Tuesday 6 April 2010

A Bunch of: M-Pro 1993 Commercial Tapes (part one)

I have four commercial releases from 1993 that I thought I'd put together in one post. First one has matches from July. I enjoyed the clips from Shiryu vs. Terry Boy. One of the things I've been enjoying most about Terry is the styles he brings together. Obviously there's the lucha-inspired offence, but he also drops in several American spots, like a long side headlock sequence or inside cradles off the ropes. The finish to this is Terry doing Flair's corner bump then coming off the other turnbuckle with a crossbody. Other thing I've enjoyed is the body language. The DVD I'm watching is fairly bad quality, yet his mannerisms - like the bemused turn of the head after Shiryu flips onto his feet off of some takedown - tell me what look I could expect to see on his face if I could see that much detail. It's interesting to be essentially watching like someone in the cheap seats on a DVD, yet reveals which guys really know how to convey a story to the whole crowd. Shiryu has a great tope.

Main event tag was Delfin and Naniwa against SATO and Sasuke. This was entertaining stuff, they paired off to start and switched after two sets of exchanges, so we got some opening mat work and typical lucharesu stuff, followed by the rope-running sequences. Delfin was in fine form, kicking Sasuke in the face after his does his backflip corner attack, then teasing a dive before blowing it off due to crowd cheers. SATO was a little off on a couple of his highspots, but he's still impressive to watch. Sasuke was doing his usual spots so that was completely fine by me. Naniwa is the only one I don't have much sense of as a wrestler. They do the comedy spot where Delfin does over-the-shoulder armbreakers without looking at whose arm is given to him, leading to the inevitable switch where he gets Naniwa's arm by mistake, while Sasuke and SATO cheer him on. They finish with some dives and Sasuke wins with his in-ring quebrada on Naniwa. Nothing exceptional, and I got the impression they mistimed a couple of things (like the breakup of the Delfin Clutch), but even by-numbers M-Pro from this period is fun to watch.

Second show is the commercial release of the July Champ Forum show I reviewed before, with clips from a few other matches. One thing I realise between my first and second watch is that Sasuke's in-ring quebrada press was pretty much his finish, which adds to the finish because he after Delfin kicks out of that at two, he tries a top-rope version (again for a two-count) then the pinning rana for the win. I'm always a fan of super-finishers in big matches, especially when convential weaponry has failed.

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