Cero Reviews AJW Classics ~Retro Hour~ EP 7: AJW Summer Night Festival In Budokan

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Cero Reviews AJW Classics ~Retro Hour~ EP 7: AJW Summer Night Festival In Budokan

Post by cero2k » Apr 9th, '21, 23:14

AJW Classics ~Retro Hour~ EP 7
Aired: January 22, 2008

This week's episode of Retro Hour was a compact version of AJW Summer Night Festival In Budokan. The episode missed the opening match where Mika Komatsu & Yumi Ogura defeat Jumbo Hori & Kazue Nagahori in under 7 minutes, so I didn't really try that hard to find that match alone. It also had edited versions of the All Pacific title match, and the Gokauku Domei vs Jumping Bomb Angels match. I went ahead and found the complete thing in order to make this a proper review and not just a Retro Hour review.

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AJW Summer Night Festival In Budokan
August 22nd, 1985
Nippon Budokan, Tokyo, Japan

Monster Ripper vs. Yukari Omori - 3.5/10
Ripper is known in WWF as Bertha Faye, and Rhonda Singh everywhere else. Omori is one half of the Dynamite Girls. This wasn't a good match, but it served it's purpose properly. Ripper is young and green, Omori is more of a tag wrestler, so it made for a weak combination. This went down as a brawl, so it worked that it wasn't crisp, and with the idea of putting over Ripper as a monster, crushing Omori worked. Ripper won with a jumping Crossbody.

Itsuki Yamazaki & Noriyo Tateno vs. Gokuaku Domei (Bull Nakano & Dump Matsumoto) - 6.5/10
Hard to say this about a 20 or so minute match, but this was technically a squash. Hard to see this in hindsight because of what the JBA will eventually become, but GD just beat the crap out of both Tateno and Yamazaki. Now, how would a squash match work in a 2-out-of-3 falls match that ended 2:1? Well, the first fall, that came about 10 minutes into the match, was a double countout as both teams brawled outside the ring. The double countout took them to 1:1 and into sudden death.

Final fall was just a bit more of the same, Matsumoto and Nakano beating the shit out of Yamazaki, even the seconds came in and joined them for the beat down, ending with a Spike Piledriver for the GD win.

All Pacific Championship Match
Devil Masami (c) vs. Chigusa Nagayo - 9/10
This was awesome, a story of two women going all out, reaching their limit, and earning each other's respect at the end. Coming in to the match, Masami is not exactly a heel, but she's not a fan favorite, and surely not against the top fan favorite wrestler in the company, Nagayo.

Match saw Nagayo start strong, she hits a couple of big moves early on and comes surprises Masami with a couple of near falls. Masami had a sudden realization that Nagayo was no one to take lightly, and so Masami's fire wakes up, and the real match begins. This went from slams and pin reversals to a straight up fist fight at the end, punches that legit made me think they were a bit stiff by Masami. Last couple of minutes, Masami landed so sick punches to the face of Nagayo, who came back with three big kicks and both women fell down, but neither was able to recover for the count, and thus we got a double knockout draw. Masami retains.

Post-match - Masami and Nagayo drag themselves to embrace, Masami looked quite emotional after the match. She cut a total babyface promo.

WWWA World Championship Match
Jaguar Yokota (c) vs. Lioness Asuka - 9.5/10
This was just a fantastic match, the perfect combination of the ace of AJW and one half of the top tag team in the promotion. This is a well known, arguably legendary match, it was one of two matches in 1985 to get a ***** rating by WON, the other being Tiger Mask II vs Kuniaki Kobayashi. In the summer of 1985, there really wasn't a bigger match to build that this, maybe Nagayo vs Yokota, but realistically, Asuka and Nagayo were about the same as both women were loved as a tag team.

The match started with a fast paced exchange of pins and reversals, but once she was over that hump, Yokota took control of the match and started working over Asuka's legs. After some time, Asuka was able to reverse a Figure 4 over and make some damage on Yokota's legs. From there on, they traded leg submissions and slams for a while, they started heading into the finish, the violence escalated somewhat more, Asuka picked Yokota on a suplex position and just tossed her to the floor, only for Asuka to try and follow with a tope suicida, but fail when Yokota moves out of the way, and that's where Asuka's game falls apart. Back in the ring, Asuka tries a bit more, but Yokota dodges, hits the leg trap backdrop suplex, and wins.

OVERALL THOUGHTS
This was a great show, it was straight up AJW big summer show compacted into 60 minutes. The two top matches were legit Matches of the Year Runner Ups.
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