Super Generation Army (Mitsuharu Misawa & Kenta Kobashi) vs Giant Baba & Stan Hansen
03/05/1994
Nippon Budokan, Tokyo, Japan
(reviewed 04/30/2024) Pretty good! This is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a lot better than their thirty minute Tag League draw from a few months back, a lot more engaging in spite of a slightly longer runtime. Mostly that comes down to energy and effort. Stan Hansen is much more heated here than he was during that tournament and Giant Baba actually matches some of that intensity along with being more charismatic than we’ve seen him in recent tags. Dude’s doing arm drags and taking headlock takeovers right from the start, quite a physically active performance in light of his condition by this time. That helps contribute to the slapped-together superteam coming across as relatively heelish, more aggressive and controlling than their Super Generation Army counterparts, and it gives this match a sense of direction that the RWTL bout lacked. It’s still overlong and repetitive—Budokan’s undoubtedly giving bigger reactions about five minutes before the finish than they are at the end—but the swing of momentum is more exciting than in any HDA/SGA matches we’ve seen so far, even with Baba anchoring the finishing stretch. Another small foible is the first really awful Kenta Kobashi overreaction of this review series, the man practically weeping that Baba somehow kicked out of his moonsault that has about a 23% success rate, but it’s such a brief moment that I can’t get too mad at it. Mitsuharu Misawa picking up the win with a flying neckbreaker drop is kinda cute, using an elevated (in every sense of the term) version of the boss’ move to illustrate that his era has ended. And it certainly has—aside from another RWTL match alongside Hansen later in the year, an upset by a mathematically eliminated team that robs the Holy Demon Army of their chance to win the tag titles back, this is Baba’s final Budokan Hall main event and one of his last major matches. If he appears again in this review series it’ll be in feel-good undercard tags and Korakuen Hall specials, never anything as serious as this. Nice little sendoff for the legend.
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