AAA starts on the Ciudad Juarez show, which happens to be Verano de Escandalo. I’ve an educated guess that the Mascara de Bronce match, the tag team title match and the Pimpinela/Mamba hair match are airing this week.
Lucha Underground concludes the first round of the Cueto Cup, and this appears to be the last show with 4 tournament matches on one night. Dragon Azteca/Dante Fox looks like the big match, and the preview suggest we’re going to get Fox’s backstory this week.
CMLL Claro has Block A of CMLL Universal tournament, or the competition to find out who gets to face Ultimo Guerrero in the final
I’m scheduling other things to do during CMLL Puebla.
I didn’t realize the genius of this until now: the Oficials lost their hair, and their next IWRG appearance is on the show where everyone gets to wear their mask.
All matches were taped at Gimnasio Olímpico Juan de la Barrera, Ciudad de México, Distrito Federal on 05/26/2017
Mini Psycho Clown defeated Dinastía to win the AAA World Minis Championship
(9:05, powerbomb w/rope grab, good)
Argenis & La Parka beat Averno, Chessman, Súper Fly
(7:47, Argenis inside cradle Chessman, below average)
Dr. Wagner Jr. & Psycho Clown beat Hijo del Fantasma & Texano Jr. (8:58, Psycho inside cradle Texano, ok)
What happened:
OGT, to start the show and before their match, took credit for running Ricky Marvin out of town. They didn’t seem to mention him by name in all of this, but Ricky’s not been back yet. It was explained that Vampiro ordered the trios match to be a 3 v 2 handicap match instead. OGT dominated 90% of the match, but still lost when Pirata Morgan convinced OGT he was on their side only to trip up Chessman for an Argenis cradle. Pirata again had words for La Parka.
Mini Psycho Clown beat Dinastia to win the minis title, thanks to some help from Mamba and a grab of the rope that was missed by the referee. Pimpinela was Dinastia’s second and, like all tecnico seconds, completely useless.
Neither team wanted to work with each other all that much in the main event, but they didn’t do a traditional tag match so it didn’t come up much. Dr. Wagner eventually tried to steal a pin from Psycho Clown (who illogically hit this finishing Canadian Destroyer and decided going to the top rope was better than a pin) and later hit Psycho Clown with a chair. He also hit his opponents with the same chair, which was not a DQ this week. Everyone popped back to life, Texano charged at Fantasma for no reason, and never made it there before Psycho rolled him up.
Fantasma & Texano brawled thru the crowd and to the back after their match. Poder del Norte sneak attacked Wagner & Psycho Clown, and were about to cut a promo when OGT interrupted. Averno demanded a trios title shot at Verano de Escandalo. Psycho & Wagner took both teams out with dives and brawled with them. The rudos all just sort of left, and Wagner & Psycho came to the ring to tease a fight. There was less to this than the last two times it happened, with both guys just standing and teasing that fight for a couple minutes to get the crowd going, then Wagner knocking Psycho down and pulling off his mask.
The NotiAAA bit was just about the NFL players training lucha libre. The NotiAAA segment is all “AAA in the news” with no build up anything, which is odd.
Thoughts:
The match quality was a little bit better than usual, but the finishes on those show were really not any good. The minis match ended with a powerbomb with a rope grab before either man really had come close to winning, the second match ended with a distraction to set up an inside cradle, the third match ended with a distraction to set up an inside cradle. Distraction cradle finishes are the worst.
The main event was really a long four way billed as a tag match. They didn’t have the unlikely teams work as teams at all, just brawling in different one on one combinations until the finish. It gave the match a lot of energy if not particular direction. They might have had both if they just put the guys in logical team, but that would’ve missed out on the pointless pin stealing and chair shots. The finish looked like someone actually forgot or screwed up a spot and they needed the fastest way out, because it just didn’t fit.
The post match promos were another situation where the people putting this together knew the Verano de Escandalo match was meant to be a tag match with Psycho & Wagner being forced to team against their will, were building to that match, and just couldn’t/wouldn’t communicate that to their fanbase. Instead, this is the final show before Verano de Escandalo in airing and the normal viewer would have no idea it was meant to start airing next week or what big matches would happen. I don’t understand the advantage of obscuring what you’re promoting but it does seem intentional at this point.
AAA’s absolutely building Psycho Clown versus Dr. Wagner with the idea that Psycho Clown will finally beat Wagner at TripleMania. It’s the same thing as last year with Pagano. They’re not technically doing the singles matches but giving the same visuals.
There’s no way the Pirata Morgan stuff is ever going to make sense. It’s just not going to happen. The handicap match made sense but wasn’t any good for the long beatdown. AAA’s in Mexico City, they could’ve found a tecnico to fill in, but did the lame match and the lame finish instead. Super Fly is still cool though.
The minis title match wasn’t as bad as I thought it might be, though it’s helped that the standards for these things are low. There’s usually nonstop interference by the seconds to the point; they “limited” it here to a half dozen spots and let them wrestle uninterrupted for minutes at a time. Still, Mini Psycho couldn’t get control without Mamba repeatedly tripping Dinastia, and was all in the ring to set up the finish. I don’t think the match did anything to get people more interested in Mamba versus Pimpinela, it was slight enough that it didn’t help Mini Psycho and it didn’t work with Vampiro reversing important finishes with the rudos cheat in other matches – except maybe it confirmed this was not an important match. There were a few highlights, but also the crowd wasn’t in the match otherwise – just throwing these guys out there with no reason behind them hurt. (The crowd generally seemed less into the show than usual on AAA’s tapings in Mexico City.) I think these two could probably have a better rematch, but both were barely used before or after and are clearly not in the plans right now.
No IWRG last night. There was an enormous rain storm in the Mexico City area, causing bad flooding in some areas. The conditions looked unsafe to get people to the wrestling show, so they canceled the show.
DTU starts it’s weekend tour tonight in Arena Aficion. They’re bringing in extreme wrestlers from GCW this time around, with Ciclope & Miedo Extremo taking on Jimmy Lloyd & Matt Tremont in the main event. The other story is Angel o Demonio joining the X-Law side and trying to convince Ovett to join him. They’re partners in the semimain tonight.
CMLL Informa announced Satoshi Kojima as being on Team World for the Gran Prix. This would be Kojima’s debut in Mexico. He’s popular among NJPW fans, but not really known that much in Mexico; the announcement of Kojima participating led to JCR and Ultimo Guerrero talking about everyone but Kojima. (It sounded like UG would like another match with Michael Elgin.) He’ll do fine, and he’ll probably be more over in his Lucha Memes appearance because that’s higher concentrated amount of educated fans, but I kind of thing he’ll just be a Japanese guy to most of the crowd unless CMLL spends some time building him up.
The WON has a story about Sanada coming to CMLL; he was the guy being quietly rumored as being added yesterday before Kojima was announced. There are four spots (or three spots if Marco’s right) left so he could still be added later. Sanada wrestled a little bit in Mexico before going to NJPW and would probably fit in better, but would continue the pattern of NJPW sending their B/C heavyweight type guys and not their top guys or the juniors who might fit in better.
CMLL Informa also had JCR mention that NJPW & ROH wrestlers would only be working in CMLL and likewise with CMLL wrestlers, but Caristico and Sam Adonis were actually independents and so they might be working other places. (I guess Marty Scurll, Cody and the Young Bucks must also actually be indenpedents in CMLL’s thought process.) It didn’t seem connected to anything, except JCR must’ve known those guys were about to be announced for someone else, and today Caristico was announced for an Ultimo Dragon Fiesta show with AJPW on 08/19. They’re treating it like a DragonMania show in Japan. I suspect Adonis will be on that show too.
Imapct announced the tag title team match on Slammiversary will be LAX versus AAA’s Hijo Fantasma & Drago versus NOAH’s Marafuji & Ishimori versus The Crash’s Laredo Kid & Garza Jr. That should be a pretty good match and that’s important. It’s also a match that seems totally impossible to happen in Mexico. Impact themselves refers to the The Crash promotion in the press release (though the NOAH team is treated as a much bigger deal since they’re guests.) I’d think the state of things means the Crash and AAA teams can’t lose to each other, but Impact’s gone this far, who knows how much they can get these two promotions to get along for a PPV that’ll maybe get seen by 20,000 people.
Lucha Underground has been deathly quiet on this situation. And everything else of late.
It’s unclear how luchadors will be signing up: Octagon says the group has a Facebook page, but doesn’t link to it and I can’t find it. I suspect people working a show with Octagon in the near future will be getting sales pitches. Fuerza Guerrera (men), Lady Apache (women), Hijo del Fishman (juniors), Mini Rey Misterio (minis) and Yuriko (exoticos) were announced as heads of various divisions. It seems odd there’s all these groups and it’s this is one of those things that people are going to have see in action to believe it’s going to help them. Octagon says there’s a Facebook with more information, but there’s no Facebook page I can find. I suspect he’ll be pitching guys strongly at shows he works on.
Octagon said they would not be working with the existing Mexico City lucha libre commission, calling Fantasma corrupt. The reports have no explanation why he felt that way, but I’d guess it has something to do with siding with AAA over him. Octagon also said he won his court case for the name over AAA. For what it’s worth, Mexico’s trademark search still shows AAA owns the name.
Hijo del Santo’s quest to get Mexico City to pay for a Santo museum must not be going well: in this interview, he speculates about taking it to Hidalgo or Puebla.
In an interview with SI, Konnan said the Crash was close to a major TV deal. The matches from the latest The Crash show are up on Konnan’s Patreon right now; I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m interested in how it looks if you’ve subscribed to that $5/tier. They’re listed as “KI100+ Monkeys Get It 1st”, so I wonder if that means they might be showing up elsewhere too.
An interview with Laguna luchador Tackle, who’s sons wrestle as Tackle Jr. & Bala de Plata Jr. (Bala de Plata is Tackle’s brother.) Tackle was Funebre Jr., but a guy named Raiders named a football tag team partner.
watching five different CMLL shows burned me out on watching things for a few days (and I had better things to do anyway) so that’s why this is going up on Thursday. A lot of the extra stuff wasn’t really that interesting and I probably should choose wiser but I wouldn’t be here if I made sound decisions.