Day: February 3, 2014

Long time followers of the site, or maybe even long time follower of me on my internet, know what I’m actually good at doing. It’s not gathering relevant news accurately, it’s not having worthwhile opinions on wrestling (definitely not that one), and it’s not even recording things on my TV to put on the internet. My skills, such as they are, are “doing dumb stuff persistently over a long period of time.” I finished a project that required just that.

We were given an opportunity to photograph a ton of old lineup posters and magazines while in Mexico. I’ve spent the time since transcribing the photographs into text and pictures, and integrating that content into the luchawiki and the match database. There are a couple magazines I actually bought which I’m not sure I’ve added in yet, but everything else is in there. If you’ve seen something sourced as “luchablog photolog (some numbers)”, that’s what that meant. I’ve been also using the new data to fix the information I also have. There were 1,221 shows modified in some way, the vast majority of them added to the database.

I’m putting all that added information right here for download. All of those events have already been entered in the database and should be appearing on the various data pages, but this puts it in one easy place. I’m not sure if anyone besides a couple of German sites will use this information, but it exists for anyone to use in whatever way to can figure out.

I’ve done my best at trying to clean up the data, but there are surely mistakes. I’ve included match/event notes in the file. I haven’t included name/alignment metadata, because there’s not an easy way to express it and I’m not sure anyone else uses it. There probably should be some standard way to share all this information, but since I haven’t figured out what that is yet, this will have to do.

(There are plenty of errors – as I can now tell looking thru that file. Oops.)

• if you’re going to write a post about what you’ve learned from lineups, you should probably write that post up when you’ve finished typing up the lineups, and not after you’ve added them to the database. It’s much fresher in your mind.
• if ever you find yourself in a similar situation, where you have more magazines and posters available to you than time available – and you’re using a phone camera – I would recommend leaning towards photographing posters over magazines.The poster photographs were very successful; even if it turned out somewhat blurry, they were still big enough that I could figure it out. That wasn’t the case with magazines. I didn’t keep stats, but I’d guess maybe 4% of the posters photos were unusable, while 12% of the magazine photos were impossible to decipher after the fact.

  The other person taking photos did a much better job of taking photos, so it’s possible me or my camera were not good at this – though they smartly took photos of parts of pages while I tried to did whole pages. And the magazines are the only places where you’re going to find results, plus those full pages of cards which are such a great data mine

  We could’ve scanned things, but that would’ve taken much longer and we would’ve got a lot less done. (I’d really love to find a practical magazine scanner for my own collection, but have never had much luck.) The flip side of the blurry photos was the incredible speed and number of photos I was able to take – thanks to some awesome and very appreciated assistance, there were stretches where I was framing and snapping a new poster every 10 seconds. I might have been able to get a little better quality if I went slower, and I did help myself by starting to take a two shots at may posters, but I feel like we ended up with the most usable posters we were going to get.

• Whoever decided that a standard poster should have the month, day, day of the week AND YEAR on it is among most favorite person in the history of the world. That person saved me so much time. There’s no obvious reason for the year to be there, except the handbills might have been posted or floating around for long enough to mistake one year’s for the next.A lot of them didn’t have it that way and working out the correct year was not impossible but often a struggle. Infrequent visiting foreigners were helpful. I had to take wild guesses on a few. Promotion affiliations are 90% my guessing. Promotions were (and are) downplayed on lineups, but top wrestlers associated with the promotions were pretty consistent. There were also other shows with both UWA and EMLL talent in the 80s, making any distinctions pretty pointless.
• for obvious reasons, a lot of the older info tends to be more UWA specific. Still, a lot of Mexico, Coliseo and other shows too. It was neat to find missing major building lineups, but I have this (perhaps disillusion) thought that someone’s kept track of all the Arena Mexico or El Toreo shows and that list will be shared with everyone at some point. We’re less likely to find similar items for shows out in the provinces, and so getting a piece here or there was always a good fine. I also saw the Los Temerarios logo so many times I almost put it on a magnet.

• I am Team Arena KO Magazine. Definitely better than Box Y Lucha back in the day, better results, better lineups. (And all the Naucalpan info you want.) It is amusing and not all surprsing that Box Y Lucha’s Cartela section in the late 80s looks just about the same as it does today.
• Villano II is the rarest Pokemon. Even when he was wrestling, he was not wrestling often.
• We (and be we I mostly me “I”) treat it like a big deal when women are allowed to semimain or even main event major shows, as if it’s a break thru. It’s more of a return. Women’s matches were booked as such a big deal in 1987, after the ban on women wrestling in Mexico City was lifted. It didn’t happen as much in Arena Mexico, but they were booked as a hot new gimmick in B arenas – including plenty of arenas they could’ve been wrestling in before the ban was removed. The ban itself obviously hurt, but the surge in interest when the ban was removed was a nice silver lining. It didn’t sustain long but it must’ve been quite a time for those involved.On a lesser scale, you can see the same thing happen with the pre-mini dwarf wrestlers – they were around for a while, but got hot for a period as something different. You can see where an Antonio Pena might have figured they could do a lot with that type of characters if they were a bit more athletic.
• Los Xaviers were the trio I was least familiar with who seemed to be booked the most. I remain confused by X/J being the same later and everyone who actually speaks Spanish is confused why I’m confused by that. Most set trios were usually just listed by the trios name, without specifying who was in that trio in the moment. It surely makes sense in context of the moment but becomes harder to decode after the fat. I spent considerable time looking up when the Arquero del Espacio changed members or figuring out what Los Tres Villanos happened to mean that month. (Usually 1/4/5, but these go back span enough to find 1/2/3 and recent enough for 3/4/5. Speaking of, Villano I was a guy who was around for a long time without a lot being written about him today.)
• it’s crazy to see how busy things were in the 80s and early 90s. Sundays with shows in Arena Mexico, Arena Coliseo, Pista Arena Revolucion and El Toreo (all accessible from the DF metro!) were common. That’s a lot of fans going to shows and a lot of wrestlers getting work. There was a period of time where they were running Toreo multiple times a week; I find a lineup where they were adding Tuesday shows at this giant arena just to run the same Nuevo Valores shows CMLL is now running.
• traveling thousands of miles to find lineups of shows a few miles (and a few decades) from my house was very weird.