Super Generation Army (Mitsuharu Misawa, Toshiaki Kawada, & Tsuyoshi Kikuchi) vs Tsuruta-gun (Jumbo Tsuruta, Masanobu Fuchi, & Yoshinari Ogawa)
taped 07/26/1991, aired 08/11/1991
Matsudo Athletic Park Gymnasium, Matsudo, Chiba Prefecture, Japan
(reviewed 04/06/2024) Yoshinari Ogawa is such a welcome addition to this feud if for no other reason than his appearance. No one else is willing to be (or allowed to be, as Giant Baba was not a body positive booker) a string bean shithead with 80s arcade carpet tights freshly scrubbed of Pall Mall ash and various unidentified liquids. Nobody else is willing to wear a puffy mullet that makes him look like Nippon TV live action adaptation Butt-Head of “Beavis and” fame. Everyone else in AJPW is simply too scared to look this good:
Ogawa also encourages these guys to do moves they wouldn’t otherwise, with Mitsuharu Misawa busting out a powerslam years before he ever thought of the Emerald Flowsion and Tsuyoshi Kikuchi applying a Brock Lock of all things on his fellow junior. That novelty goes a long way because this is otherwise a bland, overlong match. The first half is pretty aimless, fifteen unremarkable minutes of guys getting isolated for brief periods of time before they get enough separation to tag out to the next guy up in the rotation. Nothing bad but nothing particularly memorable either. When the heels finally get their hands on somebody for an extended period of time it’s Misawa, who’s arrived from his recent title win with a noticeable limp, but after two reviews in which I praised his selling ability he decides to remind me why I came to hate him in the first place: as soon as the dude makes it back to the ring after the increasingly routine AJPW kneecrusher on the timekeeper’s table he immediately cuts off Masanobu Fuchi with an elbow and tags out. Granted he spends the next few minutes nursing his knee on the floor, a flock of people attending to him, but it’s the sort of dismissive deescalation of stakes that can’t help but breed resentment in this untouchable golden boy, especially as this leg injury fails to be a factor for the entire rest of the match.
The control segment on Kikuchi that follows is alright, featuring some near-miss hot tags the likes of which you don’t see too often in puroresu, but it feels out of place and unearned when he wasn’t the one who just got dropped knee-first on some office decor. Unfortunately the finishing stretch is even worse, a grim portent of what’s to come with 90s AJPW. Now that we’re over a year in, the Tsuruta-gun/Super Generation Army feud is getting a little stale and instead of doing anything different or introducing any new elements other than the ratty Ogawa, these guys just decide to do more of what they’ve done before—and I do mean more. Jumbo Tsuruta is laid out not once but twice in this match, first with a northern lariat from Toshiaki Kawada and then with a Misawa elbow to the back of the head! After their great early matches all fell in the 20-25 minute range this is another that’s 30+ minutes and suffers for it, on the same card as an Akira Taue vs Kenta Kobashi 30 minute draw no less! They even do a repeat of the “Jumbo snaps” angle from the year before, this time with the veteran hitting four—count ‘em, four—backdrop drivers on Misawa along with belting everybody in the back of the head for revenge!!!! It’s just tedious. In the absence of any new ideas they’re throwing ever- increasing amounts of old shit at the wall in the hopes you’ll find it just as refreshing the eighth time around. Was talking to some friends earlier today about how Dave Meltzer goes from giving AJPW a handful of five star ratings early in the decade (only three in 1990, for example) to awarding them for any old Johnny Ace or Satoru Asako match by the mid-90s. It’s hard to understand why. Like you could just say it’s because Dave has awful taste (and he does) but beyond that it’s hard to see what he saw in this stuff as it dragged on and on, getting more bloated and self-indulgent over time. Maybe it really is the novelty of an irrelevant, inoffensive new twist to a painfully familiar formula. Maybe by the time I get to 1995 the mere presence of Satoru Asako will feel like the greatest night in the history of our sport.
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