Holy Demon Army (Akira Taue & Toshiaki Kawada) & Tamon Honda vs Super Generation Army (Mitsuharu Misawa, Kenta Kobashi, & Satoru Asako)
06/30/1995
Korakuen Hall, Tokyo, Japan
(reviewed 05/11/2024) It’s often a pretty bewildering experience, going back and watching minor matches that Dave Meltzer has given a five star rating, and perhaps never more so than with this match. For starters we’re missing half of it—only thirteen and a half of this match’s twenty-four minutes made it to tape. Granted it’s only one newsletter’s rating of a fairly meaningless wrestling match but I think it’s pretty dumb to see just over 56% of a thing and find yourself fit to judge the rest of it, positively or negatively. That’s deeply conceited behavior. I’ll definitely think less of you, dear reader, if you stop reading in the middle of this review and if you just scoffed and ran to tell all your little friends about my saying so, then you definitely deserve it. Either way this is not exactly Can-Ams vs Kobashi & Kikuchi, as far as great matches which were clearly great even in their incomplete airings are concerned. I wouldn’t exactly accuse these guys of being unenthused but they are not going at it with the sort of physical or emotional intensity we’ve seen from them in previous Korakuen Hall main events, let alone in the bigger matches everybody throws all the asterisks at. It’s hardly the driest match I’ve reviewed in this series but somehow I think a superlative rating (or what used to be superlative anyway; great job on rendering the aspect of your career you’re most famous for completely meaningless, Dave) warrants a little more than simply being “not the worst.”
If there’s anything exemplary about this match it’s Tamon Honda, appearing here for the first time in this series. A fairly successful Olympic wrestler who didn’t join AJPW until he was nearly 30, Honda’s another of these controversial King’s Road wrestlers who dared to be something other than what Kenta Kobashi and co. already were and thus earned generations of foreign scorn for it. At this point he’s less than two years into his career, which has been slow going due to some nagging injuries, and as a result he is limited to little more than some perfectly forgettable headbutts and a lot of unnatural yelling. It certainly seems to be the most notable performance of his career thus far—some slight indication of the great wrestler he’ll soon become—but something tells me he’s not who Dave had in mind with this five star rating. Really it seems to be more about who’s in the thing rather than what they do in it, if the latter even matters at all. We know for a fact Dave didn’t see ten minutes of this match. Why should we assume he even bothered with the rest?
Also Satoru Asako sucks ass.
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