Attendance: 200 kinda sums up where CMLL was to start 1995. This building is EMPTY. We're talking about a Tuesday but it's also holiday season when attendance usually goes up. Now was the attendance really 200? Probably not. This is probably a guess based on seeing all the empty floor seats on TV - of which there are many. We're talking entire sections just empty. But yeah CMLL was very much struggling at this point, so much so that people unhappy in AAA weren't even rushing back to CMLL if they quit, they were working for an offshoot PROMELL group that had a little money. So this first match of 1995 from Tuesday sums up CMLL's in-ring - at least in the main event scene. This was very solid match. **1/2 is a perfect rating. It hits the good level but doesn't go a single bit above that. The small crowd does not add any excitement to what's going on which doesn't help things. Freshly bald Black Magic does some fun things with Dandy which is what I'd consider the highlight to be. Next up is the Friday semi-main which is Mascara Magica's first real shot working with the bigger names. Again a very solid technical match, far more exciting than the Tuesday one as there were people in the building for Dia De Reyes (so that 600 number cannot be right). Emilio looks like a million bucks bumping around for Atlantis. Arkangel takes a cool bump off La Careta (!) to set up a big Magica dive in the third fall. Finish is a snap Casas roll-up on Wagner & Atlantida on Emilio which pops the crowd. Good stuff. I'd go ***1/2. Garza/Satanico is the start of a long build to Garza finally beating Satanico so they go to a double pin draw. It's pretty edited down so you don't get much idea of how good it was but there was some heat from the women screaming for Garza of course.
Just the main event makes the usual shortened TV show. It's the start of the build to a Brazo De Oro/Gran Markus Jr. title match. I know, how thrilling. Porky/Brazo have some fun interaction but that's about it here. Matches like this really expose Pierroth Jr. not being a more than a standard in-ring guy as he's the one trying to carry things on the rudo side & it's just not working. I wonder if people would be surprised to find out lots of veterans really didn't respect Pierroth as a worker?
Announcers are on a big kick about Mascara Magica getting a chance to move up in the semi-main. I was never a huge Magica guy. He was fine. But he never hit the level I thought Shocker/Niebla did when it was their turn to get elevated. The match is seemingly built around Casas/Dandy not getting along. I can't figure out why that would be. I know Casas was rudo not too long before this but they already did the turn. Mano Negra plays the role of instigator trying to get them to fight. Out of nowhere in the third fall Casas/Dandy get on the same page & it gets a huge pop when they knock the rudos off the apron together. Problem solved, right? Well... after the tecnicos win (Magica pinning Bestia which is treated as a big deal) they have more tension between them outside the ring. I guess Casas is going back rudo soon? My memory is hazy & I don't wanna spoil myself by checking forward, I'll just roll with it. Main event is a cut off match that appeared to be heading a two fall conclusion. After a long first fall Ultimo Dragon goes for his asai moonsault & I'm not sure what happens. He just stops before jumping & goes down holding his knee. Announcers speculate the worse but it looks like he's back in action soon after according ot results so maybe just a scare.
Putrid main event. Vampiro & Black Magic are back to work in front of miniscule CMLL crowds. For as hot as Vamp was for that short run in 92/93, he cooled off so fast. He meant absolutely nothing here. It's amazing to me he ever sniffed the HOF ballot. Just a total flash in the pan. His performance here is dreadful. More build to Oro/Markus with Oro pinning him clean after some mask ripping. These attendance numbers always have me skeptical. Like I'll doubt there was anyway CMLL was only drawing 600 fans to someof these shows, sounds made up. But then you watch the video & it's clear only the first couple rows on the floor have people & it sounds like there aren't many people sitting upstairs. Rough rough rought times.
Oh wait... this was the match where Ultimo Dragon got hurt. So scratch what I said two shows above. Maybe that match never aired? I can't seem to find it. But it was definitely this match because I remember Felino was the one kneeling down to check if he was okay or not & then the show went straight to the main event. Weird. Dave rating a 1995 CMLL match ***1/4 is kinda like ***** considering how disinterested he was in the promotion at the time. My fair ratind be somwhere around ***3/4. That's also me giving a little boost just because everything else this month that we saw was very lesser quality. The Dos Caras/Wagner stuff in particular stands out as usual. It's criminal there's no extended singles match between the two on video (although there is a Dos Caras vs Dr. Wagner Sr. match from All Japan!). Satanico's hair here is the longest it's ever been in his career so you had to know where this was going, especially with him feuding with Garza. He cleanly submits him for the win here. By 1995 CMLL standards, you can't miss this one!
Oh the joys of 1995 CMLL TV! Show starts with a rapid fire highlight package covering matches from Tuesday Arena Coliseo & Friday Arena Coliseo with no distinction made between the two. Even Cubs who seems to be scouring the video for listings missed a match in here. It's just the finish of each match so nothing worth breaking down. The Brazo De Oro/Gran Markus Jr. title match airs is the only one to air in full. So many empty seats. Surely they didn't think this match would be a draw, right? Here's the thing... the match was fine. If you are looking it from a purely in-ring aspect & taking into account what these two guys can do in 1995. The problem is lucha had evolved by this point & these guys were working a slow early 1980's title match. Great for the few hundred who actually paid to get in the building but that is not or should not be the goal. You can watch a match like this & respect it but in no way can you call it a success or say we need to see more of this. Brazo De Oro wins the title after a very cold match even the announcers seemed bored by. I'll give it ** because I'm in a good mood.
Only the main event of course airs. We have blood! Between Silver King/Emilio Charles Jr. which came outta nowhere. It doesn't even fit into the finish which is Garza pinning Emilio so that was a bit odd. It's mentioned Garza is off to Japan with Dos Caras (for WAR I believe) in a few days. Black Magic was very entertaining in this but I felt the match never escaped normal CMLL 1995 gear. Shocked Dave went ***1/4. Also, there's no way only 500 people were in Arena Coliseo. I guess I should also mention in the highligts of that tercera we saw Chicago Express turn on his partners so he's rudo bound at this point. Why was he ever a tecnico???
There is no point seperating these shows when only one match on each airs. This was a rough watch! And it only get worse! CMLL 1995... not the best TV product. We are gifted a semi-main from the Tuesday Coliseo show that is overall quite useless. It ends with Arkangel fouling Kato Kung Lee for reasons I can't even begin to explain. They never feuded. Neither has a title. Maybe there's a reason those attendances were dipping dangerously low. Shocker in one of his first full TV appearences does little of note. From Friday we get the main event which is more of the same nothing. At one point Vampiro seems to fake a leg injury so he doesn't have to keep being involved in the match but then jumps into things again when it's time for his dive at the finish. IT'S A MIRACLE! Silver King gets the deciding pinfall. He had a couple nice bits with Wagner but that was the highlight of this slog. Skip this show.
Wow look at all the stuff that aired!!! Well, not really. CMLL now used their little TV time to start airing highlights of all the people you never got to see on TV. Just finishes. Sometimes even just the actual final pinfall or submission & nothing more. We see an Olimpico dive that injures Lynx. More of Chicago Express breaking up with the tecnicos. Lady Apache pins Reina Jubuki to set up a title match. We do get the full Coliseo semi-main event so great news for you Hijo Del Solitario fans out there! Two straight weeks! Very basic match highlighted by Solitario giving Cadaver De Ultratumba a legdrop crushing his head. He seemed none too happy. The other full match is the Friday Arena Mexico (oh BTW this is the season opener) main event with Canek's return. What a tecnico team that is. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Completely useless match. Watching lucha libre in slo-mo is not fun. The awful run of TV continues...
During the Tuesday main event they cut to a shot of a fan holding up the little paper with the lineup you get before any CMLL show & I tried my best to freeze frame it so we could find out the unknown wrestlers but the shot was too blurry. I blame Jeff Lynch! 3/4* Meltzer??? That means it was barely above a DUD which is ridiculous. Very solid match with some actual good work between Silver King/Mano Negra at times. The match was of course built around the Garza/Satanico issue ending with the rudos ganging up on Garza which led to a DQ. Good for what it was. Let's go **1/2. Friday show actually only aired the main event in full but had highlights of the women's title match which is listed as the semi-main but I refuse to believe that to be true. Maybe tercera but most likely segunda. Aside from the oddity of seeing the existence of women in CMLL in 1995, nothing to take away from the clip. On commentary it's noted everyone going to Japan soon (Garza, Dos Caras, Damiancito El Guerrero & ... Olimpico????????). Main event is wretched. At one point Jason The Terrible has his hockey mask taken off so he just works in a plain black mask. They showed some guy who looked like a musician in the front row with his hot girlfriend to see Vamp in action. I couldn't identify him. The finish was actually at least clever as Dos Caras put Pierroth Jr. in a figure-four leglock & they rolled outside the ring while still in the hold. As they struggled for minutes, Jason pinned Vamp inside the ring. How did we go from sub 1000 on Tuesdays to 12000 on a Friday? We didn't. There in no way was 12000 fans in this building. NO WAY NO HOW.
No highlights this week - straight to the action with the Tuesday main event & Friday main event afterwards. Garza/Satanico are feuding over on Tuesday which has had Satanico low blowing Garza for the past few weeks & getting away with it. So you see where this is going, yeah? Garza blocks it & gets DQ'ed for low blowing the rudo. Actually a great finish that got a lot of heat from the few fans who turned out. Othewise I enjoyed the second fall finish with Porky giving Emilio & Pierroth a senton which let Dos Caras climb on top & hug him during the pinfall. There's also a dive sequence at the end of the third fall which is wild considering the participants in this match. Over at Arena Mexico we have the Campeon de Campeones! A "relevo cibernetico" as it was called at the time. Basically all the champions at the time get to do a trios match under torneo cibernetico rules to determine one true winner who earns a title shot (which is silly if you think about it since CMLL usually made double champions vacate one of their two belts). The two captains were Dragon & Dandy due to them being NWA champions which were more important than CMLL belts. Imagine explaining that to people these days. It would be absurd. The teams were formed via a COIN FLIP! Now let me tell you something about CMLL... they don't work things. Meaning this was absolutely a shoot coin flip & the teams were chosen on the spot. Just like the tumbler in 1996 for the juniors tournament. I believe this moreso because of two things: 1) this match is soooooooooooo by the numbers nothing crazy as if nobody had any plan going in & were just calling things on the fly as total pros used to be able to do + 2) Jericho, who would have the most problems calling things on the fly, doesn't even enter the match until the final three. There's even a 4 minute bit where Ultimo Dragon is having his leg worked on & gets trapped in a half crab multiple times before having to submit due to the pain. Very non-lucha. It's a good technical match but it's nothing that's gonna break **** because they had to keep it very basic. Jericho ends up winning pinning Negro Casas with a tiger suplex after slamming him face first off the top rope. There were a lot of well done super close nearfalls in this match that I don't think a single 2026 CMLL referee would have been able to pull off properly. Post-match everyone congratulates Jericho & they even toss him up in the air a few times. Should also note on commentary Javier Llanes says the building is half full (considered a very good turnout in these days) & gives the number as 8,400. They then joke about it being 8,400 1/2 because Espectrito is in the building too. It's funny to hear Javier Llanes on commentary talking about "programacion" because he was the actual booker but by this point had been replaced by Peonono.
The fact I remember nothing about anything that aired from both of these two shows probably tells you the entire story. I only watched it a day or two ago! Tuesday main event & Friday top two air although the semi-main is just highlights. I remember Atlantis doing a cool roll-up to win the first fall of the Tuesday match. I remember La Fiera bleeding a lot to set up his hair match out of nowhere with Sangre Chicana. Both guys seemingly washed at this point. I remember an ugly corkscrew splash from Jericho that I'll clip & probably post somewhere. This was not a fun week of TV to watch.
Tuesday airs a totally forgettable main event instead of that torneo selectivo for the Gran Alternativa that I'd have killed to see. Well, not killed. Sorry I have murder on the mind after sitting through that 20 minute main event. Just awful. We move over to Friday which is Homenaje Dos Leyendas... although it's not Homenaje Dos Leyendas yet. But this is a major CMLL show, don't let the lineup confuse you. Top two make it to TV. This is Jericho's reward for winning the torneo cibernetico two weeks ago. He & Dragon were farmiliar opponents so the match is good as you'd expect but it's also edited so you don't get the full idea of how much they did. Crowd is super hot for many nearfalls so I'll just assume in full it was a very good match! Jericho has one hilariously missed corkscrew splash off the top. Dragon ends up beating him clean with a sunset flip bomber. And you wonder why I fell in love with that move? Main event is the rushed hair vs hair match between two guys who are not beating the washed accusations in what we saw of the first two falls. Yikes. Third fall has them both bust out insane tope suicidas launching each into the crowd. It's heavily edited (rinse repeat) but even the editing can't save this one. Felt flat & very underwhelming for a major show. Really came off like CMLL needed an apuesta match & chose to reward two long serving employees. Something they'd continue to do for many many many years. Fiera gets shaved bald after Chicana surprises him with a power bomb. Chicana is soon gone from here without losing his hair back to anyone so swing & a miss by the booking team.
Two shows honoring Salvador Lutteroth with trophies handed out. They'd follow it up in 1996 with another torneo held on a Friday which was the first official Homenaje Una Leyendas event. If you are any sort of person who tape traded & collected CMLL TV - you had to have come across the Tuesday torneo. I refuse to believe you if you say you didn't. It became the filler for any episode of TV. Only highlights aired so it was a 10 minute or so video package they'd tack on for the next 6 months or so any time TV needed to hit 90 minutes or 2 hours & they needed to fill. I must have seen it on like 7-8 different TV episodes even as far as going into 1996. The first time was on TLN of course when I was just beginning to discover this lucha libre thing. I had no idea what I was watching. The ring was just full of all these people I was seeing for the first time ever in colorful outfits & I was in awe. One of my favorite matches as a kid was those WWF Survivor Series tag team matches where the apron would have like 10 guys standing waiting to tag in. It was the coolest thing. So this reminded me of that. It was pretty easy to quickly figure out this was an elimination match although it was only much later I'd figure out Wagner/Pierroth were on the same team but since there can only be one winner they had to square off at the end. I think this was the only time in Mexico Jericho & Vamp ever shared the ring as opponents. Vamp eliminated him. There were many power bomb finishes leading me to believe the refs had a cue - if you see a power bomb - it's a three count. Better than trying to memorize 15 finishes in the days before ear pieces! With my 2026 lucha eyes I can point out the oddities like Negro Casas being one of the first people eliminated & Mogur existing on this level. Surely he had to be a sub for someone. The trophy looked really cool. This is the kind of hook you on lucha libre match for sure, especially in rapid fire highlights. Moving to Friday we have a trios tournament. As usual it's a CMLL tournament so it stinks. Add in the fact we just got to see JIP matches so basically just the finishes until the final... a very unappealing episode of TV. There are a couple of just awful finishes too. The final ends up 2 out of 3 falls but goes two straight with Los Chacales winding up as the winners. It leads to an angle where El Brazo who played a big part in getting the Brazos to the final ends up upset his partners lost the match so he beats them both bloody. This sets up an upcoming rare three way hair match. Hotshot booking! I think this was meant to be a bigger deal than how it actually came off. Tournament wrestling has always been a staple of this promotion so I get it's part of the history but at some point it became clear it had become old to the live audience who seemed to get colder & colder to seeing the same guys coming out & wrestling multiple times on one show.
This was a just barely over one hour TV show that had the minis match from Tuesday, tercera from Friday, semi-main trios titles match from Friday & main event three-way hair match from Friday. What does that tell you? That's correct - lots of editing! But here's a twist you didn't see coming. They had time to replay the torneo & part of the trios tournament from the week before. How does something like this happen? Lucha TV is fascinating. Minis match is a two fall special as Mascarita Magica/Ultratumbita (called Espectrito numerous times on commentary) are feuding & heading to a mask match. I think this is one of two CMLL minis matches from 1995 that make tape. So if you thought 1996 was bad, it was only worse here & they don't even exist on video in 1994 I believe. Rough times to be a mini working here but the divide between CMLL/AAA minis was so fierce there was nowhere to go. We get to see a cool Ultimo Dragoncito asai moonsault & that's about it honestly. Ultratumbita blows the DQ finish somehow. Announcers speculate whether this is heading to a title or mask match. We move onto Friday where all we get are the closing moments of the tercera. This is the Infernales return to Arena Mexico as MS-1 just jumped back here. This is also the big moment where Garza finally beats Satanico - cleanly by submission! In all the 1995 CMLL I've watched so far this gets the biggest reaction of anything BY FAR. It's clear Garza should be the top guy here, Satanico has worked his magic. Afterwards we get a little brawling & Satanico is confronted with a hair match challenge but says why should he accept? Garza only beat him once while Satanico has many wins over him (by cheating). Good build to the upcoming hair match! Both guys played their role great. Next up is the trios titles match set up by Los Chacales winning the trios tournament last week. Skip forward to the finish since that's what TV did - Chacales win the titles! Nice little pop for the title switch. Rare rudos vs rudos match on a Friday for this time period. Even rarer is our three-way hair match main event between brothers. Coin flip decides the matches. Porky wins two in a row so he keeps his hair. He sticks around to watch the final match play out. It's 2 out of 3 falls so they split the first two of course. Brazo De Oro bleeds a bunch. It's heated but not super heated or anything. El Brazo ends up winning with a power bomb while his feet are on the ropes for leverage right in front of Porky who complains but the decision stands. We cut immediately to a bald Brazo De Oro as the head shaving wasn't deemed important enough to air over the repeated matches earlier. This all seemed so rushed. It's hard to explain the booking here. Maybe they wanted to do Garza vs Satanico here but decided to put it off & rushed a different hair match? I'm just throwing anything out there to explain things.
This is the kind of show where re-watching ends up paying off! I'll explain in a bit but I already sent Cubs a voice message & he beat me to the punch updating the DB. This is another one hour CMLL TV show that features a replay of the Salvador Lutteroth Torneo + trios tournament matches. Make it make sense. The Tuesday mask match is third fall only. Every tournament except the final is finish only. The hair match is finish only as well. Even if you didn't have the replays this would be an impossible show to fit in an hour of TV. The mask match is basically a couple big dives & then Ultratumbita submitting Magica. I was watching this very confused because for some reason I was sure Ultratumbita lost so I was waiting to see who the fake Espectrito gimmick was gonna be revealed to be. Instead it was the other way around & I remembered oh yeah he loses mask before he becomes Fire a few years later. The Gran Alternativa starts with a long (near 5 minute!) explanation of the rules. Easy fast forward material but I'm doing this re-watch to pay attention to the little details! It's noted how there won't be a battle royale because the teams were set via the Gran Alternativa league (I forgot to mention we got updated TV standings the week before which was the only mention of this league exisiting over the last few weeks). So 1A faces 2B, 2A vs 1B & so forth. Also the winners got to pick their own partners which is how a lot of these teams got put together so nice & tidy. It's also mentioned in passing if any match goes to a draw - there will be an immediate playoff between the rookies to see who advances. In theory that should have been a giveaway but I just presume they did these announcements in every tournament. Not much to say about the tournament matches for the most part because they were just finishes as I mentioned earlier. It must have been a bit of surprise to see Atlantis & Atlantico lose in the semi-final. I'd have presumed they were winning if I just looked at this lineup at the time. The second semi-main ends with a draw. First Bestia/Silver King get pinned at the same time, then Corazon/Shocker do a double pinfall. I had ZERO memory of this & I definitely watched this tournament at least a couple times in my life. So Vitorrino announces due to the rules we are now getting a Shocker vs Corazon Salvaje singles match which again is just the finish shown. Shocker submits Corazon clean so we... oh wait... right... this is CMLL so of course the referees fucked it up. Shocker/Silver King are mid-celebration as the refs signal Corazon Salvaje never gave up. LOL Bestia Salvaje is even standing in the ring confused. Shocker responds by grabbing Corazon, giving him a german suplex & finally after ALL THAT DRAMA we get the tecnicos advancing to the final. It's a really good final for such a short match! We get a sick tope suicida from Shocker, mask ripping & my favorite... Silver King/Shocker grab Astro Rey Jr, instruct the fans to move, then proceed to LAUNCH HIM about 5 rows deep. Not upside down. Like a lawn dart! Insane spot. All-time memorable highlight. They end up winning after beating Wagner & of couse Astro cannot return to the ring. Their trophies are extremely tiny compared to the one Jericho won a month ago. Budget must have been spent. Main event is the hair match that had been building for months & months. Really such a shame we couldn't see this one in full & never will. Crowd is molten as we join the action. This part is really timely because as I write this CMLL is experiencing a crisis of fans hitting the ring. Humberto Garza comes out of the crowd to cheer his son on. Clearly a planned spot. Except it seems nobody let the police know about this so within seconds they are all over poor Humberto & about to drag him off. Thankfully commisioner Ray Mendoza gets involved to alert them please unhand the wrestling legend & father of the kid we are about to give a big win to. LOL Garza submits Satanico with La Campana to a huge pop. Cementing him as the new young star of CMLL. Probably one of the most important moments of the year for CMLL.
Tuesday match is on my YouTube, looks like The Cubs Fan has not gotten around to adding it to the database yet. Do you realize if he wasn't keeping track it'd be impossible to find some of this stuff even if it was available? I specifically avoid using keywords that might draw the wrong kind of attention which makes the videos harder to find. Satanico is of course bald here. This match is of course JIP & edited to death. Gran Markus Jr. is not having any fun working with Vamp. The usual post-apuesta finish as Satanico is DQ'ed for choking Garza & refusing to let go. On Friday the folks from the Gran Alternativa got their big matches although over at Arena Coliseo as we were still doing the deal where Arena Mexico got rented out for other events throughout the year. Semi-main does not go 10 minutes for three falls, this isn't 2026. It was a very edited match as all CMLL TV was in this time. Atlantico was legit treated like a mini at times with Atlantis just carrying him around using him as a weapon haha. The Dandy/Felino work was good. So was Bestia Salvaje's stooging. Finish is all messed up as they do the star with the huracanrana in the middle & Felino's kickout isn't strong enough so the refs call the match for the tecnicos. The look of confusion on everyone's face was funny. Here's where I'd love to tell you what happened to Corazon Salvaje but I have no idea! I do remember back in like 1999/2000 when Rencor Latino started to become a big thing, I was convinced he was Corazon Salvaje in his rookie years. The physiques are very similar. Main event is good match. Topping out at good though. Felt like something was missing or just lost in the editing of course. The finish sees Silver King launch Shocker into a tope but Shocker comes down at a disgusting angle onto his own head. I don't really blame Wagner as it looked like Shocker was flying so he backed up but then Shocker's body just comes straight down before Wagner can react to make the catch. It happens. Stretcher ride followed. Emilio ended up pinning Silver King.
Tuesday main event is a rematch from the previous week. Only the third fall is shown. It was really good! Very hot crowd. Satanico ducking any interaction with Garza. Fiera hit a CRAZY tope over the top onto Markus! Finally Garza is able to get a hold of Satanico but the rudo manages to sneak out of La Campana which is actually smartly noted by the announcers! You assume here comes the foul but... NO! Garza manages to roll-up Satanico for the win! Huge pop! Even after losing his hair to him, Satanico keeps putting Garza over strong. I feel like there's a lesson to be learned here? What a legend. Switching over to Friday we have a monumental moment! You'll never guess so I'll just tell you. ARKANGEL DE LA MUERTE... is in his new gear! This is one of those comments that will only fascinate lucha hardcores who even remember his early days in that red & white outfit. He is still wearing it as of the week before this so I'm calling it - this match was the debut of the new modernized gear. It fits what he wears for the rest of his career except the arms get a bit modified. On the other side is our first look at La Sombra who looks nothing like the Sombra most people know (Andrade). But if you're a CMLL hardcore (which you are if you are reading this) you will recognize a big version of mini Sombrita who stuck around many years & was based on this version of the gimmick. He looks like a black & white cookie. So he appears & I already sense doom because this match ends with a mask yank DQ via Arkangel. La Sombra, we barely knew ya! Other than that the match was fine. Brazo De Oro & Mocho Cota worked well together. Shocker did a great tope suicida onto Astro Rey Jr. after a crazy high sallida. No complaints here. Main event is either the continuation of an angle we hadn't seen yet or is something completely out of nowhere as Apolo Dantes shows frustration with Rayo De Jalisco Jr. throughout the entire match before sweeping his legs out causing him to be piled on & pinned in the third fall. I guess I'll find out next week whether this was the official turn or not. I'm guessing no knowing how CMLL was booked in these times. But the match ends with Apolo running away straight to the locker room with an angry Rayo chasing. Good show! We finally found one in 1995!
For reasons I couldn't even begin to explain as there are no feuds going on or future apuesta matches coming out of it - the 2da from this show aired in highlight form of each fall. Including the crowd whistling in the first fall! Which the announcers actually noted! Why air a match that you're going to bury? LOL It did look like pretty sloppy work. The saving grace I guess you'd call it was the third fall finish which was actually either genius or a total mess depending how you choose to look at it. Solar II goes for the tapatia/surfboard on Escudero Rojo. As he has him up, one ref is checking the submission & Reyes Veloz dives in to cover Solar so the other ref starts counting the pinfall. The submission is clearly called before the three count hits just as Olimpico dives in to try and break it up. I don't think they meant for it to be this close of a call, they just lucked into it. Mass confusion follows with each ref claiming a different result & the wrestlers unclear as to who won. It's ruled a draw. I'm not sure this could be replicated ever again b/c it was the ideal everything comes together moment where each person did their part right & the mistiming of it all made it hit perfectly. I don't think I've seen this finish in CMLL since? The main event also airs on TV - another chapter in the Garza/Satanico rivalry. A betting man probably would have gone with Garza here, it would have made sense. But no. Satanico retains CLEAN! Really good match if you have patience & understand what Satanico is doing here. It's a very methodical match with most of the time spent on the mat struggling for holds. Satanico is making Garza work for everything which is cool to see. I believe the thought process here was to get Garza over with the more serious CMLL fans who didn't buy the pretty boy act like the women & kids did. So by struggling with Satanico & earning every hold - the design was for these hardcore fans to take him seriously as a real luchador. Satanico stretches him a lot & you can see him dead weight Garza a few times too just to see how he reacts. We don't have video footage but I presume this was the style in the 70's when Satanico started out & things were more mat based. Satanico submits Garza clean to retain but these two are not gonna be done with each otehr this year!
Top two aired here but with a full Tuesday match making the cut it was the Friday semi-main that felt the brunt of the timing issues. So we get a JIP highlight filled match which is more pushing the Sombra/Arkangel issue. Arkangel submits him clean to win this one. I want to say we're close to the mask match but here's a fun fact - we don't have the date of the mask match. Clips aired during an August TV show but I refuse to believe these guys spent 4+ months feuding to do a Tuesday semi-final mask match. I assume it happened in May & we're just missing the results. 5/16 & 5/30 would seem to fit. Main event is just as I suspected... kinda. Apolo Dantes is still a tecnico like I predicted. But he doesn't tease a rudo turn at all. In fact he's OVERLY happy with his partners & they win clean of course (it's a Kids Day show). After the match he does a quick interview saying he's happy to be a tecnico, his only issue last week was with Rayo De Jalisco Jr.. Join the club buddy! Take one guess as to who he's booked teaming with against next week? You got it. Match was good! People were working hard with a building full of kids cheering. Mid-show we got clips from an in-ring deal where they gave the kids gifts & posed for photos.
Almost missed this one! LuchaDB has nothing airing so went right by it & was up to the August shows before I realized I had this sitting in my YouTube upload queue. Maybe it ended up being a sign? Like I was being saved from wasting my time? The only thing that airs from Tuesday is the revancha from the previous week in clipped form. It goes better than last week, third fall seemed a bit exciting. Finish has Escudero Rojo submit Solar II but he won't let go & even starts ripping at his mask so the refs reverse the decision. Was there a secret undercard feud between Solar II & Escudero Rojo going on??? Moving onto Friday we get the top two which are total zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Semi-main event is NOTHING. Literally NOTHING. I can not think of a single thing to say about what happened other than Arkangel pinned La Sombra twice cleanly. Main event is more Apolo not getting along with Rayo although it really is Rayo who comes off like the dick. Not surprising. Art does tend to imitate real life. The finish here is Apolo stealing the win although... the tecnicos won. Shouldn't Rayo have been happy? He was just mad he didn't get the pin. What a glory hog. Another absolutely nothing going on match. Maybe I just won't ever upload it so everyone can be spared seeing any of this.
Do you know what 1995 CMLL TV doesn't have the time to do? Air two complete matches. Do you know what 1995 CMLL TV absolutely has the time to do? Air a 5 minute segment with music playing as we see highlights of the wrestlers giving presents to the moms for Mother's Day. That's sweet but poor time management. Especially in an era where as short as these shows are, we are now missing weeks so the timeline will jump around. The extra kick in the balls is the one full match that does air is just an extended angle as someone is turning rudo so you technically got zero full matches on this show. Very 2000 CMLL-ish. The Tuesday main event is just clips focusing on a budding rivalry between Ultimo Dragon & Bestia Salvaje. I think they messed up the finish where Bestia low blows Ultimo on the outside. The refs are supposed to see it but for some reason don't so a minute later they do the same thing & this time it's called. The main event is full of Apolo Dantes turning on his partners. It has a couple funny moments as he really plays it up since I'm sure weeks of this was getting repetitive for the live audience but I couldn't get overly into it. This is one thing I'm glad CMLL grew out of doing. These turns that would take foreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeever. I do not reccomend watching this episode of TV, you will gain nothing from it. A huge waste of time. I also very much take issue with the reported sellout.
Could have been the CMLL show of the year but instead became another clip show. We get 8 minutes or so of Ultimo Dragon vs Bestia Salvaje. It all looks really good but you can't judge completely without seeing the full thing. Dragon retains his title after rolling through into a cradle. Previously Bestia Salvaje had taken this fantastic sallida de bandera before catching a plancha. This was a rematch. The week before is listed as airing but I think Cubs has that wrong because nothing from the Friday show made TV & I couldn't find a link anywhere. He probably meant this match. We move to Friday where special guest star Great Sasuke is around! He's here to challenge Pantera for the CMLL Welterweight Title. I believe this had spun off from something over in Michinoku Pro, perhaps with Pantera working as Triton but CMLL couldn't actually acknowledge that. This was called the best Arena Mexico in a long time in the magazines & clips from it ended up playing in a Pantera video package later in the year that I'll probably eventually get around to explaining. All these cool dives. None of which we saw in these 6-7 minutes of highlights. The heat is off the charts as we skipped into the third fall. No doubt this was a ****+ MOTYC but impossible to tell with this version. Announcers are losing their minds on the nearfalls. Pantera eventually cradles Sasuke for the win as the crowd chants 'Mexico! Mexico! Mexico!' Probably a huge upset as I have to believe Sasuke was the favorite going in. This is the only result for Sasuke we have in this week so he was in & out just to do this match. So weird. Main event is the only match that airs in full which makes no sense since you could have accomplished the goal just airing 2 minutes of highlights. Apolo Dantes avoiding Rayo De Jalisco Jr. & then faking a low blow to win. That's it. But for some reason it deserved the bulk of the TV time over a MOTYC. Whatever. This run of 1995 CMLL has not lit my world on fire!
The dreadful run of TV continues! Tuesday trios match is just highlights as we've come to expect. Ciclon Ramirez/Chicago Express have ignited a feud & by ignited I mean started a feud that nobody really cares about. I've always wondered how Ciclon fell so fast & so hard. After the mask loss he just tailspins into a midcard role. Up until then he was well on his way to at least being a solid semi-main eventer. Feuding with Chicago Express here (+ eventually losing the apuesta match) is just crazy for someone who isn't too long off that hot feud with Felino in 1993 & semi-hot feud with Javier Cruz in 1994. Chicago pins him clean for the win. Friday semi-main is a decent match. I remember reading many notes on tape lists about it was the best CMLL trios match of the year (to air on TV). I don't agree but I understand why people were including it on 'Best Of' tapes at the time. There wasn't much to choose from CMLL-wise & the match ends with the rare triple countout after each tecnico hits their big dives (asai moonsault, running somersault plancha, corkscrew plancha) onto each rudo. Very spectacular stuff. The bigger news is during this match it's revealed Arena Mexico is *CHANGING THE START TIME OF FRIDAY SHOWS* to 8pm over the summer. It's just a test according to the announcers. This literally made my jaw drop. Honest to god if you had asked me if CMLL ever changed the start time for Friday shows I'd have said no. It's always been tradition. 8:30pm Friday. To this day I've always made note of how better it would be to start the shows at 8:00pm & give the undercard some time for their matches to breathe but CMLL would never do that due to tradition. I looked it up after hearing this & sure enough they are starting 8pm into July & then it's back to normal by August. This is definitely a historical part of CMLL that has been lost in time. Nobody has ever corrected me when I said the start time has never changed! Consider this one a blog exclusive. Main event sucked. A bunch of aimless brawling. Sangre Chicana looked like he was out on his feet the entire way. Brutal. The Rayo/Apolo feud is going strong so the rudos get DQ'ed when everyone teams up to beat the piss out of Rayo. I believe that deserves an award, not a DQ.
More Rayo/Apolo stuff in the main event. First half of the match is just a total beatdown. Big pop for Rayo's eventual comeback. Dos Caras had a funny bit where he submitted Wagner to the inverted Gory Special & chased Rafa El Maya as he was calling the submission. There's a very clear big edit in the third fall. Dantes ends up low blowing Rayo to steal the win. This feud is no fun because it's 50% Rayo. Apolo tries his best but this fat fuck is just dead weight. Lots of it.
Look at this... a week of CMLL results where all we have is what aired on TV! Sometimes people really don't understand how much lucha libre history is still missing. Imagine a 1995 Monday Night RAW taping where 80% of the results were unknown? 1985, sure. 1995? Never. Tuesday has clips of Chicago Express beating Ciclon Ramirez for his hair. The crowd got into Ciclon's tope & his nearfalls but nobody gave a fuck about Chicago. Poor guy. I honestly felt bad for him at how silent it was when he won with a power bomb. It's not listed here but later in the year they air some repeats which includes clips of the main event from this Tuesday show which has El Dandy/La Fiera/Atlantis over Pierroth Jr./Satanco/Emilio Charles Jr. when Dandy beats Satanico in straight falls. It's just a minute or two so nothing to really take away but noting this to show I am doing a good job piecing things together! Over on Friday we had the start of the Puerto Rico invasaion with a big show for 6/30 being advertised as having heavy foreign participation (all Mexico vs The World matches). Perez fit in good here. The other two not so much. So you get a lot of awkward moments where people are trying to figure each other out. I honestly don't mind it. Today a lot of the wrestling style is just going into your routine. You don't get the chaotic nature of how things used to be. Match ends with Perez fouling Vamp who over-sells it to a comical degree. Main event is the ever so rare #1 contender match! I don't know what prompted CMLL to do this. I guess they just wanted to do a Rayo/Apolo singles & need a stip that wasn't mask or hair yet. Silver King is actually out there with his giant title seconding Rayo. It's a Rayo singles match so......... yeah. But Apolo tries really hard and turns into something just about watchable until the messed up finish. The idea is Dantes is supposed to power bomb Rayo and put his feet on the ropes but he's too far away to do that. So Rayo kicks out. There's an awkward few seconds where you can see the wheels turning & Apolo's only thought is drag Rayo a bit closer to the ropes & go for the cover again. This time he gets the three. Very lame. But at least the right guy won which should set up a good one next week!
Nothing from Tuesday on the TV we have, straight into Friday's 8pm start still in effect! I can't help but notice a rare singles opener for a Friday night! But focusing on what aired we start with the semi-main & I guess a little Rob lore here. I've told the story on a podcast before (although I forget which) about how I discovered lucha libre. Short version is my dad was into soccer & would also put on whatever game they were airing on the one Spanish language channel we had here in Toronto. They were games from Italy (I think). I didn't care about soccer to be honest. So I'd wait till he was done watching his gae & then take over the TV. Well one week I came out when he was done & what was on my TV? Wrestling! But wrestling like I'd never seen before. There was a ring. A referee. A crowd. But it was people I'd never seen before doing a style I didn't understand at all. I was intrigued. And that was my first exposure to lucha libre. From that point on I'd do my best to try to catch the show each week & explore this new world. Now the question would be - do you remember what made was on that first time you discovered lucha libre? Not quite. I know it was Arena Mexico. I know it was Miguel Perez Jr. & Rayo De Jalisco Jr. involved. Clear as day I remember the graphics because I was trying to figure out who any of these people were (no internet yet). So was this the match? Maybe. Timeline certainly fits since I found lucha libre in the summer of 1995. But these same two meet up next week & maybe the week or two after so it could be either one. I don't recall seeing the main event of this show until much later but also who knows... my memory has faded over time. Rob lore section over. Match was alright. Atlantis had issues working with Foreign Exchange (you'd think I would remember this hideously colored outfit). Wagner was doing the bit where his mask came loose so every time he got hit it would go flying or he'd bite down to keep it on his head. Very entertaining stuff. Foreigners pick up their first win with Perez cleanly beating Dos Caras using a twisting splash and standing moonsault. Main event is for the gorgeous giant CMLL Heavyweight Title. Going through this year of CMLL gave this result away. There was zero chance Silver King was retaining. Who was his second? I couldn't place it. Didn't seem to be a wrestler. A boxer maybe? Match is very good for the same reason I noted on last week's show - these are two guys who are not just going into their routine. Lots of feeling out. Lots of stuff that doesn't look clean but looks vicious. Silver King absolutely smokes Dantes on both a power bomb to end the first fall & a backdrop driver in the second fall where Dantes knee'd himself in the face upon landing at an awkward angle. It's really fun to watch wrestling like this because it feels new. They split the first two falls of course. Dantes does a springboard plancha, getting great distance, which spills both into the 2nd row. There's some very good nearfalls (3rd fall is edited). They start focusing on this lady sitting in the front row who is VERY into the match & pro-Silver King. She gets pissed at a supposed slow count from Rafa El Maya. Soon after Dantes grabs Silver with his Northern Lights Suplex & we have our new CMLL Heavyweight Champion! Definitely a match to check out. I think originally way back when at some point I went ****1/2. May downgrade that slightly by a 1/4* or something but either way very high end for CMLL in 1995.
This show as a much publicized international event that CMLL was hosting in conjunction with IWA (Japan). They had formed a working agreement as you could see with the Puerto Ricans coming in last week. Only the top two air which means we don't get the full sense of how this show came off. Crowd seemed into what we saw. They created a special video intro for the show so I guess that's something. As usual the semi-main gets chopped up. So much so that we don't even see how Silver King got eliminated in the third fall, they just join in progress as Texao eliminates one of the Head Hunters leaving it down to a singles match. After a couple nearfalls they pull the classic switch-a-roo and the fresh Head Hunter lands a NASTY moonsault onto Texano for the win. He seemed to undershoot it causing all his body weight to crush poor Texano. Just brutal, especially in slo-mo. Match was a really fun watch but hard to grade with it being cut down so much. Love watching the Head Hunters move around as big men. Something also missing from today's pro wrestling where you don't really have big guys at all in the major companies & the ones running around the indies are just fat slobs who can't work. The way the crowd screams in terror as they are about to land on someone with any sort of move is something that I don't think you can replicate these days. Honestly it'd probably get someone over as a huge babyface if they did it today. Main event didn't have a YouTube link so of course I had to go dig it off one on my satellite TV tapes. All that work to dig up a Rayo De Jalisco Jr. match! It was much like the match the previous week. I was amused as them presenting Foreign Exchange as being from Jamaica. For some reason I thought it was Ricky Santana & had to look up myself to see it was Jose Estrada Jr. in one of his many gimmicks. Finish is kinda surprising but just a set up for later in the year as Miguel Perez Jr. cleanly pins Rayo after a twisting senton and standing moonsault. As I said the previous week - mabe this was the first lucha match I ever saw? It has to be one or the other since Rayo & Miguel don't get matched up again for a bit.
Oh these poor fans. All 11132 of them! How did Dave get such an exact number which we've never been able to do from the CMLL box office??? 15 matches! 15 matches where nothing probably went over 5 minutes! I'm not sure if they did the seeding battle royale or just the tumbler. I'd guess the latter because 15 matches alone is long enough of a show. I'm sure nobody got out of the building until after 11:30pm. Even though the matches are short you have to take into account they did entrances over and over again which adds a couple minutes to each match. The TV presentation actually shows every match if you can believe it or not but it's basically just the finish of every opening round match & quarterfinal match although, yes, they found time to insert intros. Can't skip the intros that go longer than some of the matches! I'm obviously not going to go match-by-match here. The order of matches is wrong anyways. It doesn't matter. Miguel upsets Rayo who came in with taped up ribs to cover for his early loss. Porky gets in 2 moves & his night ends in under 2 minutes it seemed. Vamiro busts out a top rope DDT on Leatherface??? WTF??? It's so weird how they didn't book it better to keep it Mexico vs The World the entire way so you end up with Perez vs one of the Head Hunters. In fact, the Head Hunter who would go onto win the entire thing after hitting a cool looking tiger driver on Vampiro. Even if everything aired in full I can guarantee you this would have been a giant waste of your time. They did have a very cool giant trophy for it that was presented by the army so at least the photo op must have looked great.
Do not trust THE CUBS FAN of LUCHA BLOG! This full show did NOT air! And here I was all excited for a Super Pinocho match. Matches 2, 4 & 5 make the cut. I think match 2 may have even been a TV filler match in later months instead of airing the week of these top 2. But the real big news is this is the first show with updated graphics that would stick around for a year or two. It's the CMLL graphics I grew up with which includes a new TV show intro where Chris Jericho is pictured & I used to pause the tape to try to see the names of every wrestler as I was still in the process of learning about this new world. In fact, back when I had a grand total of TWO VHS tapes with random lucha matches, one of them had this trios match with Sombra & the Solars vs Los Guerreros Del Futuro. So I remember this match clear as day. It was whatever. Probably most notable to me now as likely the first time I ever saw a dive train in a match! No single spectacular dive but it definitely stood out to me as something I had never seen in WWF/WCW before. I can also appreciate a match like this more these days. It was wrestled totally clean. The announcers explain that is the style of the Guerreros. They out-wrestle their opponents. And that's how they won (Cubs wrong again!), a power bomb by Futuro on Solar. Funny note from commentary: It's explained Solar I just returned to Arena Mexico after being for 3 years. Where was he? Well according to them he was in Germany teaching people how to do lucha libre properly. Do you get this joke? Do I have to explain it? I probably do. Solar jumped to AAA when it began & worked for Antonio Pena who was known in the media as 'El Fuhrer'. So this was a dig at that nickname. Pretty funny. But also confusing as fuck if you don't know that bit. Semi-main was a very standard trios match that I remember almost nothing from as I write this almost a day after watching it. The most I recall is Mocho Cota teasing a dive which I found to be absolutely hilarious. The announcers kept talking about Ultimo Dragon suffering a knee injury in Japan which ends up playing into the finish as Kahoz moves away from an asai moonsault. As Dragon rolls around in pain clutching his knee, Kahoz submits him... but he won't stop kicking Dragon's leg post-match so the refs reverse the decision & give it to the tecnicos by DQ. Another The Cubs Fan ERROR! Main event may actually have been the MOTN. The Head Hunters were in bump mode. One of them even takes a sky high backdrop! Holy shit! Vampiro was having a blast since they were making him look like a million bucks. But the real big news comes in the third fall... Vampiro takes out Pierroth with a pescado & Casas had been splashed to end the second fall so he was taken out. This leaves Mil Mascaras alone with the Head Hunters and they use the number advantage to tag team him and........ PIN HIM??? Yes! MIL MASCARAS CLEAN JOB ALERT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I had no memory of this. Not even some bullshit where they both piled onto him. One of the Head Hunters got the deciding pinfall alone. Wild! I think this is the last job of any kind Mil did at Arena Mexico. I won't read ahead to have it spoiled but the smart money is he gets the win back in a week or two, otherwise someone must have the dirt on him to get him to agree to this wiithout anything in exchange. Post-match we get an in-ring promo from the Head Hunters which also seems to be a change in how the TV show is presented.
As usual just top two air. I believe the semi-main is the official start to the Garza/Brazo "Hermoso" feud. Brazo won't let Garza into the ring to start things off & it only gets worse from there. Garza gets absolutely destroyed start-to-finish leaving him a bloody mess in the ring. Fanastic blade job from the kid here. Crowd was screaming at the rudos to stop beating him up. This is the pro wrestling I grew up on! The only negative is production never got the best shot possible. They'd get a good glimpse or two and then not get right in there. Rudos end up DQ'ed of course & they send out medics + the booker (Peonono, identifed as such!) to tend to Garza. As he's being taken away on the stretcher the rudos attack again. More classic pro wrestling! As I said, this is just the beginning. I know I'm about to see Garza/Brazo matched up for a few more weeks. Main event has Gran Markus Jr. sub in for an injured Head Hunter I. They actually do the announcement before he match where Vitorino (weeks away from dying?) explains this is a serious sport with serious consequences & Head Hunter I (in a neck brace) injured himself recently so he was not cleared to wrestle tonight. He hangs around at ringside for the entire match which kinda spoils how it's gonna end. Match itself is fine. Even one Head Hunter will do as II is bumping all over the place including a sick tumble off the top rope near the end. Dantes was gold taking a bunch of great bumps as well including flying into the fans in the front row after being dropkicked off the apron. At one point Markus runs away from an attempted dive & climbs onto some fans as well. You can see this one dude is none too happy about having this fat dude in tighty whities basically shoving his ass into his face. LOL There's a mini dive sequence in the third fall. Dos Caras/Head Hunter II then appear to be getting to a finish but the refs start waving their hands to stop them. They've DQ'ed the rudos because Head Hunter I started to get involved by stomping Atlantis & Vampiro at ringisde. I wonder if they jumped the gun there because both guys in the ring seemed very confused. Either way the same destination was imminent. Decent show.
HUGE NEWS!!! WE MADE IT!!! WE PERSERVERED!!! Yes, the era of 1 hour CMLL TV w/ only 2 edited matches is............... OVER!!! Sorta. These matches all ended up airing later in the year. I'm not really sure of the specifics. I think there was a 2 or 3 week period where Televisa didn't record CMLL shows in October but still had to fill the time slot so they pulled stuff taped months before. That's why so many listings ended up incorrect with us thinking certain hair matches & title matches happened later in the year when in reality it didn't fit at all. This is why. TV listings threw it all off. But here we are - a Tuesday Coliseo show where the opener, tercera & main event all air & not edited at all! It's glorious! This was also newly found footage by Roy Lucier via Mike Tenay. We start with the minis opener... *wipes away a tear*... I'm sorry it's just so beautiful even to write. This is what I live for! When they start wrestling there's basically nobody in the building. By the time they hit the finish there's a few more people & they are hot! Why? Because the match was good! Professional lucha libre done right. I put this match in my playlist for the Wrestling Playlists Christmas deal. Damiancito is fucking incredible start-to-finish here. Even Negro Casas puts him over huge. Oh BTW, Negro Casas is on commentary for this match for some reason? I really encourage you all to watch this instead of just relying on my terrible PBP. Second fall has a wild double dive where Dragoncito ends up landing on a bunch of fans. Don't tell me that wasn't intentional - the building was mostly empty & he found the one place where people were sitting! Finish is absolutely incredible with Cicloncito/Damiancito looking like the most flawless wrestlers in the world. I could watch that sequence all day. This was glorious. Next up we have a standard midcard trios which feels so refreshing for a time period we weren't seeing any of these matches. Garza/Rojo are either feuding or starting their feud here. We would get to see the conclusion of it too! And it's very memorable! But that's for another time. The announcers keep messing up & calling Reyes Veloz as being in this match. I can see mixing him up with his normal parter Escudero Rojo but Mogur? Really? In the third fall Olimpico comes up short on a tope suicida. Rojo is eliminated by Garza. A bit later Garza goes to eliminate Mogur as well but Rojo jumps back in to attack Garza so the DQ is called. Decent enough match. Garza looked the best out of the tecnicos which does not reflect well on those two tecnicos. Main event is a straight falls special for the tecnicos. No idea why. Rudos just dominated early, tecnicos fought back to win first fall & then dominated the second fall. La Fiera hit a huge tope over the top & then the Atlantida was slapped on Emilio. Crowd cheered. I got no problems with something like this! Bonus: The finish of the Americo Rocca/Reyes Veloz hair match exists on video but it's literally just the last 90 seconds or so, most of it with a half crab applied. Both guys are bloody. I think it came from the original airing of the TV show which then had the top two from Friday which I'll get to below. Veloz lost. A bad omen for his partner who is setting up a similar apuesta match.
Second part of this week's TV! We go from 2 edited matches to 7 out of 10 from Tuesday & Friday! The segunda starts off with one of those rare deals that kinda faded away over time. You'd usually see it pop up in Blue Panther or Virus matches in the 2010-2020 era before completely disappearing. El Hijo Del Solitario & Guerrero De La Muerte start the match... they wrestle... they continue to wrestle... they start doing nearfalls... about 7-8 minutes later Solitario power bombs GDLM... and pins him! The entire first fall was just them. It's a nice little twist because nobody is ever expecting that to happen so it always catches the fans off guard. Of course now Arena Mexico/Coliseo don't have educated fans, just tourists, so a finish like this would probably just generate a totally confused or wet fart reaction. I liked it. Even if Solitario was involved! The second fall is a bit more normal except for a weird moment where Ciclon Ramirez puts Chicago Express in the Reinera and seems to submit him. The refs never call it but Ciclon celebrates like he just eliminated Chicago. But the match rolls on and the rudos eventually take the fall. Third fall come down to Solitario & GDLM once again. They do some nearfalls before Solitario misses a flying senton & GDLM submits him to a nice reaction. A good match! This would be the kind of match that shows you why 2/3 falls can work if you just put a little thought into it. A nothing segunda turned into a match with twists, turns & intrigue. They had a match long story that paid off at the end. Stuff like this is what sucked me into lucha libre so I always love re-watching it. Next up is the official start of the Shocker/Kahoz feud which actually goes on for the rest of the year. Yes, a feud starting in July that doesn't finish until December! They don't make it too obvious but of course I know where it's going & thus I understood the finish where Kahoz beats Shocker. It also makes sense why he "injured" Ultimo Dragon a couple weeks ago. Getting him a little hot for this feud. Match was good! Pantera looked great, especially vs Arkangel. The sequence in the third fall leading to the two big dives was tremendous. It's so weird watching Javier Cruz as a clean shaven tecnico in 1995. He just seems so out of place. He's not long for this company either. Semi-main is one of those rare CMLL matches that is not a match at all - just an angle. After getting destroyed the previous week, Hector Garza is out for blood. Literally. He starts the match beating up El Brazo. He continues the match beating up El Brazo. On and on and on and on and on and on and on... you get it. The entire two fall match is just him beating the shit out of Brazo who gets in absolutely nothing & ends up laying in a pool of blood. Just a massacre. Garza is covered in Brazo's blood too. It's an awesome visual & more out of the box booking by CMLL. We've seen the rudos do stuff like this before but this is a rare time the tecnico is the one acting like an animal. Garza does a post-match interview explaining this was payback & he wants a hair match - which he will get next week. I'm not sure how Brazo accepted as he was just laying there dead but I'll take it! They end up stretchering him out. Another type of deal you will NEVER see in current Arena Mexico. Main event is where Mil Mascaras gets his win back from the Head Hunters after losing to them two weeks ago. I'd love to tell you how but sadly only the first fall is available on video. Something was up with my DVD so the second & third falls went missing & I couldn't find another copy. First fall was pretty good! But that's all I can comment on I guess. Good show! Good week of TV! We are finally turning the corner!
As the kids would say... we are eating well! I think. What I'm trying to say is - we are on a roll! For the first time in who knows how long - A FULL ARENA MEXICO FRIDAY NIGHT SHOW AIRS! I don't think it was on one week of TV, may have been split over two or matches from different airings later in the year? How it pieces together doesn't really matter. Just be happy. Not only did a full show air - a very good one aired! We start off with the minis! YAY! Just think - we could have accidentally stumbled onto a week where the opener was some shit with Alacran De Durango or the women. Instead we get the 1995 CMLL minis who were better than the 1995 New Japan juniors. That's right. I can say things like that here & get away with it. But seriously - these guys were putting on a fuckin awesome match until a freak injury. The first fall is full of fantastic work between the Cicloncito/Felinito & Dragoncito/Damiancito pairings. Rudos take the first. Tecnicos take the second after an extended sequence that leads to a double corner dive. As Dragoncito lands you can see him telling Felinito something & clutching his leg. The injury wasn't on the dive, it was seemingly on a random flip in the ring to setup the double dropkick to the floor where he seems to roll his ankle. He stays down between falls & they end up taking him away on a stretcher. Somehow they knew he was hurt without needing the ringside photographer to hold up the X! Imagine that! There seems to be a discussion about just ending the match but the commissioner (Ray Mendoza) indicates Cicloncito has to wrestle alone in the third fall. He does. He loses. Duh. But I'm still calling this a really good match! Next up is the contiuation of the Shocker/Kahoz feud but with a guest appearence! Not really a special guest as he was a regular at the time but he seemingly never made any TV. Trueno! It should generate a "who?" reaction. It's OK, I don't blame you. He really was a nobody except for one rumor that seemed to get way out of hand based on the way he wrestled. People actually thought he was Mil Mascaras' legit son. I think the magazines may have pushed this narrative too. He wasn't. I'm not sure Mil has any sons & if he did he certainly wouldn't want them wrestling & stealing his spotlight. But the way he wrestles in this match you can see why it was totally believable... especially when he does his plancha with the arms extended. The finish of this match is Shocker catching Kahoz outta nowhere & submitting him clean which gets a huge pop. Kahoz was still considered a sorta top guy on a depleted roster & Shocker was the newcomer coming out of the Gran Alternativa tournament. Very good booking! Next up would be a standard trios main event but with a loaded show got bumped down to a tercera tonight. The focus is on Rayo De Jalisco Jr. & Pierroth Jr. (w/ new silver gear!). Crowd seems pretty hot for them. Rayo ends up pinning him clean to win the match & makes belt motions. I guess the CMLL Light Heavyweight Title? Seems like a step down for Rayo but he may have known he wasn't getting that Heavyweight Title back any time soon. La Fiera does an awesome tope over the top near the finish. Semi-main is FANTASTIC! LOS HEAD HUNTERS IN PRIME FORM! Serously - what a great match this was. Holds up to 2026 standards, holds up to 1995 standards, you name it. Nuclear crowd heat. They cut to the original porra ruda who were a bunch of young guys - the type you never really saw at Arena Mexico these days - cheering on the Head Hunters multiple times during the match. I mean I can't blame them. The Head Hunters were doing such cool shit. It's wild the stamina they had as this match goes 20 minutes & they are taking backdrops + doing moonsaults in the final couple minutes. They got pigeon-holed as fat garbage workers but they really had some great matches in that couple years where they were at the top of their game. Like this one. I'd go ****1/2 easy. My only drawbacks were a flat first fall finish as I think Roberto Rangel mayhave jumped the gun counting a pinfall & the finish seemed rather light compared to the bombs that were being thrown leading up to it. But you could also rationalize that as the gas tank ran out on Dos Caras. Everything else in the match was just superb though. The crowd screaming any time the Head Hunters are about to squash one of their opponents will never get old to me. There's a great miscommunication spot in there somewhere too. Multiple dives including a somersault plancha by one of the HH's! OH THE HUMANITY! In a way it was sad because immediately afterwards it hit me how a team like this could not exist today. Even if they were just as athletic, sure their spots would get huge pops. But the way their opponents worked with them is what made matches work. These days they'd just be sucked right into doing the standard formula which doesn't even really allow for anyone who doesn't fit the mold. Take the big guys like Omos & Satnam Singh. They have to not sell & stay on their feet for most of the match for their gimmicks to work. Neither promotion has seemed to be able to make it work. They "can't work" is the reasoning. But really, they can... it's just wrestling has become so one-dimensional there is no accepting of a big man no-selling or doing unathletic things. That's not "the right way to do things" these days. It's really a shame because everything just becomes the same if people at any size decide they all have to work the exact same way. I've got into a rant. I should stop. Watching this match. It's fucking great! You know what else was great? You do! The main event! Garza gets handed some roses by a little girl pre-match. Brazo Hermoso comes out to some cheesy 80's love song so you know we're in for a good one! Action starts quick with Brazo bloodying Garza up including licking the blood off his fingers. Garza shows great fire on a comeback before missing a charge in the corner. Brazo stays in charge until Garza slams him down & puts on a Boston Crab for the submission to win the first fall. Second fall has a couple wild Garza dives. Brazo sells it like he hurt his knee on an asai moonsault. Garza is also selling his ankle after the corkscrew plancha. He legit slips on a corner move which could have been a disaster but it played perfectly into the story of his ankle being hurt. Crowd is red hot for every nearfall. Garza again slams down Brazo & locks on a Boston Crab... except this time he grabs both his arms & turns it into LA MECEDORA! FOR THE WIN! TWO STRAIGHT! Crazy loud pop & genuine shock from the fans but happy shock! Lots of crowd shots where people are celebrating. This is how you make a star! Brazo lays on the mat face-first just like the previous week where he was left bloody. Crowd throws money. Brazo hands a bill to Garza & they shake hands as Brazo has his head shaved. This was a very important feud win for Garza. He got to show a bit of a rudo side to erase the pretty boy image that would have stuck with him forever. He bloodied up Brazo last week & got the dominant win this week. The women were always gonna cheer him but this got the men to respect him going forward. Again... great booking. Wonderful show!
DOMINGO??? Yes, a Sunday match aired! There was a couple week period where for some reason CMLL had TV cameras at the Sunday shows. I'm not sure exactly why but I remember it being mentioned in the magazines. I know around this time they taped a show specifically for a Japanese commercial release. Not sure one has anything to do with the other, just mentioning it. From this show we get to see the main event which has a change. Vampiro is in the ring in street clothes saying he's unable to compete. Mano Negra is in his wrestling gear & the commission orders him to leave the ring so they can have a fair tag match. Being a rudo he naturally gets involved which leads to a weird moment where Vamp is just watching & shrugging his shoulders saying he can't get involved because of his injury. It came off very rudo-ish but it was just Vamp being Vamp. I'm sure this entire situation was Vamp being Vamp because for him not to be in gear but Mano Negra was... well... alarm bells went off in my head. So we get the tag match & it really isn't much. Two fall special. Although done weird as after some friendly fire the tecnicos pile on top of the Head Hunters for the pinfall but one of the HH's is on his stomach so the refs don't count the fall although it's Silver King that has to alert them. Then Silver King is elimianted. Rayo is about to eliminate the remaining Head Hunter but the one who got eliminated comes back in & we get a DQ. Second fall has the Head Hunters do another miscommunication spot which gets over huge because they really play it up. A bit later one of them low blows Silver King & that's that. An oddity of a match to air.
No full show this time around. Heck, no main event! Just the tercera & semi-main sneak through although I'm sure somewhere out there that main event exists. Shocker/Kahoz continue their deal here with Kahoz submitting Shocker clean in the third fall. Solitario had his shoulder taped up which may explain his poor performance here....... haha Just kidding. His poor performance is because he's shit, you see. So yeah this was a bunch of nothing except maybe a cool bump or two by Espectro. TV main is the debut of Ray Gonzalez from Puerto Rico. Do not ask me why but at one point the announcers compare him to Tito Santana? Over my head. I thought this match was actually pretty bad. Nothing going on. Gonzalez was beyond dull. I couldn't tell if Dandy wasn't enjoying working with him or just couldn't figure out what to do with him. After both Negro/Felino are eliminated, Dragon takes out Bestia with a gorgeous plancha leaving Dandy/Gonzalez. Gonzalez hits a weak powerslam & covers for the 1... 2... then he just gets up as if he's won. Roberto Rangel taps him on the shoulder like what the fuck are you doing? So Gonzalez gets back on Dandy & Rangel counts to 3 for real. So fucking bad. Two or three more weeks of this guy? Bleh. Skip this week of TV.
Two singles matches from this Tuesday make it to TV. The first one is a hair match that had been built up for about a month between Humberto Garza Jr. & Escudero Rojo. It sounds like a no-doubt result but Humberto was not exactly a prospect like Hector. I'm sure he got in thanks to that connection but he was definitely the Atlantico so-to-speak. It's a bit of a messy match on his end with veteran Rojo carrying the load. In the third fall Rojo does a wild tope near the ringpost that they somehow lucked into the perfect camera shot of. Then comes the big moment this match will be remembered for. I never had this match originally. I found it on a random tape in the Highspots office as I was going through organizing things (+ stealing for my own collection). I remember being in the process of dubbing this & just gasping loudly watching it play out. Garza gets knocked outside the ring & Rojo takes off for another tope... but this time somehow his arm catches the rope as he flies through & he ends up being twisted in mid-air which causes him to crash down hard onto the back of his head/shoulder at a gruesome angle. Everyone immediately panics & within seconds he's surrounded by refs/doctors/commisioners/photographers. It's a wild scene. Thankfully the match is immediately called off as you can hear the crowd cheer (for Garza winning) as the TV replays are going on. On the replay you can see Rojo is initially just stunned because he starts scratching his head of an itch before he seems to realize he's broken something. They take him away pretty quickly & the ring announcers apologizes to the fans saying he is receiving medical attention but if/when he's able to he will return to the ring to get his head shaved in front of you. TV goes to commercial & when we come back the head shaving is taking place. Yes, Rojo returned to the ring with his arm in a brace & got all his hair shaved. A trooper! Evidently he broke his collarbone & I remember the magazines saying seperated his shoulder as well. I'm not sure if the head shaving happened after a delay or if he came back out after the main event before heading off to the hospital. Either way that takes guts/pride/stupidity. No such memorable event in the main event. I say this with respect to both guys... the most boring regular match ever. LOL Both these guys perfectly capable trios wrestlers, both these guys just total bores on their own triyng to do a technical title match. The only thing of note is they did a rare angle where after the first fall El Brazo (who had been rudo after turning on his brothers back in March) came out to replace Olimpico as Brazo De Oro's second, cheering him on the entire way. These days that would be a red flag he's about to cost him the match. 1995 was a simpler time. He just provided the inspiration so Brazo De Oro could win the title from Markus with a somewhat messed up wheelbarrow into a small package. Crowd seemed happy at least.
And hey look at that the Brazos are already teaming by Friday! But that match doesn't make the cut for TV. Instead we get another chance to see the boring as fuck Ray Gonzalez. He's a bleeder! Sounds like a typical Puerto Rican wrestler. Dandy bled a ton too. They were the central focus once again & once again I couldn't have been less interested. Gonzalez provides zero color. Just kinda meanders around the ring & shows no emotion whether he's selling or on offense. He ends up beating Dandy of course because they are setting up a title match next week (ugh...). Crowd doesn't seem to care about any of this except for the blood. The other guys in the match were basically just background players. Garza had a cool moment to end the second fall but that's about it. Main event is the big return to Arena Mexico of El Hijo Del Santo so we get full entrances. He had finished up with AAA in July after Triplemania & kinda became enemy of the state after deciding to come back to Arena Mexico. It's a weird return match because Negro Casas is nowhere in sight & you'd imagine he would be the guy waiting to welcome Santo? Instead we have this ragtag trio of rudos including the evil foreigner Foreign Exchange teaming with two Mexicans with no issue. Odd. Even the match felt odd. Crowd was into it but it wasn't at the level of anything extra special you'd imagine with Santo returning after more than 3 years. Of course he goes over with the camel clutch on Satanico as Atlantis sloppily pins Foreign Exchange. This didn't do anything for me but maybe it was just a match to do the return & next week things will kick into high gear?
This is split over two TV episodes but I'm gonna tackle it all at once since we don't have full results anyways. Another Sunday match makes it onto TV, this trios being the final step towards the Sombra/Arkangel mask match the following week. We have it occurring on a Tuesday but it doesn't make sense they'd set up the match on a Sunday in front of the live audience & come back with it on the Tuesday so I'm thinking the right date is 8/27, not 8/29. You can always tell the Sunday shows because the canvas is different. Sometimes they don't even have a ring skirt up so you get the old school view of what's under the ring. Like I said, this trios is building up Sombra/Arkangel so they are the focus. We get a nice Ciclon Ramirez tope suicida on Guerrero De La Muerte right before the finish which is Sombra accidentally low blowing Arkangel as they do a leapfrog spot which leads to the DQ. The extended post-match is where the challenge is made & accepted through the ring announcers. Also an old school touch! The wrestlers never grab the mic, it's just the announcer explaining what they are yelling at each other. Don't tell Omar or I could certainly see that becoming a thing in current CMLL! We move onto Tuesday which just has the semi-main air. The Brazos/Ola Negra listing is actually a Friday match. The Silver King/Felino exchanges are just wonderful. They are both just so much faster than anyone else at the time & intense in everything they do. Mocho Cota was pretty entertaining in everything he did & the crowd was very into him. There was a moment where he sold taking a punch so great the crowd was just laughingly loudly at him & again it made me think that's what is missing from lucha these days. Nobody wants to be the foil. For a spot or two maybe. But Mocho was the foil for this entire match. It didn't hurt him, by the end I'm sure the crowd really respected his work. Those applause were for everyone. I don't know how this can be taught again to young wrestlers. I really don't. I never thought being the rudo would be an outdated concept but here we are in 2026. La Fiera ends up pinning Kahoz with a hurcanrana to counter a power bomb. Good match! Now we head to Friday where the Brazos are back as a team for the first time since they split back in March. Matching Dallas Cowboys knock-off jerseys! Repeat what I said about Mocho with Wagner in this one. Him ducking Porky in the first fall is great rudo work. And of course once Porky gets a hold of him Wagner sells his ass off. They split the first two falls. Third fall is all Brazos in control. They hit a couple dives including what I believe is the first time Porky attempted his corkscrew off the apron like he's Hector Garza! haha Same finish as previous match with Oro going over his rival Markus. Good match! Semi-main is Lizmark returning to CMLL for the first time since the AAA split. He wasn't even originally booked - he's a sub for Vampiro who is still out injured. Lizmark was actually not one of the original guys who left for AAA but it didn't take him long to head over. Money is money. That's why he jumped back now. Attendance was slowly ticking up in Arena Mexico & it was more steady work than AAA. He'd find his way back to AAA in 2003 for similar reasons & bail after a year or so to finish his career with CMLL. Match was fine. Standard stuff. I figured it'd be more focused on Rayo/Dantes but it was really just mostly a tecnico showcase ending with the Atlantida on Satanico. As you can see Santo worked the Tuesday Coliseo show instead of this one so I wonder if he had a pre-arranged date that conflicted. Everything is kinda built around him going forward after this so this week just comes off as an oops I double booked myself deal. Main event is thankfully the final time I'll have to deal with Ray Gonzalez. HE DOES NOTHING. HE LITERALLY DOES NOTHING. I could never get into Puerto Rican wrestling so maybe it's a me thing. But he just seems so slow in everything he does & always has the I'd rather be anywhere else but here look on his face. This match had no blood, they worked it technical style. Whatever that means when 50% of the people in the match don't seem to have any technical abilities. The finish only makes it even worse as they fall to the floor while trapped in a figure-four leglock, neither guy wants to let go & so Rafa El Maya counts them both out. The crowd is very confused at first & then boos. I'm just thankful this didn't set up a rematch. I guess Gonzalez couldn't lose? Whatever. Maybe it set up a rematch in Puerto Rico which is fine because I'll never have to see it. I like that part.
This definitely needs some housekeeping. By the time you read this I will have sent my corrections to Cubs so you may not even be able to find this in the DB any longer. What we have here is three shows combined into one. The mask match happens on 8/27. The hair match & following trios are from 6/13. The only match listed that actually happened on this 8/29 show is the main event. It's pushed as both Lizmark (back from AAA) & the Infernales (MS-1 back from ???) returning to Arena Coliseo after many years away. The prototypical solid with only moments of spectacular CMLL match you'd watch back in the day & take for granted, especially compared to what AAA was doing at this time. But watching it with 2026 eyes it really stands out as being a lost look at a style long gone by. Right from the start you see the little things we took for granted like two of the Infernales trapping Garza in their corner to beat him up while the tecnicos do the same on the other side. The two teams agree to a ceasefire & trade of hostages so to speak but the rudos of course - BEING RUDOS - just attack the tecnicos to go on the offense. There isn't much of a comeback in the second fall, they just seamlessly flow into the tecnicos on offense building to a fantastic triple finish. They really took this all away from us just so 90% of the CMLL roster today can end their matches with a flying splash & one pinfall. So sad. There's a lot of great stooging by the Infernales, especially Pirata Morgan. Dandy slaps the shit out of each one of them as the crowd cheers in approval. We get a hot finishing run complete with Dandy tope suicida, Garza incredible tope over the top rope & then kinda lame finish where Satanico fouls Lizmark for no apparenty reason but that's Satanico's deal. It was part of his gimmick. The entire feud with Garza was built around him having no hestiance to just punt you in the balls when he feels he's in danger. Really good match in the ***3/4 - **** range.
There are no video links up so I guess I'll be the only one to ever watch part of this one-time only CMLL Copa Jr. *TAG TEAM* tournament. I put it up on my channel a few months before I'm writing this. Hopefully my channel still exists in a few years so if a random person finds this blog they can follow my words to watch certain videos but you never know with the internet. I use the word "part" because all that I have from a satellite TV tape is the last QF match, semis & final. It's a very interesting tournament. They were using nostalgia to draw because you had the available Sr's all ringside watching on like Tinieblas, Blue Demon, Ray Mendoza, Karloff Lagarde & others. I imagine it was a bitch of a tournament to book because you had to know ego would play a part. Nobody wants to fail in front of their dad. So we pick it up in the last QF which has Santo/Rayo going over the Ola Blanca members. Decent enough match. Rayo busts out a pescado! Holy shit! His fat ass actually made it over the ropes! Next up in our first SF we have Apolo & Emilio dispatching of Demon & Tinieblas. Good stuff for a CMLL tournament length match. The next SF is the big one. Santo is back in Arena Mexico opposite Negro Casas. LET'S - FUCKIN - GO! Crowd is molten for them starting the match off of course. They do some nice mat wrestling & speed things up a bit before going to a stand-off. In 2026 they shake hands & the crowd chants 'esto es lucha' like robots. In 1996? Negro doesn't want no fucking stand-off. He tears into Santo, beats him down & tears at his mask. He kicks Santo to the floor & his team is DQ'ed for excessive violence. Match is over before it had basically even started! This is actually great booking. You immediately re-ignite the Santo/Casas issue with the Anniversary approaching (spoiler: they are doing a singles match!) & it gives reason for Negro to be on the rudo side in coming weeks. He just wants to get at Santo. Very much the reasoning Santo would adopt a year+ later when he does his infamous rudo turn but only at Arena Mexico & only to get at Negro. Solitario even joins in on the fun stomping Santo down. It seemed like he was running his own angle since he was an undercard tecnico here. He was largely ignored. Thankfully. Apolo & Emilio hit the ring to immediately start the final which is another reason the booking was good. It gave Santo an out in losing. The tecnicos didn't get destroyed, they actually fought back. Apolo takes a great sallida de bandera bump. Santo does his tope atomico onto Charles. But in the end the rudos come out on top over the weakened tecnicos. Apolo/Emilio win the nice looking trophies which continues Apolo's hot year. Main event is the return to action of Vampiro teaming with the returning Corazon De Leon & Atlantis against the Bomba Boricua trio who cut a pre-match promo. Love the fashion choices. Do you ever think Vamp wonders what would have happened if he had been nicer to Jericho during their short time together in CMLL? Knowing Vamp he was probably a POS to him, Jericho basically confirms it later in life. I'm sure Vamp was very jealous the girls were into someone else. But if he had just been cool, surely Jericho uses his immense pull at AEW to get Vamp in doing something or other. I mean fuck, he used his pull to bring in Juventud Guerrera for a terrible one-off. No doubt Vamp would have gotten at least that. Could we have seen Vamp vs Luther one more time??? This is a deep pull for any late era WCWSN viewers. Oh yeah, the match. It was pretty heated, lots of women screaming as the tecnicos get beat up. Puerto Ricans take fall one. Tecnicos take fall two although Jericho & Boricua were having big time communication issues on whatever the finish was meant to be. Third fall is a clean win for the rudos after hitting a Doomsday Device on Atlantis. Puerto Ricans going over strong in September? Where could this be heading??? Decent show overall. I'd suggeset checking out the tag tournament for sure.
No point doing the Coliseo show alone since there's only one match & no other available results for now. It's noted on commentary that is the semi-main event & the main event features the reuniting of La Ola Azul (Atlantis/Lizmark/Blue Demon Jr). Decent enough match. Porky is pretty funny early on. Garza has a rough patch with Markus who just shuts him down leading into the rudo beatdown. Finish comes out of nowhere as if they just had enough of being out there so they sloppy do two corner submissions so Garza/Markus could have the middle of the ring to themselves & Markus drops Garza onto the ropes crotching him & earning a DQ loss for the rudos (which goes against the recorded result). Moving over to Friday with an attendance listed as 7500! Announcers indicate at least 10,000. In his book Jericho said 8000. I dunno what to tell you, I don't even work here. It sounded very loud during the main event, that's all I'll say. Four matches airing from a Friday is pretty good & it's great news for us this week! This segunda is very good! Very long first fall with Magica/Karloff & then Pantera/Mocho working the mat. They did more matwork combined than most CMLL matches last these days. Slightly confusing moment where Pantera seems to eliminate Karloff. The refs certainly call it that way. But neither Pantera nor Karloff seems to be aware. As Niebla/Cota move on with the match it appears the refs let both sides know Karloff is out. Mistake or planned... who knows... but they rolled with it just fine. Only a nerd like me would notice. Cota eliminates Niebla & finally Arkangel eliminates Magica to win the fall. Another thing you won't see in current lucha - eliminations during falls! Second fall has some really nice exchanges. Match is moving along superbly........ until it isn't. LOL It's just a couple seconds but it's a very messy couple seconds. They do a great little sequence to end the fall. Rudos friendly fire, Pantera gets flipped into a moonsault bodyblock, Magica takes out Cota with a dive, all that's left is for Niebla to do his diving backwards tope on Arkangel. Except Niebla slips climbing the ropes. He catches his balance enough to stay up there but Pantera decides to improvise & grabs Arkangel... except at the same time Niebla gets his footing & leaps backwards only to clumsily knock Pantera over as Arkangel stands there bewildered. Pantera no-sells it & both he & Arkangel no-sell Niebla telling him to get the fuck out of the way & they finish up with a perfectly executed torito. A CALAMITY OF ERRORS! Crowd laughed out loud watching it play out. But listen - 7 seconds does not ruin a match. The third fall is very good. We get a big dive sequence which is perfectly done & then Mocho Cota puts Pantera away using his awesome Sinoalense submission. Crowd gives the match a nice ovation, as do I! ****. I should note Dr. Alfonso Morales was absolutely certain Shocker was in this match. The other announces tell him it's actually Mr. Niebla & Shocker switched out of this match. That must be the case as I presume Morales was just reading off the lineup sheet in front of him. Shocker ends up in the next match opposite Kahoz which makes more sense. Another good match! And another match that begins with an extended matwork segment with Dandy & Shu El Guerrero. I had it timed at 11 minutes before they made the first tag. Can you even imagine something like that in CMLL today? They'd be yelling from the back so loud we'd be able to hear it on the stream. Never mind the fact the crowd would be whistling like crazy. But it's very good stuff. You can tell Dandy was relishing working with Shu at Arena Mexico finally. They were basically married to each other for the entire match. Teams split the first two falls. Felino hits a plancha on Garza, Dandy takes Shu out with an over the top rope tope & then Shocker manages to submit Kahoz to a big pop. ***3/4. We're on a roll! But it doesn't continue. The semi-main is a two fall special & pretty short with the Puerto Ricans beating the Mexicans. Finish is Perez power bombing Silver King. A two fall humiliation for a Mexican in September? You're asking for trouble Silver King! Before the main event starts Vittorino wraps up the intro by just casually mentioning next Friday's show is taking place at the normal day & time. It will be called 'Noche Mexicana'. This served two purposes - letting everyone know the Anniversary is NOT next week & that the show isn't being moved to 9/16 as one would expect. This kinda tells you how important magazines & posters were back in the day. If you didn't hear that announcement you'd be relying on those mediums to let you know the show isn't moving day or time. The crowd is molten for any Santo/Casas interaction which begins right as the intros finish with Santo dropkicking Negro off the apron. Negro sells it huge like his jaw is broken. Attaboy! Jericho & Satanico have a rough sequence but they just keep going & fight through the messiness to end well. That's how to do it! If you don't acknowledge it, neither will the people. First fall goes to tecnicos after an INCREDIBLE Santo tope suicida knocking Negro into the seats, a Jericho asai moonsault on Satanico & Ultimo pinning Emilio. Would have been cool if he did his asai moonsault in the ring to follow Jericho! Oh well. Second fall has the rudos in control so Santo takes quite the beating. His mask gets ripped up a bit. Negro stomps the shit out of him. Eventually the refs decide this is way too much & the rudos aren't listening to their demands to stop so they raise Santo's hand ending things in two straight via DQ. Crowd is really into this so they're unhappy the fun has come to an end. Santo sells the beating big & just lays on the mat until the rudos are long gone & we see him still down as the show fades to black. Good stuff. Watch everything here but the semi-main!
I'm doubling up on these shows because according to the listings it aired weird. The Coliseo matches aired with the Friday 3ra. There's a TV sign-off after that match. Then the Friday top two seem to be on their own show or a different feed? Who knows. The Rayo/Silver King vs Head Hunters match is from last month so we'll have to get that erased from here. TV opener is a quick two fall ?squash? by the Brazos. Mexico never really did squashes but this is as close as you'd get. Rudos ambush the Brazos, Brazos fight back & in less than 12 minutes total take both falls having dominated all the action. Big pop for Porky's plancha onto all 3 rudos to end things. Next up is the start of Jericho's final run here. He came back to do one last tour & give back to the promotion that booked him when nobody else would. Say what you will about the guy, this is the kind of thing that shows someone's real character. In recent times (2026) I knew a situation where a current AEW wrestler had the chance to do a real solid for a small time promoter who had been nothing but good to them for years and years before this person made it big. Even when it was the world against this person, this promoter stood up for him & helped him in not only financial ways but also personally. So when all he asked was one favor, not even a freebie, it really made me angry to hear the answer was a no. Karma is a bitch though. He'll run into this same promoter on his way back down. Anyways back to the match... it's classic Vamp nonsense. They all know this match is to set up Jericho vs Dantes for the CMLL Heavyweight Title so of course the first thing Vamp does is try to pick a fight with Dantes & make belt motions. He even tries to "lil bro" Jericho at various points in the match. I'm sure Vamp will tell you he has no regrets in his career but deep down inside he knows one of them is being nicer to Jericho around this time. Jericho re-payed everyone who helped him out. Hell, even Juvy got a Dynamite guest spot once! Vamp absolutely would have gotten a shot to either wrestle or do some behind the scenes role at Jericho's request had he not been a total piece of shit to him in Mexico. Or shot on his good friend in WCW I guess. Match is fine. La Fiera/Mano Negra do that awesome double bump off the turbuckles to the floor spot that Fiera invented & became a staple of his big matches. It looked really good here. Totally believable double countout finish for an apuesta match back in the day. Really good finishing sequence between Jericho & Dantes ending with the champ being rolled up. Title match next week! I remember that match! TV Main is that weird Arena Mexico 3ra. Scorpio Jr has returned from AAA. MS-1 has returned from ? And we still have way too many Puerto Ricans around. This show was called 'Noche Mexicana' so the Mexicans are in sombrereos which the rudos tear off before the match. Quite honestly this was probably my first time ever seeing this match because these are not combinations of people I'd go out of my way to sit down & watch. To me it was a total nothing match. The result is wrong, Boricua pins Pierroth to win with a powerslam off the midlde turnbuckle. Pierroth was bloodied up & had his mask ripped. It's one of these insta-feuds as these guys are in a mask match in two weeks to headline one of the Anniversary Shows. Pretty lazy booking. Semi-main is focused on a feud we knew had begun & they were stretching out still so way more thought into that one than the insta-mask match before this. Match is pretty good. Garza/Wagner have an awesome little sequence ending with Wagner sliding backwards into the ringpost to foul himself. Pretty funny. Fishman is also back here from AAA, lots of jumping going on around this time. By this point Fishman had been around forever so he was already kinda washed & really didn't fit in especially when he had to try to work with young Hector Garza. Finish is Perez scoring the big win outta nowhere after a snap powerslam on Silver King. He cuts a very strong intense post-match promo. These guys are having a hair match to headline the first Anniversary Show next week. Main event is a revancha from the previous week. It's also Chris Jericho's final Arena Mexico match until the now infamous Mistico debacle in 2024! The focus is of course on Santo & Negro but not in the sense they stay attached the entire way through. We get to see all the combinations interacting which was cool. I liked watching Jericho & Satanico working together. Emilio was great. There was a bit where Santo was beating on Negro & Emilio was on the ropesin his corner complaining so Dragon comes over to dropkick him sending Emilio crashing to the floor. Classic rudo bit! Finish is listed as a DQ here but it's actually a clean win for the tecnicos with Jericho/Dragon going over together as Negro is beating the shit out of Santo just out of camera range on the apron. Crowd is of course really hot for this. They are also heading to a singles match but that's still two weeks away. ***3/4 main.
One match show (for TV at least) but a great one! It's that time again - RobViper lore! Most people first came upon Chris Jericho in WCW. Others before in ECW or SMW. Me? I first discovered Chris Jericho here. Having no idea he was Chris Jericho. He was just Corazon De Leon. Later he popped up in my PWI magazines & I put it together oh this was the guy from that Mexican wrestling TV show I recorded. This match was on one of my two lucha libre TV tapes so I have vivid memories of it. This was a match that made sense to me having been more familiar with singles matches than the trios matches I was being exposed to. Also, it was for a title. I understand what that means. This is an important match. Later I would find out the full story. This was Jericho's last stand in CMLL. Losing on his way out. Not only losing on his way out, giving 110% on his way out! Admirable. This is a really great match. Commentary discusses Apolo Dantes' career earl y on which actually made me give pause. They mention he missed two full years before returning to CMLL. So I had to go look it up of course. It clicked in my head that yes, he disappears but it wasn't for two years. It was just over a year. I assume he had a major injury but who knows. Either way it really puts his career in perspective. He's always been a major CMLL star top guy to me because he was around the time I started watching. But really his career starts in 89, pauses in 93, continues in 94, ends in 2007-ish. That's like a 17-18 year career. Totally goes against the norm of a standard luchador who starts way too young, might disappear occasionally but is always around later in their life & goes until their body gives up. Apolo got into promoting/training (Dantes Wrestling Factory) & kinda disappeared out of public sight at an age a lot of luchadors would be getting ready for their prime years. It's so fascinating. I'd love to hear an interview with him on the Arte De Gotch podcast. He was also Gigante Silva's handler in Mexico so you know he has some cool stories! Speaks some English too, I think. You know what else he can do? Have a great match! Jericho takes the first fall with a nasty looking Tiger Driver. They had some exchanges that would be viewed today as "sloppy" or "on different pages" but I dunno... I just have no issue seeing stuff like that any longer. Today's wrestling is so pre-planned & it never feels like there's any improvisation going on in the ring so seeing two guys struggling for position or recovering after running into each other just clicks with me in a way where instead I'd use to mark it down as a negative to a match. Obviously you don't want guys falling all over each other the entire way but these are two pros who fought through it & blended it into what they were doing. Apolo takes the second fall with a huge superplex. Third fall is full of awesome nearfalls & spots. Jericho does his dive from the second rope inside the ring to the floor. There is an INSANE spot where Dantes suplexes Jericho from inside the ring to the floor & Jericho takes the full 360 (+!) bump onto his face. Legit you gotta see this. Crowd screamed, announcers screamed. Dantes follows with a tope where his ribs seemed to hit the arm rest of a vacated chair ringside. They do a cool german suplex reversal spot ending with both men falling to the floor. Someone bring that back! Jericho gets a huge nearfall on a crucifix before Dantes puts him away with a gorgeous Northern Lights Suplex. Crowd is thrilled with the match. As was I. I remembered it being great, it held up & more. Let's go ****1/2. Not bad for a Tuesday night at Arena Coliseo! We will miss you Chris!
The Anniversary Show is upon us! Up until recently a one match Anniversary Show! The main event was readily available. It's part of RobViper Lore - it aired here in Canada on the same episode as Jericho/Dantes so I got to see back-to-back singles matches. The other two matches that aired were only recently dug up by who else but Roy Lucier? Those matches end with a sign-off after the semi-main & note we are switching over to AAA in Monterrey which was another new show we didn't even know was a TV taping but I'll cover that a different time in a different place. So the first match to air from this show is the continuation of the mass jumps happening around this time. Every week it seems like someone new from AAA is appearing on these Arena Mexico shows. This time it's the Dinamitas minus Cien Caras. They never mention where these people came from which is always strange because the same announcers are the ones plugging the AAA TV show directly to follow. The match is focused on Santo/Negro of course and HOLY SHIT do they lay into each other. This is a pretty violent match by today's standards without the overuse of blood or stupid garbage spots. Just laying in the stomps, connecting with punches... it's incredible stuff. They play off each other so well. Negro isn't afraid to dish it out & Santo is more than happy to return the favor. The finish is a DQ where Santo just won't stop stomping Negro's face in. Crowd is electric for all this. Who wouldn't be? Negro bleeds hardway. Santo has his mask torn up a bit. It's clear these guys are heading to a singles match next week without any mic challenges needing to be made. Great shit here. Next up is not as great shit but another match being set up for the following week. Pierroth Jr cuts a passionate pro-Mexico promo from just outside the curtain before heading to the ring. He's soon a bloody mess through his mask. Crowd is hot for everything here but after watching Santo/Negro do their thing, it was hard for me to get into the kind of brawling happening in this one. Boricua goes over on Pierroth of course & then issues the official challenge for a mask match. It's not a great promo. Broken English & Spanish somehow. But we're set. You can probably guess who won that without knowing but the next result will more than confirm it. The main event was a weird one for me. Like I said with Jericho/Dantes, I remembered it being great & it help up that way. I remembered this match the same way but it absolutely did NOT hold up. I thought it was fine but just hitting that fine bar. I couldn't even get invested in it. Just felt so disjointed & without any direction. The brawling wasn't top notch & the in-ring work was borderline sloppy. I think my biggest pet peeve was the finish which just seems to come out of nowhere & is a poorly executed huracanrana to counter a power bomb. So poorly executed that I'm almost inclined to believe that wasn't the planned finish & Silver King just lost track of the count. This theory fits with the way he was acting post-match all upset & trying to signal there was a two count. It was clearly a three. The people were not having any of these complaints either. This could just all be imagining things too. I expected these two to have a much better match, especially with the rose colored glasses from it being the first apuesta match I ever saw. I wish I could remember what I was thinking watching Silver King get his head shaved, a foreign concept to what I had been exposed to in my small world of wrestling up until that point. So with Puerto Rico winning this battle, it should be more than obvious how next week's match is going to play out.
Unofficial Anniversary Show Part 2! So big that they even skipped airing anything from Tuesday to get four matches from here in. Sorry to all you Ringo Mendoza fans, he did not make the cut. The segunda actually has Apolo Dantes in for Emilio Charles Jr which kinda makes me wonder about the plans for the next couple weeks being able to see into the future. This match storyline is the Puerto Rican rudos not getting along with their Mexican partner. The strange thing is he does nothing wrong except win the match for his team! Apolo was the Heavyweight Champion & in the middle of a top level push so he kinda had to be kept strong unless a title match was being set up. So he just goes over here. In response his teammates beat the shit out of him. In the recap it's noted the Dinamitas (MA2K/U2K) tease a save but leave him to get beat. We see none of that on TV. I presume the intros for the next match bled into the post-match angle live. The next match has no issue with between the Puerto Rican & the Mexicans. Maybe the Puerto Rican & the Canadian though. At one point Perez does his handspring moonsault & CRUSHES Vampiro's face. It was glorious. I re-watched it like 5 times. Vamp immediately rolls outside & is with the doctor for a bit. I assumed he was gonna quit on the match but he got back in there to take the finish which was him losing clean to a Perez power bomb. Admirable! Wonder if it was a receipt for something though because usually Perez does the move in one fluid motion. This time he stopped as if he was purposely thinking how can I land this on the prick. LOL MA2K actually took a couple decent bumps in this one. Working his ass off after being allowed back in Arena Mexico! Semi-main is the big one for people like us... Santo vs Casas! I remember seeing this match on TLN. Vividly. It's not as long of a match as I remembered it being. They go just under 15 for all 2 or 3 falls. 2 or 3? I'm not sure. They start slow with matwork, gradully increasing to the violence we saw in previous weeks. Santo rams Casas' head into the ringpost so we get some blood. Looks hard way. Casas takes fall one with a scorpion deathlock. Santo goes on the offense like he did the previous week in fall two. The ref tries to pull him off but gets an elbow in the face. It's totally accidental but should be a DQ. The announcers call it as such. Roberto Rangel comes out & the commisioner comes to ringside as the KO'ed ref is tended to. Rangel takes over as Santo keeps beating on Casas. About two minutes later Casas is on the apron & Santo gives him the sunset flip power bomb to the floor (birth of the RobViper Special!). I go 5/10. They were a little off timing wise, I'm sure Santo was trying to hit the 10/10 he used to do with Psicosis in AAA. Rangel immediately calls for a DQ saying you can't do that move. They stick a TV mic in his face & he explains the moveis too dangerous so it was an excessive violence DQ. Casas sells it huge. Santo sells confusement over why he was DQ'ed. Crowd is super hot b/c Santo keeps trying to attack Casas as they are putting him on the stretcher. Good angle & way to prolong this rivalry with Santo ducking out for a couple weeks (in storyline he got suspended for his actions here). This was definitely the first I had seen the sunset flip bomb to the floor. 1-2-3 Kid did it on a RAW once but we didn't get that here at the time. My first ever ECW tape had Sabu doing it to Mikey Whipwreck & that's where I actually fell in love with the spot because it looked so gruesome to take. Main event is the mask match that was set up over the last two weeks. This is the crowd's main event. Heavy pro-Mexico support for Pierroth. I kinda miss this. I wish the foreigners who came into Arena Mexico these days got more than just "culero" chants. I want the loud pro-Mexico chants like here & whistling when the foreigners go on offense, even if it's cool offense. Huge pop for Pierroth winning the first fall with a small package. Boricua ties it up. There isn't much to say about the work in the match - Pierroth is average & Boricua is just no good. Pierroth ends up winning to a huge pop. Boricua has some random woman with him who disputes the finish but eventually they give in. He unmasks as David/Fidel Sierra. He looks exactly like you'd expect a wrestler to look like in those days. Best part of the match was Pierroth's pre-match promo.
Combining these two shows since they aired on one TV episode & there are no full Tuesday results. Opens with a really nicely worked trios match featuring a crew of regulars here who haven't had much TV time recently. Pantera looked great. Mocho Cota looked great! I said this earlier at some point but definitely a guy who I completely blew off for so many years & here he is basing like a boss for Pantera + taking wild bumps to the floor. It's a cosmetic business & Mocho Cota is so the opposite of whatever is cosmetically appealing it's easy to brush him off but if you look for all the little things that make a great wrestler... he has them all. Except 10 fingers. *cough* They split the first two falls. Third fall has some near submissions before they transition into a dive train. A perfectly executed one. No standing around waiting forever, no pointing where you want people to stand, guys just going one after the other hitting their targets perfectly. It ends with a wild Pantera moonsault plancha that sends fans running away to protect themselves. Everyone is brawling on the outside, only Pantera manages to slide in at the last second giving the win to the tecnicos. Easy ***3/4 match, maybe even **** if you wanna be extra nice. Main event of the Tuesday show ignites a Dandy/Mano Negra issue. Or continues one. Nothing from the previous Tuesday aired so hard to know. Work is good but it's focused on those two right from the start. I liked the third fall which was basically the other guys clearing the way for their partners to stay in the ring & settle things mano a mano. You don't see that much these days since CMLL is all about making people focus on just one thing at a time so they don't want multiple guys holding each other back on the outside while two are in the ring doing whatever. They just want the outside guys down on the floor not moving. Just one of those things where the magic has been lost. Both Dandy & Negra end up bleeding. Negra ends up low blowing Dandy very obviously in front of the ref for the DQ. Moving over to Arena Mexico we have a team of tecnicos that are called the new generation of CMLL! Well, 2 out of 3 ain't bad I guess? Double dose of Mocho Cota on this TV! Vitorino actually announces the rudos as Los Chacales but it's just 2 of the 3 members of that group. Fuckin Mocho Cota takes a simple armdrag from Garza, slides out of the ring & rams himself head first into the seats. FOR NO REASON! You gotta love it! Crowd popped so I guess that's a good enough reason! There are tiny moments where you see Garza/Bestia getting into it but nothing that sticks out as an issue starting. They'll be in a hair match before the end of the year so I guess that starts being built up soon enough. Not much else to say here... it's just a solid match of newbies vs vets ending with the kids taking it after a gorgeous moonsault bodyblock from Garza. Well worked. Semi-main is a weird one. The first fall goes like 15 minutes & has both teams in control for various points. The rudos end up taking it. Second fall is also a bit-back-and-forth. Felino takes a crazy ass bump being hiptossed over the top to the floor. Lizmark takes Satanico out with a tope suicida. I presume Negro Casas was into UFC at this point because the finish is very un-lucha & more in line with "this is how it would be if wrestling was real!!!" He gets Vamp's back & just starts choking him out. The refs didn't seem to mind although it's clearly a choke. Vamp fights & fights including ramming Casas into the buckles but nothing he does breaks the hold. Finally Casas switches into a grounded Dragon Sleeper & Vamp passes out giving the rudos the win in two very long straight falls. I thought Casas was great here throughout playing a rudo afraid to lock up with Vamp, eating his kicks & then the finishing sequence. Main event is even weirder than the previous match! It's rudos vs rudos but really Mexico vs Puerto Rico & Puerto Rican's adopted friends. Emilio Charles Jr comes into the match with bruised ribs & it ends up being the turning point in the match when Perez does a twisting senton off the second turnbuckles which crushes Emilio's midsection. He rolls to the floor "injured" so the refs & doctor go after him. That's when VAMPIRO hits the ring! Not even in his gear! He goes right after Perez & sends him packing. Perez runs away while the commissioner tries to stop Vamp saying he isn't part of this match. Somewhere in all this Perez pins Dantes with a sit-out power bomb. Vamp is taken away so the match goes on 3-on-2 since Charles had long since left to get medical attention. The Mexican side looks screwed until out of nowhere Dantes rolls up Perez with a small package for the shock win! We're all even. Dantes gets all bloodied up in the third fall. Out of nowhere Emilio is back! All fired up! He starts attacking everyone in sight. Crowd is very hot for this. It's very not normal to see any of this in CMLL! The rudos manage to take control again with Emilio still selling his injured ribs. Dantes is eventually surrounded inside the ring & is the victim of a vicious 3-on-1 assault. The refs keep issuing warnings but they are ignored so finally the DQ is called in favor of team Dantes. Anniversary Shows may be over but the apuesta matches are not! Dantes/Perez clearly heading to one, next week, in fact! Thought this was all done very well. When you don't over-do the chaos it really stands out when you do a totally normal pro wrestling bit like the tecnico returning from the dressing room injured or another tecnico running out to try to help even up the sides seeing his buddies at a disadvantage. Easily the best match of the show.
No Tuesday Coliseo matches so we'll never know how the El Dandy/Mano Negra feud played out! It's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. We get four full matches from this Friday show even though the listings here indicate otherwise. The segunda is the first time the announcers openly acknowledge the Shocker/Kahoz feud. They had interacted a few times by now but it was just in the course of their matches. This is where it becomes clear this is an actual direction. The announcers even give context that the two had gotten into fights at the gym where they work out together. They were threatened with suspensions so they took their problems into the ring. Who needs a 30 minute promo segment when the announcers can just explain stuff that easily? Humberto Garza uses one of these awesome long lost lucha submissions to win the first fall where he basically has Felino suspended in mid-air giving up. The match comes to an abrupt finish in the second fall when Kahoz blatantly low blows Shocker. Alfonso Morales' call of this is absolutely incredible. HE'S INCREDULOUS! WHAT FOUL??? lol The tercera is JIP with highlights of the second fall finish. Only copy I could find was my own so it'll have to do. Third fall is pretty good. Standard stuff with these teams. Can't say I was a big fan of the finish where El Dandy goes for a figure four leglock only to get rolled up & pinned by MA2K. Captain on captain so we're done here. But it was clear even before the replays were shown that Dandy only had one shoulder down. The replay only hammered home that fact. The tecnicos complained but the refs were having none of it. I suspect that was the intended finish & not a screw up. Semi-main has the Head Hunters back here. They're wearing their tag team titles. It must be pointed out because I have no idea how they managed to make those belts fit around their waists! Rudos take the first fall. I love how any move by the large Head Hunters is an automatic believable finish. One simple elbowdrop & that's it for the tecnicos. They tie things up rather quickly. The finish has Head Hunter I (or II?) missing a moonsault. Atlantis then give him a flying cross body, Lizmark a flying dropkick & finally Canek another flying cross body. The tecnicos pile on top for the win as Alfonso Morales yells about how that's illegal. Main event is the rubber match between Mexico & Puerto Rico. Perez beat Silver King. Pierroth beat Boricua. There must be a winner to establish which country is better! Apolo attacks right away but it's Miguel who scores the first fall in pretty dominant fashion. He bloodies up Apolo good in the second fall but hurts his knee taking a spinning backbreaker. Dantes ties it up with a Northern Lights Suplex. Third fall is incredible. Tons of nearfalls. Both guys working super hard. Perez tries a sneaky low blow like he did previously but Dantes is one step ahead, blocks it, clotheslines Perez outside & follows with a great springboard plancha. Huge superplex gets a two count. Announcers recall a Dandy/Javier Cruz hair match ending that way with both guys knocked out. Perez gets hiptossed to the outside, amazing bump, Dantes follows with a pescado but Perez moves & Apolo crashes FACE FIRST! What a bump! They do a fantastic countout tease where bloody Apolo barely makes it back inside before the 20. Apolo boosts Perez onto the top rope for a moonsault bodyblock for another great nearfall. Perez looks like he's setting up a dive but just does a pescado onto his feet. Perhaps he chickened out, perhaps he saw the cup of beer flying towards him at the last second. Yes, the crowd was very hot! Many more excellent nearfalls. The only negative is the crowd was so hot the producer kept cutting to crowd shots of fans reacting & coming back to the action already in progress. It almost cut off the finish! Perez goes for a power bomb, Dantes rolls over into a sunset flip but Perez sits down for 1.5, Apolo hooks his arms to take him over... crowd shot... back to the ring... 3! Let's assume there was a 1 & 2 as well! Crowd erupts for the Mexican victory! You know you done good when the people are not only on their feet but also rushing the ring to celebrate. It's a real feel good moment as you get lots of crowd shots of older people who have clearly been attending these shows for a long time very happy not only that Mexico won but that they got a great match as well. Without needing to chant esto es lucha! Somehow they just knew - ESTO ES LUCHA! Perez is unhappy at first but eventually calms down enough to get his head shaved like a sporting gentleman. Dantes continues his wonderful year. ****1/2? More? It's no less than that, that's for sure. Well done gentleman! Definitely check this match out if you've never seen it.
You're probably thinking wait a minute Rob... weren't we just in mid-October? How are we now on the second week of November? Well, I call it the Tony Ricco era of CMLL TV. Who is Tony Ricco? Not really a clue. I just know he was a wrestler from Portugal who CMLL brought in with some hype, set to debut on 10/20. He lasts three weeks & is never brought back or heard from again. In that timespan CMLL TV completely disappeared. No tape collectors seemed to record anything, nothing has ever popped up via any other means aside from the semi-main of the 11/3 show which is the exact semi-main from this show above, often causing the two matches to be confused. The one available on YouTube is the 11/10 match. A random channel had the 11/3 match up at one point, I discovered it accidentally looking for the 11/10 match. You can tell it's the 11/3 match b/c it has a fuck finish which leads to the revancha this week. What airs from this show is that semi-main event + the tercera so the Japanese women stopping in gets no TV coverage. I searched around a bit for what was happening in October 1996 that would have caused any pre-emptions & nothing really stood out. It's a mystery. AAA TV seemed to be airing just fine. It's possible CMLL went through one of their phases where they felt TV was hurting live attendance or perhaps they found out what AAA was being paid & demanded the same? I'm just spitballing ideas. This is the time period where some older shows in the can ended up on TV which I've already recapped since July/August stuff was being shown in these few weeks. A lucha mystery! Maybe when I'm long gone someone will solve it, feel free to leave a comment as you know my #1 priority when I'm done with all this will be checking comments in my blog. The tercera is the heating up of the Shocker/Kahoz issue. It's not much of a match beyond that & the icing on the cake is a shitty finish where I'm almost positive Kahoz yanked Shocker's mask off by accident right when the third fall begins. It was right in front of Rafa El Maya though so he had no choice but to call the DQ. It came off very poorly like everyone was undecided should we actually go with this or do some more stuff. Texano clearly wants the match just to continue like normal. They do some random brawling for a couple minutes before Kahoz blatantly low blows Shocker for a more emphatic DQ. Disappointing. A far cry from the next match. This was actually billed as CMLL vs PROMELL as by this point Fuerza Guerrera was part of that group, as was Blue Panther. Explaining the entire PROMELL deal & how it eventually turned into Promo Azteca is very complicated so I'm not gonna go into it here. In early 1995 Fuerza tried to get this "inter-promotional" deal over in AAA. It never took off. So here he was trying to get it work in CMLL but again it fizzled. What didn't fizzle was this match. Another one I included on my VHS comp set of awesome lucha matches you've never seen before. If you know anything about these six you definitely perk up when you see a match like this announced & they certainly went for it! Even a near accident in the first fall couldn't derail them. Garza gets backdropped onto the apron... totally normal spot... but somehow gets hung up going over & twists himself into the most awkward ankle imaginable as he plummets to the floor. The rudos take over from that point. Garza gets checked on but he's fine. They didn't let it derail the match, they just went with it. From then on it's pure gold. Some of the best lucha you'll ever see in front of a hot crowd. Black Panther was treating this like his breakout match which it really was. El Dandy looked like 80's Dandy all over again. Me summarizing the moves they did, the cool sequences, the finish... it's just words. You need to watch the video. Tecnicos go over to avenge last week's beatdown. ****1/2, maybe even more, I wouldn't fight you. A near perfect match. This should be on any playlist of best CMLL matches of the 90's.
Not much to the one Tuesday match. Not even sure it's from this Tuesday but for now we'll stick it here. It's a two fall special with Casas getting DQ'ed for fouling Vamp. Decently worked but nothing really stood out aside from the end of the first fall where Vamp tries to get at Negro who just shuts him down by playing a statue & then daring Vamp to hit him. The fall was already over so it would only have made Vamp look like an asshole if he did. Negro knows all the tricks. More weird TV choices when it comes to the Friday show. For completely unknown reasons we get an opener! A singles opener! With the women! Triple rarity! But to make it even more wacky it features Yuki Lee. Who? Fuck if I know. Basic research has her as some Korean girl who ended up training in Japan & was sent to Mexico as the young girl for the women in the second match. So she got a match or two. She's not really heard of at all afterwards, not even in Japan. She's out of the business within a year or two according to one website. Kind of incredible with that short of a career she ended up in a CMLL TV match. It's a one fall match with a 10 minute time limit which is exactly what a lucha relampago/lightning match is but this used to be common in CMLL although only the real hardcores remember. Way back in the day 1 fall 15 minute time limit was the norm for undercard stuff. Midcard matches at 20 & top stuff would have no time limit. As 2/3 falls became more prevalent the time limit for singles matches went away but into the mid 90's you'd still see these random singles pop up on various shows, all with a 10 minute time limit. These two women end up going to a 10 minute time limit draw is the only reason I explain any of this to you, mysterious person reading my blog. A totally normal finish for these kind of matches because the idea used to be 10 minutes is way too little time to get a decisive winner. Today 10 minutes is enough for 3 falls. So it goes. Again the established Japanese women get skipped over. There's a Japanese commercial tape out there covering this tour where you get footage from the Sunday show which features a tournament for the TWF Title if you're interested. From a satellite TV tape we get Block A of the tournament to crown a new NWA Welterweight Champion. All participants are in the ring as Felino gives a speech about the importance of the championship. We get the blocks for both weeks! Pre-planning! It's a CMLL one night tournament so you know how this goes. Every match is JIP except for the final. They're all very short matches anyways. The guy who gets his shit in is inevitably the one who gets eliminated. So I won't go match-by-match but it was fun seeing Rey Bucanero & Astro Rey Jr doing their thing trying to impress in a rare important Friday spot. Onita Jr did not look good at all. The best match was of course the final where Santo/Felino have a solid ***3/4 condensed match. Santo goes over & he'll meet whoever comes out of that 11/24 block (spoiler: YOU SHOULD KNOW WHO WINS THAT BLOCK!). Only other match from this taping to air is the semi-main which isn't much of a match at all. It's a rudo dismantling of the tecnicos as Garza is all bloodied up (this is not a repeat) & Shocker is humiliated by Kahoz. I liked the spot where Satanico beats on La Fiera outside the ring, trapping his leg between the chairs so he can't re-enter to help the tecnicos who are at a disadvantage. Fiera sells this great & even has fans trying to help him get loose but any time it looks like it's working he shows he's in pain so they stop helping. Genius! Rudos win in two straight & we have our direction for the year end shows. Or so CMLL thinks until disaster strikes but that's a story for a future week. Second straight week with no main event airing so no idea what's going on in the big matches! Would have loved to see Dos Caras/Dr. Wagner Jr work together again.
Tuesday portion of this show is a pretty non-descript trios match that is assuredly not the actual main event of the show. I'd guess semi-main unless something else was going on here but we lack the results to know for sure. Hell, it could also not even be from this week but no idea where it would fit otherwise. Solitario has his shoulder taped up so I'm sure that's a clue as to time frame but I'm not about to do a deep dive on Hijo Del Solitario matches to figure it out. We'll just hope my new magazines come through! Gladiador wins the match beating Demon clean which was kinda surprising. I don't know if Demon is around here much longer. Well, I know he isn't. He's in AAA by 1996. But I wonder if this is his actual last appearence as he lost in such a way that it would certainly make me re-think myself if I was the son of a legend. But I'd also have enough self-awareness to understand I suck & clearly Demon didn't. Moving to Friday with an asterisk! A pretty big one! That segunda is actually probably the opener from a previous show. Maybe part of the July/August canned footage. I'm unsure of the exact date but I am 1000% sure it's not here. How can I be so sure? Well, Metalico lost his mask on the same show where they held the TWF Title tournament which was confirmed to be the previous Sunday. He is masked in this match. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure it out. But it's listed here so we'll include it here. He teams with Ultimatum. If you aren't aware this is future Pentagon Black (Metalico) & future Electro Shock (Ultimatum) who are destined for AAA. Los Malditos are working without masks. Sometimes they'd have full masks, sometimes half masks, sometimes unmasked. For two preliminary guys they were very protected. I guess the perks of being CMLL-lifers. They would make a habbit of winning these prelim matches in straight falls which is exactly what they do here. The tecnicos don't even get in much offense. I wouldn't call it a total squash since those don't exist in lucha libre but it was as close as you'll get. Even the announcers seemed surprised. I was proud of Mestizo who even got a tope suicida in before the finish! Role reversal! Enjoyable for what it was. Only other thing from this show that airs is the main event so we don't see Negro Casas winning the right to face Santo next week. Main event is easily the best match of the show. Even Canek had his working boots on. The Dinamitas are wearing their alternate blue & gold gear which I always find strange to see. Garza is spectacular in everything he does & gets rewarded by the end of the match. It comes down to him & Wagner. Wagner gets in the usual tecnico nearfalls spots but Garza keeps escaping. Wagner then gets knocked down, fights off Garza's La Campana but Garza turns him over, bridges over him, crosses the arms & gets the three count! Big pop from the crowd! Wagner's mask was loose for all this so it was a nice tease that maybe we were getting an accidental DQ or something along those lines. A very professional ***1/2-***3/4 main event. No complaints. The finish actually worked out great for the company. I'm gonna jump the gun to explain why I say that. The semi-main we don't see here sets up Shocker vs Kahoz in a mask vs mask match. The match they had been building up since late August. They also dropped some seeds for Garza vs Bestia Salvaje but there is no Bestia on this show. What ends up happening next week is Shocker comes down with strep throat preventing him from having the mask match. CMLL panics & needs an apuesta match replacement so they enlist Garza to have an on-the-spot triangle match with Bestia Salvaje & his old rival Satanico. That entire situation is strange enough but imagine if they had set up something for Garza here by having him lose to Wagner or get DQ'ed in some way. It certainly would have made things more difficult the following Friday.
So there's a lot going on here. Let's start with the easy one - the trios with Fantasma/Rayo/Dos Caras does actually air. I just couldn't find it online & my disc has gone missing. I know where I can order it from so I'll get to that since I am a completionist but I'll add my comments on that match when I track it down. In the meantime we have a collection of matches that aired & of course some unknown matches since we don't have full results. The tag match was supposed to be for the Mexican National Tag Team Titles held by Fuerza & his son. His son agreed to jump, then backed out. Probably a case where dad was telling his kid what to do & the kid rebelled. So that put CMLL in a tough spot since they advertised the title match & in theory the commission controls the National Titles. So the match was billed for the titles although no belts were present. This turns into a murky situation since as you can see Panther/Fuerza win but AAA still has the actual belts. About 6 weeks later they do a match in Arena Neza for the same belts where Psicosis & Juventud Guerrera "win" the vacant belts. I forget how it gets resolved but somehow it does & the belts remain in AAA until they eventually become obsolete many years later when AAA creates their own AAA Tag Team Titles & CMLL has yet to bring back the National Tag ones since they have about 4 sets of their own tag belts. This is a pretty solid tag match with Dandy bleeding from the nose early after being stiffed by someone. The rudos appear to have taken the first fall, they even go to commercial afterwards. But when they return we find out the refs DQ'ed the rudos for refusing to stop beating up the tecnicos after winning. Panther has his mask ripped up in the second fall (weird for a title match, no?). He gets suplexed to the floor taking a gnarly bump on the side of the apron, Fiera follows with an over the top tope suicida. Fuerza is eliminated first, Panther follows via the Dandina. New champs! In two falls! Or so they say but not in reality. Good stuff. Semi-main is the finals of the NWA Welterweight Title tournament. I have watched this match maybe 3 times in my life? This would have been the fourth I guess. It was only on this re-watch that I took notice of how they worked this match like a title match from the 60's. Self-imposed. They weren't ordered to & at no point do I recall this ever being a mandate. They do all 3 falls without touching the ropes. NOT ONCE. It's absolutely brilliant stuff. They work such a normal match that you wouldn't even notice. Like I said, I didn't the first few times! The announcers mention it a time or two. They don't work spots designed to emphasize what they are doing nor does it play into anything in the match. They just do it to do it & it's so fucking impressive. You just find ways to take your normal rolling bumps without hitting the ropes & position yourself to do moves where you end up in the middle of the ring instead of near a corner. Genius wrestling really. The entire match had an old school motif as right from the intros Vitorrino announces Negro first & then Santo at "79 kilos... which means 1 less than his opponent!" OH MY! I assume this was normal practice before the days of lucha libre being on TV. The match is of course very mat based & you see the first two falls end with submissions straight out of the black & white days. Exact photos you'd see in magazines. Third fall has Santo struggling to submit Santo from hold to hold without ever letting go. Just as it's been explained title matches used to go back in the day. Santo eventually succumbs to Negro's scorpion deathlock for the quasi-upset. Fantastic match. Santo shows sportsmanship & congratulates Negro but then in front of the TV cameras challenges him to a mask vs hair match. After a commercial Negro grabs the house mic to turn down Santo's challenge by saying "maybe one day... but first try to beat me". Amazing. He also completely blows off the hot chick at ringside (the 1995 'Queen of Lucha Libre') which is both funny & an open statement about Negro Casas himself haha. ****3/4? I wouldn't mind going the full ***** if we're being honest. It's one of their best & most different singles matches ever. Main event is the substitute apuesta match as I explained in last week's TV write-up. We join midst Satanico vs Bestia Salvaje. It appears Garza won the coin toss to exclude himself from the first part of the match. Satanico beats Bestia clean which means Bestia is for sure coming back to risk his hair. Garza enters to take on Satanico next, an old 1995 rivalry thought to have been settled. Satanico is up to his old tricks that frustrated Garza for months! After a very oops you were in my way rope running spot, Rafa El Maya is looking away for a moment which allows Satanico to fake a low blow. The crowd is screaming... legit SCREAMING at the top of their lungs that there was no foul but Maya isn't hearing any of it or Garza's pleas... he awards the fall to Satanico by DQ meaning Garza has to stick around to fight Bestia Salvaje for his hair. Actually a great finish there conisdering what's coming up. Garza & Bestia tear into each other & soon both are bleeding. Garza hits a trifecta of dives including his beautiful corkscrew plancha & a hanging in mid-air asai moonsault where he comes down with both knees smashing into Bestia very hard. The doctor (not a real doctor!) checks on Bestia who seems to indicate his hand has gone numb. Not good. But this is 1995, not 2026 where Lluvia quits a match because she got poked in the eye. Bestia continues on, hits a tope suicida, keeps fighting for his survival. They weirdly mess up something near the finish where you can tell Garza had no idea what Bestia wanted him to do. Maybe 30-40 seconds later Garza puts Bestia in La Campana & that's it! Crowd erupts as Garza scores another hair victory to cap off his tremendous run in 1995. Bestia shows good sportsmanship post-match by shaking Garza's hand & giving him the hair that had been cut off. It's too bad they were rushed into doing this because I feel a couple more weeks of build & just these guys for 3 full falls would have been electric on 12/15 (as was scheduled). But this was good too, I'm not complaining. Overall a very good year-ender although the year rolls on - this was scheduled to be the big end of year spectacular.
The unclear fashion really gets me. I love when CMLL gets one up on poor Cubs. I think he would appreciate what they did here. This is a wonderful only in CMLL - ***11 team, 22 person*** tournament. I don't know what kind of a brain comes up with something like that. It must be a soccer thing. Has to be. There's a graphic used to show how this works & it's just absurd but whatever. Basically, I presume through an unseen battle royale, teams were formed at random (there's a mix of rudo/rudo, tecnico/rudo teams here). Somehow the first four bracketed teams end up moving directly to the semi-final round. That's why it doesn't fit into Cubs trying to work out how a normal single elimination tournament works with all these extra teams. You probably don't even understand it because text doesn't help, load the video & see for yourself - it'd honestly be fascinating if it wasn't so absurd for a stupid one night pointless tournament. The bracketing is the only highlight of this mess. We just see a bunch of finishes, some of them very poorly done. The crowd seemed bored by just about everything they are seeing. Brazo De Oro & El Hijo Del Gladiador win whatever this was. WEIRD!
Top 3 end up on TV here as we gear up for Arena Coliseo season. Shocker starts the show doing an interview explaining his absence (strep throat) & how he was bed ridden for a week. He says he wasn't running away scared like Kahoz claimed & he still wants the mask match. That takes us right into the tercera where Shocker & Kahoz go at right from the start. Crowd is heated for it so maybe the delayed even helped make this feel like a bigger issue than just midcard feud. Teams trade the first two falls. In the third fall El Dandy gets backdropped by Scorpio into a power bomb from Shu which is actually a pretty sick spot even by today's standards. Silver King pins Scorpio Jr with a crucifix at the same time for the double eliminations. Silver King then takes Shu out with his patened Silver King dive. Shocker/Kahoz start brawling in the ring, take it out of the ring, then refuse to get back in the ring. The refs claim they have no choice & count them both out (weren't Silver King/Scorpio Jr still active participants?). I didn't mind the finish even with that hole poking. The mask match is set for next week. That is actually the end of the orginal verison of TV we had here. There's a sign-off & everything. The top two matches come from a Roy Lucier upload of a tape he got from Mike Tenay. Semi-main has Vamp selling a leg injury early on for reasons only Vamp can explain. Everyone kinda looked on in confusion as if he never told anyone he would be doing this. I really wanted to see some cool Dos Caras/Dr. Wagner Jr stuff but they only got in the ring once to start the second fall & it was a very short uneventful interaction. We get lots of Vamp/Dantes since that's what being built-up here. There's a moment where Emilio Charles Jr runs away into the crowd to hide so we get a shot of what the floor seats look like. NO BUENO. The house lights are kept very dark in this era so whether the place is full or empty you can never tell aside from the noise level. But just from seeing how few rows were filled & where the police were standing to watch over everyone - this looked like a really poor turnout. Maybe the consequence of last week's main event not happening? Remember when CMLL used to need to put effort into drawing crowds? Ah, the old days. Fun little bit mid-match is the announcers bring up Vamp trying boxing but getting beat by an amateur fighter. This the problem when your announcers are guys who do legit sports coverage vs guys hired to hype the product. Why would you tell people this big star of yours couldn't hack it at boxing, especially a week before he's going after your major title? After splitting the first two falls Dantes takes Vamp out with a tope suicida. We get a teased finish with the other four but instead Vamp makes it back in & accidentally takes out Dos Caras with a spin kick. No matter, he power bombs Wagner to eliminate him & instantly catches Apolo sneaking into the ring with a Urunage for the second elimination. Vamp wins the match for his team, injured leg & all! Post-match Vitorrino loudly exclaims Vamp wants a shot at Apolo's title so we have another match ready to go for next week. Before the main event Garza does a promo explaining how he's beaten Satanico at everything - title matches, regular matches, apuesta matches... there's nothing left for him to prove but he felt Satanico screwed him over last week faking a low blow so tonight is about pride. I like that he made logic out of this instant apuesta feud. Satanico goes on the attack right away after the entrances. Garza misses a twisting body press & seems to catch his arm at a bad angle so Satanico submits him easily. Second fall is more Satanico in control until Garza fights back. He even bloodies up Satanico! Shift from their feud earlier in the year where it was always Garza ending up bloody. I think Rafa El Maya missed his cue to turn away before the finish but luckily he was standing at an angle where you could sell he couldn't tell what happened. Satanico does a leapfrog, Garza slides under but Satanico starts selling because Garza barely clipped his balls. Garza is insistent nothing happened but Maya... for the second straight week... DQ's him unjustly. Crowd is furious at this. Garza is even angrier knowing Satanico has cheated him twice in a row. He doesn't want a title match, he wants a hair vs hair rematch from earlier this year so he can show Satanico he's still the better man. But who will be ref? Aha! We shall see! The Coliseo portion of this TV was useless but I enjoyed the Arena Mexico portion a lot. A rare case where CMLL put the work into setting up all the matches to be held on their major show the following week. It's loaded up! Mask, hair & title!
I wasn't able to finish 1995 before leaving for Vegas as I planned so I'm just hitting post on this anyways. You never know. If I don't come back, at least 95% of the year doesn't go to waste sitting in my drafts. If I make it back & still feel like working on this, I'll finish off 1995. This has really been fun to re-watch. I haven't watched a single CMLL show all week long because I keep defaulting to watch these instead.
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