Lucha Memes posted five shows from 2020 on IWTV. They seem to be happy with how it’s gone – the promoter seemed delighted to get a check instead of giving things away for free – so I expect they’ll continue to place shows on the service sometime after they take place. I watched all five to check them off my 2020 lists. There’s some good stuff there, and a sense of where the promotion is at right now.
The Lucha Memes production isn’t at the level of a typical US indie on the service. There are no graphics for wrestler’s names and there is no commentary; the only way you know who anyone is if you already know or you catch the ring announcer saying it once. (Each file has a match list, but the matches are often not in the airing order.) Just to compare it fairly against other Mexican promotions, Vanguardia has graphics and actually has English commentary for one of their shows on IWTV. RIOT, previously on IWTV has graphics. Anything Mas Lucha puts up has commentary and graphics. I haven’t seen the GHC shows but I’m going to try to check one out just to hear their commentary. The Memes shows must be difficult to follow for a casual viewer and “making it easy for viewers to know who the wrestlers are and why they should care” is such first-day wrestling stuff that I can’t believe I’m spending a paragraph trying to persuade a promotion to do it. It is possible that Memes only cares about making sure existing fans can see their shows if they’re not there – even that’s a big step from before – but they’re going to struggle to grow new fans with the way they’re doing these shows.
The camerawork can be frustrating. This appears to be Carxyus produced, with some people holding cameras and other cameras mounted. Multiple cameras are great – go watch the most recent Welcome to Mi Barrio to see what it looks like when only one camera is working – but there are camera switches for the sake of showing off the cameras. There are situations where it appears a bad camera angle was picked ‘live’ to surprise with a better angle in a replay. An advantage of editing a show is getting all the right angles the first time, but the aim here seemed to be showcase the ability to do replays by doing them many times a match. I grew to hate the replay chime by the fourth show. There’s also a lot of camera switching on every strike just for the sake of it, which seems like a copy of WWE’s poor choices. It was occasionally painful to watch and took me out of matches. The picture quality was clean, I never felt like I missed a finish, but it felt like the shows would’ve been better if a lot less production work was done. “Do less” is a pretty easy fix, so I’m sure these can get better over time.
It is worth dealing with all of this because there are some good matches in front of (somewhat masked and distanced) crowds. A fair criticism of Lucha Memes is they’ve essentially given up on booking storylines or feuds; most of the shows seem directionless matching up of two or more regular performers. There are the smallest signs of actual direction by the end of the year, but it’s generally unambitious booking. The silver lining is you can just jump into watching solo matches whenever because they’re all just standalone content. I’m not going to write about all the matches on each show because there is literally no point, just the ones that gave me something to write about.
On the first two shows:
2020-09-16 Double Power from Arena Lopez Mateos
Mike Segura vs Freelance: [good] enjoyable for where these guys are at this point in their careers. They can hit their big moves, they’re not going to deeper than an exhibition match. Suicida looks more fluid, in movement and thought, than Freelance these days. Freelance is more about someone else building their match over the few spots he’s definitely going to do.
Arez vs Ricky Marvin in a cage match: [ok] I don’t know if this has reached diminishing returns or it was a bad night affected by working two matches in one afternoon. There was a physical effort but not a great mental effort. It was simply Ricky kicking out of all of Arez’ moves, Ricky pulling Arez into a poor looking backslide that shouldn’t have been a three count, and a referee counting three because he’s not going to risk being in trouble with Ricky Marvin. They’ve done much better. This is also another indie lucha libre stip match where the promoter couldn’t/didn’t convince the wrestlers to use the stipulation at all; I wasn’t looking for a dive off the top, but the cage might as well not have been there.
Aramis vs Baby Extreme: [good] The headline here is Aramis’ new Musketeer hat. The match is good but was it as good as the hat? Tough to say. This has a lot of cool and exciting moves and no particular order to them. Baby Extreme gets piledriven so hard on the ramp that the referee almost stops the match, but they’ve got four more minutes of moves to do so they do more moves. There’s nothing building here, just some athleticism until they get through Aramis’s finishes. This was likely spectacular in person and a bit numbing on a screen because the moves quickly felt like they didn’t mean anything.
2020-10-04 Battle of Coacalco 2020
Garrobo Punk vs Latigo: [good] Latigo presumably wants to be in the biggest promotions in the world, but he’s actually was fantastic in 2020 going touring the micro-lucha indie and getting a strong night out of a guy who never really stands out. A lot of that’s been with the IAW title, but he’s just as good here making Garrobo Punk look more complete than he has on any other Lucha Memes show. This has the drama and build missing from the Aramis/Baby Extreme match, with Garrobo Punk looking like the guy who fought well and just had a tough first match up. This is close to Great for me.
Arez vs Blaze: [good] I wrote this down as good even though I have is more “it was fine” type stuff. This started slow, action got solid, I liked it even if I couldn’t defend it.
Arez vs Sadico: [ok] Disappointing. It felt like they were on different pages early on – the long Arez submission spot that’s not really sold by Sadico and also not counted as a pinfall was a cold moment. They were smoother as it went along, only to finish suddenly. The finish was creative but felt out of place in a serious tournament unless Arez being a heel was meant to be a story. (It was not meant to be the story.)
Latigo vs Taurus: [good] both Taurus’ early-round matches are the undersized guys trying to stop the monster. Latigo is much more effective at it (and it doesn’t include a quickly negated big chair spot.) Latigo going after Taurus’ hand to slow him down was effective, and it felt like he was close to getting the win before he was obliterated. Taurus’ spear doesn’t look as impressive as it has in other times, and the finish gets some air taken out of it when Latigo seems to have it knocked out of him right beforehand. Still an effective match.
Aeroboy vs Ricky Marvin: [good] there was a point here where Aeroboy did a kick to the side of the head and there was no noise in the building except for the impact sound. These guys were hitting each other hard and it didn’t seem to connect to the crowd at all. The reaction seemed there when they started fast. It slowed way down, and even the stiffer shots weren’t getting the crowd back for a while. The match was fine and got good by the end, but it’s a tough watch in front of an audience who only seems to care when Ricky is yelling at them.
Arez vs Taurus: [good] Both guys, maybe more Arez, seemed tired from the tournament and it affected their performance.They did well for the time they went and the crowd was very thrilled with the outcome, but it felt like they have a much better match in them.