Lucha Libre USA: Masked Warriors: 2011-10-22

taped 2011-01-22 @ Hard Rock Casino, Albuquerque, New Mexico

file
recap

It was quite a season. The highs, the lows, the other two episodes. I am going to miss this show for being a somewhat moderate point between AAA’s constant seriousness and CMLL’s indifference, finding a sweet spot of goofiness. Lucha Libre USA did their best to get personallities over; I wasn’t always a fan of which personalities they chose and what directions they took them, but they tried hard and they tried hard with pretty much everyone. There needs to be more people wrapped in their own capes and carried away in lucha libre.
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Lucha Libre USA: Masked Warriors #7 (08/28/2010)

taped 08/07/10 in Las Vegas

Masked Warriors

I come not to bury the end of Lucha Libre USA: Masked Warriors (season 1), I come here to praise it. Comments for this post are only for your positive (season 1) memories of this promotion, negative comments will be deleted.

Things I enjoyed on this show (season 1):

  • People got paid! Never ever underrate this.
  • People got paydays who no one was expecting to ever be getting paydays. Who’d ever figure Neutron would have a major television role in 2010? He may have had his career peak about 3 years after most thought it was over. A bunch of minis got to have high profile matches and will now spend the next decade promoting themselves as having appeared on MTV. (As will minis who didn’t actually appear on MTV2.)
  • No one burned any bridges, so they’re just out of this schedule (while they’re on hiatus) and didn’t leave any other gigs behind. Charly Manson worked here, worked CMLL and worked indies all without a problem.
  • Every single scene involving Pequeno Halloween. He’s no slouch outside the ring, but every skit was *****. And Rebecca was good going with it.
  • The many, many silly skits. From Lujo’s telenovela life to Tinieblas TV.
  • Mascarita Dorada on my TV, spinning around.
  • Super Nova! Entering to Danger! High Voltage! Please take that back to wherever you land next.
  • Various US indy guys who will probably do well elsewhere. Saber Claw/Medianoche hopefully will get to springboard to a bigger stage. PR Powers/Aeroform are surely going to be the indy highfly team of choice in 2011, if not sooner.
  • Rocky Romero and Salsero both picked added yet another gimmick to their list.
  • TJP added one too as Sydistiko, but I hope he finds a way to keep using it, or using aspects of it. He’s always a guy who’s seemed technically good but missing something extra, and that might have been it.

What did I forget?

Lucha Libre USA: Masked Warriors #6 (08/20/2010)

Thomas and Mack Center, Las Vegas, NV, 08/07/2010

Thought to time this recap again to show up just before the show, but…oh well.

They really shouldn’t have started the show with the wedding. How could anything follow that?

I am unclear why they had on screen graphics for a radio show, but I do give them credit for how fast they put one together.

Pequeno Halloween is great, but so is Rebecca Reyes. A wonderful couple.

RJ Brewer/Mascarita Dorada was about as good as it could’ve been. I do find it outstanding that Brewer needed – REQUIRED! – outside interference to beat a man half his size.

Expected more crazy go nuts from the tag team title match, and it really didn’t come together as well as the last PR Powers match. It could be the other team, but it’s probably more that a tecnico/tecnico match was tough for them to work out, especially when they’re still trying to protect everyone.

Last week, I wondered why they went to a large building if they were not going to show the large building. This week, I learned how wrong I was. That place looked horrible every time they turned up the lights, exposing how few people were there and how empty it all was. There were plenty of shots where you could see it this week, but it was the worse during the street fight.

Lucha Libre USA #5 (08/13/2010)

taped 08/07/2010

Pequeno Halloween for the win

The weakest in-ring show so far? Not that it was a big surprise: Lizmark/Solid wasn’t supposed to be a good match (though I couldn’t figure out why it was supposed to be a life threatening beating), and the mixed tag couldn’t be a good match. The opening trios was OK, but nothing special.

Knowing the taping results, I can understand why they had three straight segments dealing with rudos beating up tencicos (Marco reacting to Lizmark beating Solid, Rellik/Malice, Team Evil Mexico vs PR Powers), because they’re setting up bits for the next two weeks, but they were a bit much stacked up together like they did.

This was the first taping after the show started airing, and I wonder if it might be the first commentary taping since the first reviews came in. Lalo and Nigel were not good, but I don’t recall a moment where I wanted to lunge thru my TV and strangle someone. A marked improvement!

There’s still doing things where they expect the people watching the show to make big leaps in logic the show has forgotten. Not just the Big News!! that may have been the tournament brackets, but no one ever makes it particularly clear that Lizmark Jr.’s letter was about facing Solid in the tournament. The first time I watched this, I thought it was actually something about Sydistiko, since Lizmark was yelling about him and they ought to be writing him out of the show about now.

I would watch a show about Pequeno Halloween. This may be that show, everyone else is just slow in figuring out.