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El Gallinero Gros posted:Watch the IWA Japan King of the Deathmatch 95 tournament. Don't watch this it is horrible. It's really boring. The basic history is Onita is inspired by Memphis and Puerto Rico and FMW slowly transforms form a weird mixed style (with boxers and martial artists) to more and more death matches. But a big focus on spectacle. FMW would run huge stadium shows with grand entrances like Sasuke coming in on a helicopter, interpromotional stuff, and their death matches were big. Stuff like the Exploding Cages, Exploding Pool Death match and the rest of the stuff that really got attention were larger than life with huge explosions and lots of over the top theatrics. For example you would have Onita win a timebomb match before the explosion and then heroically use his body to protect someone else from the explosion like AEW tried to do with the dud. Smaller groups start springing up, including some notable big time flops like IWA Japan, and offshoots of FMW that Onita would do to create interpromotional rivalries. The most successful long term would be Big Japan. ECW is also getting bigger in the US and Heyman wants to use some FMW wrestlers and especially Onita to do an explosion match. But getting Onita to do an explosion match in the US is a white whale for two decades, and realistically still is. ECW can never put it together, CZW couldn't until 2018 (and it wasn't a true explosion match, they just had the bat) and it might actually happen next month but we'll see. Because of this ECW never really advances beyond barbed wire matches and the Taipei death match in terms of gore and spectacle. In the late 90s ECW starts inspiring a generation of guys who want to out do ECW. You get the formation of Rob Black's XPW and Zandig starting a CZW with the first crop of trainees such as Gage, Justice Pain and Lobo, plus other new local guys like Wifebeater, Trend Acid, etc. CZW gets a relationship with Big Japan early on which leads to CZW guys going to big Japan. This relationship falls apart due to Zandig being so hard to work with, but you get a period where CZW guys are doing tours with Big Japan and Big Japan belts are in the US. You also have former ECW guys like Ian Rotten starting companies which gives us IWA Mid South. XPW was more directly antagonistic to ECW. They were closer to ECW's style but did death matches and a death match tournament. The company was horribly mismanaged and just terrible in general. Unlike CZW and IWA MS it didn't seem to realize that they would have to shift to a mix of hardcore and workrate to keep fans. Both CZW and IWA MS did make that transition and CZW had a ton of success in the early to mid 2000s, regularly drawing 1,000+ people at the former ECW Arena. IWA MS got a lot of buzz (but never the attendance success) for their workrate tournaments and both were the go to death match promotions in the US. Zandig eventually sold to DJ Hyde and CZW. DJ is very contentious (somehow more so than Zandig!) and can in large part be seen as the reason GCW came to be what it is today.
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Sep 12, 2021 18:40
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Auritech posted:As far as I remember, didn't ECW back away from no rope barbed wire deathmatches because of how ugly Sabu vs. Terry Funk got? Even if they didn't, they still advertised the Born To Be Wired tape on their Hardcore TV show and I actually ended up buying it. The match really did live up to its hype though; Sabu tears his arm on the barbed wire and frantically tries to tape it up while still trying to sell Terry Funk's exhausted offense, and by the end of the match the two men are in a tangled mess of barbed wire. The rest of the tape is pretty meh. They still promoted matches with barbed wire in them but I think that was the last No Ropes Barbed Wire match in ECW. Although in late 99 they promoted Dreamer vs Credible in a Stairway to Heaven match for the ECW on TNN taping in the Westchester County Center and bait and switched us. After the show started they claimed the commission wouldn't allow barbed wire so there would be a singapore cane hanging from the ceiling. Lame!
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Sep 13, 2021 02:57
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