(No recap today.)
If you’ve messed with the database this week, you might have noticed I’ve added UWA lineups/results recently. Like everything else, it’s 09/1991 and beyond. That limitation is cosmetic and not date driven; at some point, I’ll make things look about 2% nicer and start working backwards. UWA results disappear by the end of 1994, but the promotion was rapidly disappearing by then anyway.
Quick thoughts
– For each luchador who’s in a promotion at any time, I’ve got a field called ‘technique’ that lists them as ‘tecnico’ or ‘rudo’. I need to add a third status: ‘Canek’.
– This is similarly of little surprise, but the landscape would’ve looked a lot different if UWA had stayed healthy and alive to this day. Canek and Dos Caras transcended their home promotion and have made it okay, but others weren’t so lucky. If Villano III got to appear at a big show at El Toreo every year as a legend of the past (just like Satanico & Lizmark and others at CMLL last month), his whole career looks stronger just for the exposure. Maybe Gran Hamada ends up training more guys who end up with a higher profile? Maybe the promotion picks one Skayde gimmick and gets behind it for long enough for him to be a star in Mexico? As many maybes as you want.
It’s also a neat collection of undercards – many of them seemingly random anonymous guys – who’d end up having big roles elsewhere, and it’s impossible to figure exactly how CMLL & AAA would’ve changed if this was a place they could’ve worked permanently. (Or, on the other hand, if they would’ve gotten shots at all if UWA wasn’t desperate for cheap guys.) Zumbido, Histeria II, Mephisto and Averno are some of the luchadors who worked there under different names.
– Perros del Mal is heavily modeled after UWA style booking: the biggest star (Canek/Perro) is the biggest star, but will defend Mexico against a foreigner (why he keeps bringing up Mesias being from Puerto Rico.) Foreigners are frequently brought in both to have really good matches, and just to give an impression of being a world wide promotion. Smaller guys on the undercard, and usually the same small group of guys in the main events.
There are differences. There’s nothing in Perros del Mal like the Ninja Turtles, or anything else that’s specifically a kid’s friendly character. I don’t want to encourage them to bring in Super Muneco or anything, but they might be better off with an updated version of that and combining the the two DTU/LLJL trainee matches into one.
Much more important, the UWA had much more frequent big singles matches. Over the course of 3 weeks (give or take), someone would beat Canek, challenge him, and then usually get sent packing. Or it’d be Dos Caras or it’d be Villano III or one of their other usual champions, but there were usually short run feuds with definite endings. It wasn’t booked for TV, but it was episodic in the same way as a TV show, where the point of this week’s show was to make you care about the next week’s show or the big show two weeks down the line. Perros del Mal is anti-episodic booking; they’d want you to care that Booker T joined the Perros on the show you saw him do it, but you need to forget by the next show so they can do it again. (That probably happened a fair amount in UWA, with the turn being repeated on every spot show that week, but you can’t do that in 2010.)
Perros del Mal would be so much stronger if they were doing a better job copying their source material. Rather than just talking about the big matches they’d like to do if people would give them access to giant public spaces for free, they could be doing Perro Jr. vs Booker or Perro Jr. vs Wagner every three shows, and it’d work better than another miscellaneous trios.