Osaka Pro Wrestling

He's like this sort of traveling outsider.

And I think most of the year he's been wrestling in Osaka Pro.

He got to the semifinals of their... tennozan tournaments uh which i don't know i think that's that might be like the osaka pro equivalent of the g1 climax um but he's been wrestling lots of different promotions he's done a bit of michinoku pro as well as osaka pro um but i don't think he's been doing a huge amount of substance just sort of mainly multi-man tags and teaming with more established wrestlers uh so You know, I'm not sort of seeing this as, ah, this is going to be the big breakthrough moment for Kukai.

He's teaming with fucking Master Wato.

And there's only so far that's going to get you.

At that time that like it kind of fills in like the, okay, this is what like Azteca is up to during this time period, like, well, one of the people that I'm actually like that I'm kind of intrigued at coming out of this that it's just gonna be me going wild goose chases just to kind of like see this.

I think I'm going to really over the next few years, Osaka pro is going to be the focus for me, like classic Osaka pro and getting through that.

I don't know if that's something that we want to talk about more off air.

That's more of a project for me.

And I don't remember the URL for the old Osaka Hurricane website.

If somebody has that, and there's web-archived copies of Osaka Hurricane that are similar to what iHeartDG used to be, and we have write-ups of...

Osaka Pro shows and we have real-time news that we can go back and look at, then yeah, I'm super interested in doing an Osaka Pro series at some point.

I just don't know what sort of information is out there outside of just the footage, which I think you and I both have quite a bit of at this point.

i had no idea that happened but i'm going to watch it as soon as the show ends okay it was not it

was like a quick like little 10 minute match but it was a lot of fun and it was great to see zeus back in his traditional element because he's not wrestling matches like this In Osaka Pro these days.

And that's no shade on Osaka Pro.

It's just a very different style.

So if you want to see a little bit of the old Zeus, I mean, it's a quick match.

But if Zeus had even wrestled somebody I didn't like, like Daisuke Sasaki... or something like that i i still would have watched that match because i have a great love and respect for zeus as i know you do and as hopefully everyone listening does uh if you're familiar but most importantly zeus i always consider us spiritually bonded and connected because we actually share our birthday uh

maybe

maybe not the same year he's like 20 years older than me or something but still but still it counts you know it counts we have a spiritual birthday link there uh so i do have to respect zeus but i love him anyway uh big fan of the big guns back in the day and uh i would like to watch more of osaka pro but they don't air that much anymore unfortunately yes

And as I start to, you know, put together a preliminary list for the SFM 50 this year, this will be one of the two times I wanna talk about this.

But I, I've got a list of about 75 wrestlers that came to mind pretty immediately this year, and that includes the Osaka Pro guys that haven't made tape a lot, and that includes some great guys that I might have at the, at the bottom end of my list, and then, you know, the Dragon Gate guys, New Japan guys.

The, the bevy of all Japan pro wrestling wrestlers that might be included this year.

A few Noah stragglers, the AEW guys, and you know, a, a weird year for CMLL where they are just gonna have such less representation than they have had for me the last three years, but-

I've been, uh...

I, I, I got my way through the backlog 'cause what GLATE does now is they, they record everything, but then they hold off until, like, a live show or a big show, and then they put everything up at, like, all at once.

So it's like the opposite of Osaka Pro.

So, like, I was getting through, like, their shows in Nagoya and things like this, and then this, uh, the, this big show came and I was just like, "All right." And with time and everything, it-- that match was not one that made my list for this week.

You've got T2P hitting.

And I think that, that to me is the interesting thing, is that the difference between Torimon and whether it be Michinoku, or whether it be Universal Lucha Libre, or whether it be Osaka Pro or Dragon Door or El Dorado or whatever it may be, is that Torimon figured out how to restock the pond in a way that, you know, now we're here in 1996, at the end of '96, and Mike, I mean, the new additions of the roster, the differences between December of '93 and December of '96, it is absolutely the emergence of Masato Yakushiji, which I don't even get the impression was an intentional thing.

I just think Yakushiji was so good that they sort of forced their hand.

It's-

They have a four-minute match, and, and that was the thing that sold tickets on this show.

The advance was really weak, as Dave writes in "The Observer," before Inoki added himself to this show, and once Inoki was booked, this became a sellout.

So it's just one of those odd pairings, and you see Michinoku Pro a lot of the time flirt with shoot style and flirt with battle arts and flirt with these very l- you know, quote-unquote, "legitimate presentation fighting organizations." And yet they are this totally other thing, and I think that's very interesting because you never see that outside of, you know, the, the Murahama push in Osaka Pro, but you never really see that in Osaka Pro.

You never see that in El Dorado.