer guide to explain it to new folks. It’s an independent wrestling company and wrestling school headed by Mike Quackenbush, focusing on international styles, incredibly strong storytelling, over-the-top gimmicks and a lot of inspired comedy.
The King of Trios is an evolved version of CHIKARA’s previous big tournament, Tag World Grand Prix. Tag World, which occurred three times before being shelved and then coming back once again in 2008, was a massive tag team tournament filled with CHIKARA students, CHIKARA regulars, teams from other organizations and even other countries. In 2006, the team of Chris Hero and Claudio Castagnoli won, crowning them the first ever Campeones de Parejas (tag team champions). The company decided to move forward on the concept. The tag tournament was cool, but not exactly too out there. They needed to go further and really grasp the company’s unique identity.
And so, in 2007, from February 17th to 19th, CHIKARA started off their sixth season with the King of Trios tournament. Three days long, the tournament featured sixteen teams of three battling it out for supremacy. Teams were put together based on friendship, experience, style or being part of the same outside organization. It was a strong show and every tournament since has been a highlight to the company. As I’ve said before, it’s less about being a wrestling event and more about celebrating wrestling in general.
I’m going to this year’s show, being my fourth King of Trios weekend. To hype it up a bit, I’m going to be doing a daily series of articles about the show’s history. For each year, I’ll spend one day getting caught up on the card and then an article for each night of the show. Then a little finale to talk about this year’s tournament, meaning 21 days worth of stuff.
All King of Trios shows are available at Smart Mark Video in the forms of DVD ($15), mp4 ($12) or streaming ($10). They’re all worth checking out.
So let’s start off with 2007.
The Story Thus Far…
Season 5 ended with the Kings of Wrestling (Chris Hero and Claudio Castagnoli) losing the Campeonatos de Parejas to their protégés FIST (Icarus and Gran Akuma). Hero blamed Claudio, who was also leaving the company due to signing with the WWE. Hero and FIST turned on Claudio and attacked him until Mike Quackenbush and the other tecnicos came to the rescue. Quack gave Claudio a nice sendoff, but unfortunately, Claudio’s WWE career ended before it could even begin due to some contract snafu.
The Young Lions Cup tournament was won by Arik Cannon, who defended the trophy regularly until a surprise loss to “Canadian Dynamite” Max Boyer. Cannon, in a fit of rage, attacked the referee and got suspended indefinitely. Boyer continued to defend the trophy and remained unbeaten.
During the Tag World Grand Prix tournament, Hallowicked’s partner UltraMantis Black was injured and a random draw replaced him with the ever-lovable madman Delirious. The two made for quite the team and became known as Incoherence, with Delirious turning Hallowicked fully to the tecnico side of the good/evil spectrum. UltraMantis hated this and started a new group to combat them called the Order of the Neo-Solar Temple. Along with CHIKARA veteran Blind Rage, they went to war with Incoherence. Incoherence joined forces with fan-favorite duo Cheech and Cloudy (Up in Smoke) and defeated the Order at the season finale.
Tomorrow I’m starting up my extensive look at King of Trios, the annual 3-day event held by my favorite indy wrestling federation (well, favorite wrestling federation in general), CHIKARA. Before I do any of that, I thought I’d take a look at some history. Not the history of CHIKARA itself, as I’ve covered that already. I mean how things began with me as a fan.
During 2006/2007, I was only into WWE. TNA never did anything for me and the whole independent wrestling scene was completely alien to me. I hadn’t tried looking into it and wouldn’t have even known where to start. It wasn’t until the internet introduced me to Human Tornado that I started paying the indy scene any attention. Human Tornado, now retired, was a skinny and uncannily charismatic skinny wrestler with an afro and a pimp persona. I didn’t so much watch any matches with him as I was shown this fantastic little music video from the early days of YouTube.
Now, Tornado has never performed in CHIKARA, but that’s not my point. This video opened my eyes at the inventive and more intimate world of indy wrestling. This guy would never see the inside of a WWE ring due to his physique, but is that really the worst thing in the world? He’s still out there and presumably, I could have seen him live. The idea that out there was a flippy black dude with invincible testicles and the ability to backhand a fiend across the ring opened up my universe.
There’s another video with him that’s grainy as hell, but also brilliantly sells him as someone worth paying attention to. When wrestling Scorpio Sky (now Mason Andrews in TNA), a Test of Strength causes them to pop-lock against their will. They step back, try again and this time “Beat It” by Michael Jackson blares over the speakers as the two get into a knife fight and break into a dance sequence. This continues until Scorpio Sky has enough and clotheslines Tornado.
I never did follow up on any of this in any meaningful way, like trying to follow Pro Wrestling Guerilla, where they both performed. I didn’t get another taste of the indies until catching MTV’s ill-fated Wrestling Society X. That show featured them both, as well as a bunch of other supposed big names I had never heard of. The cheesy half-hour show wasn’t exactly perfect. A lot of the matches were just cool moves being done back and forth until someone won. The thing is, the show was self-aware and allowed itself to be over-the-top in ways the more mainstream stuff couldn’t. There were fights involving dunking your opponent’s head in a piranha tank or Tombstoning them into an exploding casket.
My favorite little thing in there is how a scene involved a fireball being thrown into the champion Vampiro’s face. This is a classic wrestling stunt that’s nothing more than lighting a piece of flash paper on fire and flicking it into the guy’s face. MTV took offense to this and pulled the episode for a couple weeks. When they aired it, they made it look like some kind of Dragonball Z super attack that caused Vampiro’s unconscious body to ripple before our very eyes. Somehow, their stupid censorship made things BETTER.
I’m still working on my needlessly gigantic CHIKARA King of Trios article series, which should be going up later in the week. In the meantime, here’s something cute that I thought I’d share.
The presentation for this year’s King of Trios is based on WWF Wrestlefest, one of the greatest arcade games in arcade game history, which has recently been updated and ported to smartphones. I haven’t played the new version, but I hear that it’s ass.
Over the past few months, the official CHIKARA site has been announcing the 16 teams for September’s tournament. We have a team of old ECW guys, some nostalgic 80’s and 90’s WWF teams, some female wrestlers from Japan, the usual CHIKARA suspects, visitors from other feds, mishmashed teams of CHIKARA regulars who are forced together against their will and a group of guys who performed so terribly in 2009 and got jeered so hard that they’ve all banded together out of revenge against the fans.
On the site, each announced team would get a filename of “KOT12_#.jpg”. So the 13th team announced is “KOT12_13.jpg”. Obviously, there’s going to be somebody wanting to look forward by typing “KOT12_14.jpg” with hopes of seeing the next team to be revealed. Kind of like how people figured out the roster of Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 long before they were meant to. Each time, the CHIKARA website has been messing with the fans trying to do this by putting in a fake team.
Unfortunately, I didn’t save all of them, but here’s a bunch.
Sorry for the lack of updates on my side, especially comic-related. I’m in this weird funk I get in every now and then when I’m writing pieces of different articles all at once and can’t commit to one, meaning I end up doing a whole lot of nothing and there’s no output. Hopefully this will at least get me through it.
A couple months ago, I wrote about the history of pro wrestling and had very little positive to say about Total Non-Stop Action, otherwise known as TNA. Even when they had something cool going for them, they were always washed over with more that was terrible. This got worse when Vince Russo was brought aboard and fell deeper once Hulk Hogan and Eric Bischoff were given roles in creative.
I tried giving them a chance time after time, especially when they tried to go to war with Raw on Monday nights because if anything, that would be the time when they’d be trying their hardest. Everything was a mess and continued to be a mess and I couldn’t bring myself to watch anymore. Part of the nightmare ended a few months ago when they finally fired Vince Russo. WHY they waited so long to do that when the fans were actually chanting for them to do so for years whenever something stupid happened is beyond me.
Not that they were in the clear. Hogan and Bischoff felt the need to include their children. Brooke Hogan was given an on-air role and Garrett Bischoff was put in a story about becoming a wrestler against his father’s wishes. Brooke can’t act and Garrett can’t wrestle, so this is problematic. At least it gave us former employee Scott Steiner’s Twitter rants, which went on forever until TNA’s legal dudes told him to stop.
Interesting thing happened, though. Over the past couple months or so, the online wrestling circles I spy into haven’t really been complaining about TNA. In fact, they’ve been kind of shrugging it off and pointing out that it’s been pretty good. Great, even! Their last few PPVs have been completely solid and it’s been overall really watchable. Now, on one hand, fool me once, shame on you, etc. On the other hand, WWE has been boring the hell out of me lately, even when they’re giving us a feud based on Daniel Bryan vs. CM Punk with AJ Lee doing a Harley Quinn gimmick in the background. I want to believe that there might be some kind of good mainstream wrestling out there, so I gave the past few weeks a watch.
Hot damn, this actually isn’t bad!
It could be blamed on a lot of things, from what I understand. Russo being gone, for one, as it’s now written by someone who knows that stories are supposed to have beginnings, middles and ends, plus make some semblance of sense. Bischoff has been hands-off lately, meaning that his storyline is forgotten about. For a limited time, the show is live instead of taped, so there’s this overall drive for the performers to do better. I keep hearing that for the first time in years, Samoa Joe is actually motivated! Of course, it could also be blamed on a broken clock being right two times a day. Latter-day WCW had that and WWE tends to have that.
For the moment, not only am I digging TNA, but I’m finding it just plain better than WWE. And I’m not even talking about the talent. Each side has great wrestlers and crap wrestlers. It’s what they do with them that counts.
This Saturday night, CHIKARA brings us their second iPPV event in Chikarasaurus Rex: How to Hatch a Dinosaur. Their first iPPV came last November in the form of High Noon, which ended up being a great show with no major technical problems.
The show officially starts at 7pm on GFL.TV, though there will be a live pre-show on Ustream.TV at 6:30. While nothing’s announced as of yet, there’s likely to be some kind of exhibition match in there for the sake of hype. The show itself is $15.
Justice League (Unlimited) is to animation what Avengers is to film. Just this perfect chain of world-building that escalates more and more, delivering all the while. While the first season of Unlimited was quite fantastic, it had one glaring flaw: no Flash. Wally only went as far as showing up a couple times with no lines in group shots. It wasn’t until the following season that he even got to do anything.
Everybody stopped being mad about that after the episode “Divided We Fall”, where the core members of the Justice League are taken apart by the hybrid of Lex Luthor and Brainiac. The villain prepares to kill off Flash, a prophecy set up throughout the season. Flash – the comic relief of the team – frees himself and runs off scared.
…or does he?
I don’t even care about anything after he vanishes. It’s the limit-breaking beatdown that I go back to. The beautiful way the score starts to creep in the moment he hits his first surprise punch. The way Luthor seems so taken aback that he doesn’t even try to come up with any plan, which, if you look at it, means that Luthor’s idea of merging with Brainiac is their undoing, since Brainiac wouldn’t have been so distracted by ego. Flash is someone who’s been ignored from episodes because he’s so hard to write and they’ve even nerfed his powers so much that he had a hard time catching up to a van one time, so his existence on the cartoon is vindicated in this moment where he kicks ass with such speed that he vibrates in place, Zoom-style.
22) It’s the YETAY!
When you ask a wrestling fan about the funniest and most absurd concept in the history of the business, they’ll give you one of two answers. One is the Gobbledy Gooker, a much-hyped and mysterious giant egg that finally hatched to reveal a dancing guy in a goofy turkey suit. Then there’s the Shockmaster, a complete failure of a segment where a new wrestler meant to be the next big thing proceeded to trip on live TV, knocking off his mask and causing the entire scene (as well as his career following) to fall apart.
For me, nothing is as gleefully silly as the Yeti.
The Yeti was born from a storyline involving Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage against the Dungeon of Doom, no doubt the silliest of all major factions in wrestling history. It was made up of an old, fat man barking orders at his “son” Kevin Sullivan and a collection of henchmen wrestlers, all goofy as all get out. The whole thing is such a clusterfuck that I’m going to bypass most of it, but the main conflict is Hogan vs. the Dungeon’s biggest and newest threat, the Giant. The Giant is billed as being Andre the Giant’s son, wanting to avenge his father against Hogan. On an episode of Nitro leading up to their big PPV match at Halloween Havoc, they show a huge block of ice. Kevin Sullivan refers to the figure inside as the Yeti, only he insists on pronouncing it “Yeh-tay”.
At the end of the final show before the PPV, Hogan fights off the Giant in the ring and some crazy lights start going off. The crowd is excited and with only a second of airtime left, the ice on the stage explodes to reveal… a seven-foot-tall guy dressed as a mummy.
And if that doesn’t tell you to purchase the PPV, I don’t know what does.
The match itself continued its clusterfuck ways and by the end, Randy Savage and Lex Luger come to Hogan’s rescue. Soon after, the Yeti follows, accompanied by Tony Schiavone on commentary screaming, “And the YETAAAAY!” Yes, even he’s insisting that not only is this giant mummy a yeti, but it’s pronounced exactly the way Sullivan insisted. Somehow, it’s that little detail that acts as the lynchpin to why this is so wonderfully ridiculous. Hell, they’re so focused on the YETAY! that it’s a footnote that Luger has already turned on Hogan and Savage in the ring. During this beating, the Yeti and Giant bearhug Hogan from each side and Yeti moves his hips back and forth in a way that makes him look like he’s raping Hogan. When he isn’t attacking anyone, he wanders the ring with his arms out like Frankenstein. Despite being in the ring for only two minutes, his bandages have already torn a bunch and we can see plenty of his skin, showing how flimsy a concept the mummy wrestler idea was to begin with.
As far as I know, there was no follow-up to Yeti fighting Hogan. Instead, he faded rather oddly into obscurity with no fanfare. First he started dressing like a ninja instead of a mummy. Then he kept that look and changed his name to Super Giant Ninja. He immediately lost to the One Man Gang and was repackaged for another day.
With all the wrestling I watch, my favorite company by far is CHIKARA. I’ve talked about it for years and have done posts about their DVD covers and my own experiences at their shows. Every now and then, I get people asking me about where to start or what to expect. With the company celebrating its 10 year anniversary, I thought it would be good to do a write-up of what the world of CHIKARA is all about for beginners.
CHIKARA is a Philadelphia-based independent wrestling company that’s both a promotion and a school known as the CHIKARA Wrestle Factory. The students learn a mix of different wrestling styles from around the world, with a strong emphasis on the Mexican luchador aspects. The shows are locked into a “family friendly” label, meaning no cursing or general lewdness to the point that when something seriously impressive happens, the fans are wont to chant, “HOLY POOP!” The in-ring antics tend to have a real comic book edge to it all, with colorful, masked competitors with over-the-top gimmicks and a share of fourth-wall-breaking comedy. It’s the kind of show where this would happen on a semi-regular basis.
Despite reveling in fun and goofiness, the shows tend to tell strong, long-running stories that any new fan could pick up on. CHIKARA treats every year’s worth of shows as a season, usually giving closure to major arcs by the time they reach the finale. Seeds for future storylines come in various subtle and unique forms, existing sometimes years before they’re brought into action.
While students and graduates are the core of the roster, they also include people from other ends of the indies and tend to include lots of foreign talent for flavor. Everyone tends to be labeled “tecnico” (good guy) or “rudo” (bad guy), with the insinuation that those two groups train exclusively together. They tend to do just over two dozen shows a year, usually with multiple shows over the course of a weekend, and always release them soon after (24 hours to two weeks, depending), available from Smart Mark Video in the form of DVD, online stream or MP4 download. Recently, they’ve started doing internet pay-per-views and have one coming up on Saturday, June 2nd.
They also sponsor YouTube sensation and internet wrestling fan staple Botchamania.
How it Started
In 2002, indy wrestlers “Lightning” Mike Quackenbush and “Reckless Youth” Tom Carter decided to start their own wrestling school, partially based on their distaste for there being no school that catered to anything international. Hence, they started up the CHIKARA Wrestle Factory in Philly. Their first class was made up of five students: Hallowicked, Ichabod Slayne (later Icarus), UltraMantis (later UltraMantis Black), Mr. ZERO and Dragonfly. The question came up of where these guys were supposed to compete. On May 25, 2002, they held their first show for the sake of showcasing the new guys, while including other indy names like CM Punk, Chris Hero and Colt Cabana.
Since then, the school’s been churning out groups of graduates every year or so. Early on, Tom Carter left the fold and Hero took his spot as instructor. The Wrestle Factory occasionally factors into the story, usually in terms of how the wrestler’s mask is something that they had to have earned through paying their dues and completing their training. To remove one’s mask or perform in one without earning the right is considered a prime insult.
Yesterday went from the early-mid 00’s to the beginning of this decade, meaning we’re just about done.
As WWE hit the 2010’s, it became pretty hard to endure for two reasons. One, it became more and more apparent that their storylines were written on an hour-to-hour basis instead of being agreed on in advance. This is mainly due to McMahon being a mentally questionable dude. The sloppy storytelling had led to such promising and exciting storylines as the Nexus – the contestants from the first NXT season, who had become united against the Raw roster – petering out into a mess of bad ideas. Or Sheamus, a badass and dominant heel who became champ in record time and then went on to become a coward at the drop of a hat, ruining much of his appeal.
The other reason, which was arguably worse, was the idea of turning commentator Michael Cole heel. It started with the first season of NXT, which involved the debut of Daniel Bryan, who as I mentioned before was a big name in the indies. Cole would constantly rag on him for being worthless in every way possible. It’s hard to say if this was punishment for being semi-famous elsewhere, a way to set up Bryan giving Cole his comeuppance or a mix of both. Either way, it didn’t matter because comeuppance means very little when it’s a wrestler attacking a non-wrestler unless it’s an authority figure of some kind. Especially when this non-wrestler has an hour a week to rail on you verbally. Cole went from just hating Bryan to hating everyone on the roster other than a select few. This was entirely problematic. He rarely ever got his much-needed retribution and it didn’t stop him from going off on everyone on the roster for 4-7 hours a week. They seriously had a guy making fun of everyone to the point that WWE’s forcing you to hear about how they’re a company of worthless jokes. He was the antithesis of hype and outright made watching WWE a chore.
Eventually, they realized their folly and gradually brought him back to being a kind of okay commentator. Bryan himself endured several losing streaks, Cole’s constant barrage of insults, a temporary situation where he was fired for a really stupid reason and the issue of being a small man in a big man’s business. He won one of the two major championships, turned heel and slowly began to show how much personality he really had. He’s reached the point where McMahon seems to respect him for tolerating his mistreatment without a single complaint and the crowd has embraced him as a huge heel who’s fun to hate and even more fun to like.
As for Punk, he never got to be much more than a punching bag for whatever major face they were trying to push. He spent about a year or so losing nearly every major match and Punk himself was getting pretty tired of it. His contract was coming up and he wasn’t intent on keeping on. Since the general rule of thumb is for the guy leaving to go out defeated, WWE set up Cena (champion) vs. CM Punk at the PPV Money in the Bank 2011, which was in Punk’s hometown of Chicago. Punk publicly brought up that he was on his way out and threatened to leave the company with the championship, thereby making it a callback to his exit of ROH, only this time he was threatening to leave WWE for ROH. He even MENTIONED ROH on WWE TV during a planned segment where he got to get a lot of genuine opinions on the company and its fans off his chest. The story became huge and behind-the-scenes, agreements were made that Punk wouldn’t be leaving after all, despite appearing to in the storyline. He ended up winning the title and skipped town, leaving the company without a champion.
