AAA on Televisa: 2017-03-18 

Mascara de Bronce

Recapped: 03/21/2017

Matches:

All matches taped at Plaza de Toros Rodolfo Rodriguez el Pana, Apizaco, Tlaxcala on 03/05/2017 

Carta Brava Jr., Mocho Cota, Soul Rocker defeated Lanzeloth, Máscara de Bronce, Venum (9:02, Carta Brava hanging double stomp on Máscara de Bronce, good, video link)

Angélico & Australian Suicide defeated Dark Cuervo & Joe Lider and Hijo de Pirata Morgan & Pirata Morgan to (possibly) earn an AAA tag team championship match (5:39, Angelico Fall of the Angels on Joe Lider, OK, video link)

Texano Jr. defeated Dr. Wagner Jr. and Psycho Clown to keep the AAA Heavyweight Championship (7:43, Texano backcracker on Wagner, OK, video link)

doom for Venum

What happened: Texano Jr. is still the AAA heavyweight champion, despite being forced into defending the championship in a three way match with Psycho Clown & Dr. Wagner. He got a little help. Mystery assailants kidnapped Psycho Clown prior to the match. Psycho made it back about six minutes into the match, just long enough to get a near pinfall on Texano via a destroyer (Wagner pulled out the ref) and then distract Dr. Wagner into a loss. Psycho claimed not to know who had attacked him.

Angelico & Australian Suicide may have won a tag team championship match. The announcers mentioned the three way match as for a title match, but it wasn’t mentioned in the graphics and may have been quietly dropped. Joe Lider took the loss after he and Cuervo had a miscommunication, and Cuervo & Scoria beat up Lider for his mistake after the match. Lider is now 0-2 since the Perros del Mal have left and has been humiliated by his partners after both matches.

Mary Apache revealed her injury is a skull fracture and talked about her history of head injuries. A previous injury kept her out for three years. It’s unclear when she’ll return.

Aerostar & Super Fly argued some. The show ended with the Lucha Underground trailer for Netflix.

There were 22 minutes and 24 seconds of action on this show

Thoughts: 

unclear if anyone has caught Angelico on a dive in the last six months

They broke the AAA formula. The matches came off not as regimented as usual, or at least with new ideas and didn’t feel as much like the different people being plugged into the same setup. The openers are usually a brief tecnico warmup, a sub two minute beatdown, tecnico dives and that’s it. This opener had a little of that, but it kept going back and forth between the two sides for the last few minutes, to the point where even the final sequence between Bronce & Carta Brave could’ve gone either way. The tag team title match was in the mold of the really fun matches from Angelico & Jack Evans tag title run, with a fast pace and lots of pinfall breaks ups. It didn’t have the time or the quality of the others ones, but the effort was there. The main event felt more like a CMLL lightning match, with Wagner & Texano rushing into get pinfall chances (and not just aimlessly brawling for eight minutes before they did the ‘real’ stuff.) There’s no one right way to have matches, but it gets numbing if you have them the same way all the time. Shaking those things up is an obvious positive of the creative change. I didn’t think the matches were great (and I’d still like to see one get time) but it feels like they’re trying to get there.

There was still a lot of Vampiro on this show, but it didn’t feel like the show was about Vampiro this week. It’s hard to know what the show was about; they spent some time on the Rey de Reyes show and it was impossible to miss how nothing on this show had anything to do with that lineup. But it still feels more like something is happening here much more than before.

a nice SSP

The other obviously immediate change is the return of vignettes. There were the Apaches discussing (and reinforcing) what had happened last week, Psycho & Wagner both taunting poor Texano about how they were going to take the title away from him, Psycho getting stuffed into a van. AAA’s felt like they were mostly just rolling out matches for the last year, and now it feels like there’s more effort in making them matter.

The changing matches thing is still something to wait and see about. It’s a normal US thing and not as much in Mexico. The crowd was very unhappy when they didn’t think Psycho Clown was going to wrestle in the main event as scheduled. He got a big reaction when he turned up, but only showing up for about 90 seconds might have left people disappointed.

That opener was really good. Soul Rocker struggled a bit, but everyone else was really good and Mascara de Bronce’s tornillo looked great. They’re still having trouble catching all the dives these guys do, but they looked spectacular when we saw them.

Psycho’s already hurting before this