Kaiju King Mandora/Kaiju Zeta Mandora vs. Ultra Ace/Ultra Monkey, Osaka Pro Legend Story (1/4/2000)

Commissions continue again, this one coming from Ko-fi contributor Henry HeadCheese. You can be like them and pay me to write about all different types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or thing or $10 for anything over an hour, and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication or other processes, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi.

I don’t fucking know, man.

Ultra Ace and Ultra Monkey are your classic wrestling characters based on some anime shit (I cannot tell you a single thing about Ultraman besides that SHIN ULTRAMAN was directed by the director of SHIN GODZILLA (not the same SHIN G director who directed SHIN KAMEN RIDER, which I have seen and loved) too, although I have not seen the former), and they go after some monster guys with several eyes and claw hands.

The match itself is beautiful nonsense.

Many things go wrong, the monkey walks into the ringpost on accident, and many also also go right, like all the arm drags and various ranas and headscissor combinations. While the split is a clean one in which no one takes a thing away from the other, the match is cleanly split between schtick and basic lucharesu routine, and so, the match itself is sort of stuck in between the two.

Settling for a little bit of both, to be fair, still results in a super fun eight minutes (of what’s aired) that’s more fun than a whole lot of other wrestling.

Our Heroes win, obviously.

There are likely millions of worse things someone can pay me to watch and write about than an eight minute bullshit comedy match about an anime I will never watch or understand though.

I encourage all of you to find them.

Ebessan (II) vs. Kuishinbo Kamen, Osaka Pro 10th Anniversary (4/29/2009)

Commissions return again, this one coming from my thoughtless son Brandon. You can be like them and pay me to write about all types of stuff. People tend to choose wrestling matches, but very little is entirely off the table, so long as I haven’t written about it before (and please, come prepared with a date or show name or something if it isn’t obvious). You can commission a piece of writing of your choosing by heading on over to www.ko-fi.com/elhijodelsimon. The current rate is $5/match or $5/started half hour of a thing (example: an 89 minute movie is $15, a 92 minute one is $20), and if you have some aim that cannot be figured out through simple multiplication, feel free to hit the DMs on Twitter or Ko-fi. 

At first, I thought my horrible son had been needlessly rude.

One of the most exasperating things you can do when commissioning something from me is to be sparse on the details and making me do the work, looking at context clues in the file along with Cagematch or WrestlingData to find out where or when a match happened. Typically, it is not the end of the world, as this is not hard to do, but when 80-90% of the other people who pay for things can get this right, it feels like a lack of respect for my time. This is offset somewhat by the fact that someone is paying me for my thoughts on something, which is inherently a sign of some positive esteem, but it’s definitely annoying.

This gave me more problem than most.

Initially, I assumed I had trouble finding more information because of how many times these two had wrestled each other, going back to the turn of the century. Without a show name and not wanting to spoil myself beforehand in terms of the result or anything, it was impossible to nail this down before actually watching it. The uploader of the file on Youtube responded to a similar question by saying the date was April 29th, 2009, but as that was (a) not showing up in any of my searches, & (b) after Kikutaro (Ebessan) had long since stopped wrestling under that name, I assumed that had to be a mix-up. You look for things long enough, you find a lot of mislabeling on video sites, and I figured that this was from some Osaka Pro show in the first half of the 2000s.

My apologies to the uploader of the match, as it turns out my simple boy was not being rude, but had simply been duped, the modern version of some fan in the 2000s thinking AAA had the real La Parka all along, and the reason I could not find a date for it is because this Ebessan is a God damned imposter, who only donned the hood in April 2005, once the original left and became Kikutaro.

I should have known from the start, really.

Not so much because of any of these problems, but because something sort of feels off here. Ebessan feels off, something about it feels like going through the motions, and it only makes sense that this is, being nice about it, a tribute act. He knows the role well, it’s not an obvious fraud like a guy on a UK tour in 2002 in a Kane mask, but there is a difference between knowing the lines and fully embodying the part. It’s a cover band, it’s a guy in a cover band joining like idk the drummer from the original act for the night, and while it’s not bad and occasionally actually pretty good because he does know the material, it is also never entirely correct, and always just a little weird because of that.

The greatest gift of this match is that I will now constantly be accusing my boy of not only being a Packers fan, but also of constantly falling for every possible wrestling scam there is, up to and including fake Ultimate Warriors.

As far as pale imitations of all-time greats go though, it‘s not the most egregious one covered in today‘s drop.