Day: January 18, 2016

IWRG (SUN) 01/17/2016 Arena Naucalpan [+LuchaTV, The Gladiatores]
1) Galaxy & Kanon b Acero & Vortize
2) Diablo Jr. I, El Hijo del Diablo, Imposible b Leo, Mike, Rafy
money thrown in
3) Apolo Estrada Jr., Canis Lupus, Eterno DQ Black Terry, Cerebro Negro, Dr. Cerebro
both Eterno & Terry fouled, with the referee DQing missing Eterno doing it but seeing the revenge below by Terry. Eterno, Apolo & Canis want a trios title shot, but Hijo del Diablo arrived to challenge for a shot on behalf of himself, Diablo Jr. and Imposible. Cerbero Negro told the two rudo teams to fight it out among themselves.
4) Máscara Año 2000 Jr., Mosco X Fly, Toscano b Herodes Jr., Hijo De Dos Caras, Veneno
Dos accidentally toped Herodes, which led to Herodes attacking Dos. Rudos took advantage for the win.
5) Negro Navarro, Trauma I, Trauma II b Hijo del Pantera, Pantera, Pantera I [IWRG IC TRIOS]
Navarros and Traumas (who had won a match in the Copa Dinastia Elite tournament a few hours earlier) took falls 1/3 to make their second defense. Pantera II suffered an arm injury. Los Traumas challenged the Panteras to a tag title match in return.

Pantera II seems to suffer injuries in losing title match efforts. It’s a shame.

Herodes makes more sense as a rudo, as much as many things make sense in IWRG. (What happened to those weight division tournaments?)

Black Terry Jr. has photos of the Liga Justica show and video. I haven’t found full results of that one quite yet.

CMLL is getting back on TV a bit. Their Friday night shows will air on  Televisa Deportes Network starting in mid February, according to +LuchaTV. These are the shows currently airing on ClaroSports.com live and on Azteca in the US on a three week delay. That’s still a cable channel, but it’s a Televisa cable channel, which means pretty much anyone who pays for TV will get it. (AAA’s TV currently repeats on sister channel Univision Televisa Deportes Network.)

We don’t yet know when exactly it’ll start, how long of a show it’ll be, how much a delay it’ll be and how this will affect those other broadcasts. We do know this means CMLL’s given up on trying to get on Mexico’s Azteca in the near future, since this deal would preclude that. It also may prevent Elite from being able to do the same – in the far distant past, Televisa and Azteca didn’t want ‘their’ luchadors to appear on the rival channel. Times have changed but those two channels are still not friendly.

CMLL will also be streaming Tuesday’s Arena Mexico show. It sounds like the whole show, and maybe just because they’re doing the Copa Junior. The Tuesday shows have been bouncing around from network to network; it’s seemed like CMLL was as surprised about C3 going away as everyone else and didn’t have a plan right away, and then recently decided to change around things again to not air the iPPV shows on Mexico TV. I’m not sure this would turn up if it wasn’t streamed.

Today’s CMLL steam is the Arena Puebla show at 9pm CT. Main event is La Mascara, Rush and Shocker versus the dreadful trio of Mr. Niebla, Thunder and Euforia. People who are paying the slightest attention may recall Thunder and Euforia are feuding in Arena Mexico; it seems as if CMLL did not remember that when putting together this card or are too short on people to make any sense. (Probably a little bit of both.) The biggest match of the card, and the match that probably should be the main event except they’d short them on time if it was, is Maximo defending his heavyweight title against Vangellys. Vangellys is not going to be CMLL Heavyweight champion, but Maximo’s managed good or better matches in all of his defenses so far. The show leads off with a Batillon del Muerte performance and also includes a women’s match and a Porky match. The opener and the title match are promising, the rest are safely skippable.

Shocker had knee surgery today.

LuchaWorld has KrisZ’s news update and this week’s Poster-Mania.

This week’s Box Y Lucha seems a week or so behind.

The mystery Japanese wrestler on this weekend’s Arena Azetca Budokan show was name either Hito or Itto depending on where you look. He’s still a mystery.

Maximo says it’d be an honor to team with Casandro.

Super Comando, who (unknown to me!) was in Chicago this weekend as part of a Huracan Ramirez/Hijo del Fishman tour of shows in the US, is still wrestling and says he’ll have more news soon.

Los Ingobernables calling their rivals Mil Nombres (Caristico) and Robocop (Cibernetico) is pretty fun.

Segunda Caida reviews Love Machine, Último Dragón, Vampiro vs Black Magic, Negro Casas, Pirata Morgan.

El Hijo del Santo writes about his mask vs hair match with Brazo de Oro.

Lineup

CMLL (SAT) 01/23/2016 Arena Coliseo
1) Bengala vs Cholo
2) Flyer vs Metálico
3) Hombre Bala Jr. vs Canelo Casas
4) Pegasso vs Arkángel de la Muerte
5) Blue Panther Jr. vs Tiger
6) Rey Cometa & Tritón vs Felino & Pólvora
7) La Máscara, Super Porky, Valiente vs Niebla Roja, Ripper, Terrible

This is fair card on star power for a Saturday even if not for the missing luchadors.

CMLL (SUN) 01/24/2016 Arena Coliseo Guadalajara
1) El Tapatío, Javier Cruz Jr., Linterna vs Black Sugar, Mr. Brisa, Quca
2) Nautilius vs Joker [OCCIDENTE MIDDLE, semifinal]
final on 01/31?
3) Omar Brunetti vs El Chakal [OCCIDENTE MIDDLE, semifinal]
4) Esfinge & Gallo vs Cancerbero & Raziel
5) Magico, Neutrón, Super Porky vs Mosco X Fly, Mr. Trueno, Ripper

No idea who Magico is. Most hilarious possible outcome of the tournament is Joker winning and quickly moving to Mexico City to never defend the title. He and Omar seem like the favorites for the final.

CMLL ELITE (SUN) 01/24/2016 Arena México
1) La Jarochita & Muñeca De Plata vs Amapola & Dalys
2) Dinamic Black & Imposible vs Artillero & Sangre Azteca
3) Delta & Tritón vs Eterno & Fresero Jr.
4) Trauma I & Trauma II vs Puma & Tiger
5) Felino & Negro Casas vs Juventud Guerrera & Super Crazy
6) Carístico, Extreme Tiger, Valiente vs Euforia, La Máscara, Rush

Extreme Tiger was on these shows before, and is back again. It’s probably a one off since he’s headed to the UK with TNA next week. Juventud also worked the Elite show back in June and returns here, as they continue teasing a Super Crazy/Felino match for whatever reason.

Elite announced the Dinastia final would be this week. Unless Puma was allowed to sub in for Canelo Casas, that doesn’t seem to be the case. Who knows. Artillero booking is random but at least it suggests he’s still in good here.

La Jarochita makes the jump from AAA. She hadn’t appeared on TV since late 2014, but was part of the crew who are regularly listed on spot shows without getting any television time. She won their Quien Pinta Para La Corona in 2012, though AAA never seemed that impressed with her and used her mostly in opening matches when she was used at all. This is maybe more telling about what interests the Elite promotes: any one of two dozen indie lucahdoras could’ve filled that same spot, but they seemingly went out of their way to get Jarochita to “jump.” It seems like a thing you do if you’re excited to do CMLL vs AAA matches and over estimating how much slapping the label “AAA” or “CMLL” means on someone. (She’ll be fine.)

Lucha Underground Season 2 sounds like it’s going to be fun. You’ll be able to watch it El Rey. You’ll be able to watch it on TLN in Canada. You probably will be unable to watch it on Unimas.

It’s hard to prove a negative; Unimas isn’t going to announce they’re not carrying a show. Lucha Underground and Unimas didn’t really announce they had Lucha Underground for season 1 either – it just showed up in their upcoming listings, and people started to spot the ad for the show. Unimas hadn’t said anything yet this time around either, but with King Cuerno, Mil Muertes and Dario Cueto appearing at the Univision Deportes Awards seemed to suggest the partnership was still intact. All we needed is to see that season 2 promo or it to show up in the listings at the same time on Saturday to confirm.

I recorded chunks of Unimas this weekend just to find that LU S2 commercial. It’s two weeks out, and it was airing two weeks out last time. I did find a Lucha Underground commercial, but not the one I was looking for.

https://youtu.be/QG-0zyFgsCI

To save you the 15 seconds, that’s a Spanish language ad for the show airing on El Rey. (I only saw it once in the eight hours I recorded over two days; it didn’t appear to be in the regular rotation and might have been a local cable system buy.) There’s no reason for that advertisement to exist if the show was still going to air on Unimas – it wouldn’t make sense to direct people off network to find it if it was going to air on this network. It makes sense if they’re hoping to move the viewers over to El Rey because it won’t be on Unimas any longer.

Starting this morning, you can easily find the the listings for 01/30 Saturday afternoon, where Lucha Underground was airing at 4pm Eastern last year. The season 2 premiere is not listed. (Instead, it’s the end of The Brave One & the start of Battle: Los Angeles.) Maybe that’s just a random commercial meaning nothing, and maybe the show just got moved to a different time, but add on Lucha Underground no longer doing Spanish language announcing in front of the crowd and it doesn’t look good.

I’d really like to feel dumb and have LU turn up on Unimas anyway. But, if they’re not advertising Lucha Underground, and they’re advertising other shows in LU’s spot, then it feels like a pretty safe bet the show isn’t airing.

I can tell you where Lucha Underground will be appearing. A reporter for EstrellaTV was at the Temple Sunday to do a feature that’ll air Monday afternoon. A different feature will air on LATV at some point. (Image includes a new character if you’re concerned about any spoiler.) Both of those networks are primarily Spanish language channels in competition with Unimas. It’d be strange for them to be running a feature on a opposition network’s show, but much less so if it’s only an El Rey airing. And it’d make since for Lucha Underground to invite them if there’s a large base of Spanish language fans they’re worried about losing.

While the Wednesday night El Rey airing is the one that gets the internet buzz, estimates had 2-3x times as many people watching it on Unimas (since it’s a channel far more available in the US.) There are a lot of people who simply can not get the El Rey Network where they live but could easily get Unimas – and unless there’s a surprise streaming or VOD deal to be announced, their only method of watching the shows will be to start paying Sling or Fubo.TV, or looking on YouTube for pirated uploads. (People will tend towards YouTube, but I’d suspect there’s a larger quieter group who just will watch something else.)

I’d presume Lucha Underground knew they wouldn’t be on Unimas from back when they restarted taping in November – they didn’t do Spanish announcing from the first day of the season. For all we know, it may even be the plan: Unimas as training wheels for season 1 and hoping to migrate the people to El Rey for season 2, because the purpose of this show to get eyeball on El Rey. I’m not sure. Not being on Unimas seems like a problem to me, but it’s not the first thing that seems like a problem, and the show keeps on keeping on. I like to think I’m intelligent, but I’m not nearly smart enough to figure out how Lucha Underground works on a spreadsheet.

Not being on Unimas shouldn’t affect the onscreen product (except the lack of reshoots in Spanish.) Lucha Underground Season 2 should be good, and all the information I have on season 2 sounds fun. You’ll just probably be only able to watch it on El Rey in the US.