Recapped: 11/19/2017
The first match is from Domo San Luis, San Luis Potosí, San Luis Potosí, taped 10/01/2017. It only aired on stations which get a longer version of the AAA show (and likely aired as part of one of the previous weeks of TV on those channels, only I can’t consistently track down that show.) It has not aired on any regular AAA show and there’s no public explanation or reason why it hasn’t, which is very unusual for a main event of any TV taping.
The last four matches aired from Palenque de la Feria, Metepec, Estado de México, taped 10/20/2017.
Matches:
Pagano beat El Mesías and Joe Lider in a death match
(10:06, Pagano Air Raid Crash thru a table on fire Joe Lider, below average, via thecubsfan)
Bronco González Jr. & Chicano beat Rugido & Solaris
(6:40, Chicano top rope senton con giro Rugido, good, via Lucha Libre AAA)
Big Mami & Niño Hamburguesa beat La Hiedra & Villano III Jr.
(8:54, Niño Hamburguesa frog splash Villano III, ok, via Lucha Libre AAA)
Angelikal, Hijo Del Vikingo, Lanzeloth beat Ángel Mortal Jr., Australian Suicide, Tiger Boy
(7:52, Lanzeloth spinning fireman’s slam Australian Suicide, ok, via Lucha Libre AAA)
Dave The Clown, Monsther Clown, Murder Clown beat Dark Cuervo, Dark Scoria, La Parka
(11:05, Dave frontcracker La Parka, ok, via Lucha Libre AAA)
What happened:
Earlier in the night, Cuervo & Scoria wanted to talk strategy with La Parka about the main event match, but Parka didn’t want anything with them. Like everyone else who follows this promotion, he never saw these two dudes turn técnico and doesn’t really trust them. He wants them to earn his trust. In one of those remarkable coincidences, they get that chance two seconds later: Psicosis & Histeria attack Parka for no reason and Cuervo & Scoria make the save. That wins Parka over. In the match itself, Los Vipers return to attack the Secta when they have the match won. (Tirantes distracted himself poorly to miss the interference.) Parka stares at the rudos, and gets caught by a frontcracker by Dave the Clown.
Australian Suicide is looking like the lead singer of Green Day now. Tiger Boy is now The Tiger Boy.
The técnicos are mixed tag champs. They pose before the match like the titles are not on the line, but it’s apparently not a title match. La Hiedra is wearing a Sangre Chicana inspired outfit. Hiedra walks out on Villano III for losing the match.
Rugido is another new name for Dizzy, presented as AAA’s new find.
Noti AAA has Dia de los Muertos celebrations and Dr. Wagner Jr. talking about his evolution. They’ve cut back on listing him as “Rey Wagner”, but he still pushes the idea of it here.
I grabbed the Heroes Inmortales off one of the TV internet feeds (and so the video quality is terrible.) It’s also very obviously clipped. The really obvious edit comes about 5:30 into the video, where suddenly a wood board with light tubes and a ladder materialize in the ring. On fan video of the full match (which has since been removed from YouTube but appeared to be close to 30 minutes total), you can see Mesias have trouble folding the ladder, the ladder tipping in the crowd, the fans yelling at Mesias about it and him yelling back. Mesias and Pagano crowd brawl a while later, and it doesn’t seem like the floor camera tries to follow them. The TV version resumes a minute or so after they come back, and Mesias is noticeably limping by that point. There’s more edits after that – a moment where Mesias leaves the ring to yell at fans, fans throw drinks at him, and Mesias goes harder after the fans is also not shown on TV. Same thing with Lider choking Pagano with the barbed wire and a powerbomb on the announce time, Pagano doing a splash to the floor that misses to set up Lider cutting him again, Joe Lider doing an Asia Moosnault, and Mesias taking a splash.
Everyone bleeds. Joe Lider, who seems to have gained a lot of weight lately, takes the Air Raid Crash onto a flaming table. Somehow that’s not the finish – Pagano has to DDT Mesias too, and then covers Joe Lider, who’s grabbing his head and doesn’t actually have his shoulders down. (This is Mesias’ last match for now. In the bigger picture, it comes off like Mesias was probably supposed to be get surgery after TripleMania, was convinced to stick around because they had a shortage of actual Lucha Underground people for the Japan LU shows, and they made this match the main event as a reward while adding Joe Lider just to take the load off. It’s one of many AAA storylines which don’t make sense on screen and only make sense when you guess at what must’ve been going on behind the scenes.)
Thoughts:
The main event combined a lot of wrestlers who aren’t all that interesting into one familiar feeling matches. The Traidor Clowns are one of the least capable groups to stooge Parka’s comedy, but they’re doing it all the same anyway. Cuervo & Scoria were occasionally in the match, but this was much more abut the Vipers and Dave/Parka than anything they had to offer.
The third match and the regular tag match shared some energy and the young guys trying to big things. They both had issues with smoothiness – a little bit of people hesitating on moves, or going at the speed they must’ve practiced the spots rather than naturally reacting to what was happening behind them. Hijo del Vikingo still can do some amazing things but didn’t get focused as much as the star in this one as he did in past match. There really wasn’t any particular direction to the match, and there sort of needs to be one in every match when you’ve got so few of them as week. The finish itself didn’t look as strong as a lot of things that came before it, and this came down to a borderline match on my part. The ending looked like it was a screw up – Angel Mortal broke it up just at 3 – and the result didn’t make any sense if Suicide was going to get the title shot on the very next taping. Maybe AAA didn’t know for sure Suicide was challenging next, but they probably still could’ve safer pinned Tiger Boy or Angel Mortal since there’s very obviously no plans for them. The week to week storytelling is abysmal.
The mixed tag is what you’d expect, a lot of Big spots around Mami & Hamburguesa. They did what they do about as well as they ever do. La Hiedra’s offense didn’t look good at all, but it’s not so much of a surprise given who they were working with here. Villano III trying to do tricky armdrags with Big Mami was pushing it. Really, the rudos couldn’t do the comedy stuff well, and they’re not great enough wrestlers themselves to make this work themselves. Villano III was the better of the two at it, but not so much that you need to see it.
The actual opener was borderline match. Nothing much stuck out to me but it kept moving for the time they had. Match was pleasantly fine for a novato match except for the spot about four and half in where Chicano and Solaris were hopelessly lost for about 10 seconds. These aren’t really novatos though; Rugido’s been around forever and Chicano’s not a spring chicken, but they’re being given novato amount of things to do. Bronco is one of their better bases of this group, and so it wasn’t probably an accident he was around to make Rugido’s iffy spots look good. Not sure why you’d make that effort and also have him lose in his debut but so it goes.
The three way match combined the mindless violence of a poor hardcore match with the directionless violence of a bad three way match. We saw an XMW three way hardcore match live, everyone but me seemed to hate it (I just didn’t care enough to hate it, a personal flaw) and I’m not sure it was any worse than this. This was Mesias’ last match before going in for double knee surgery, and he’s moving erratically and painfully for most of the match. The editing definitely hurts the match – it seemed as much for time as content. I’d be livid if I was one of these guys who took all this abuse, very few people got to see it on TV, and more than half the crazy stuff I did wasn’t shown at all. That just shouldn’t be happening in 2017. (A lot of this shouldn’t be happening in 2017.) Even the stuff we did get on TV was made worse by how it was presented; the crowd was much more into Pagano in the match live than it came thru.
This match brings back the old DTU tradition of putting barbed wire on one side of the ring, and everyone (mostly Lider) stopping short of hitting the ropes for no logical reason. That draws snickers from the fan cam I watched, for this super serious death match they’re trying to do. This match is not something I want to see at all, but they also managed to make the least of it.