Super Delfin

The roster is as deep as it is.

I mean, Dolphin doesn't make my top five.

Dolphin might not make my top nine of wrestlers in this company in that year.

And I mean, I ended up with seven matches at four and a half stars or higher throughout the year.

And it made it really kind of hard to pick which ones made it to my list.

Yeah, no, absolutely so.

And we move on to the main event of this first show.

It is a Kai and Tai Deluxe versus Seki Gun match, and it's kind of the, with the exception of Shiryu, no, I would say because of like this, you kind of, this is like the top pairings that you would have on both sides because you have Togo, Teho, and Shiryu, the classic Kai and Tai Deluxe trio versus the great Sasuke, Super Dolphin, and Grand Hanmada in the main event in a wild match.

Because when you talk about those three stars, it's very clear in 92, 93, basically up until the rise of Kain Tai Dojo or Kain Tai Deluxe, that your three kings of that style were Ultimo, Sasuke, and Delphin.

Dolphin has no tail.

Essentially, he does Osaka Pro, he does Okinawa Pro, he does Seafood Pro, he goes back to Osaka.

He's making new promotions as we speak right now, but he's not the draw.

You know, because there, y- you know, you talk about this taking place over the span of, of a few days in December, but when you zoom out a little bit more and you go from 10/10/96, which we're recording this on the 30th anniversary of these days, the Sumo Hall Show, when you go from 10/10/96 to December 20th of 1996, you think about the work that was done in a three-month period.

You zoom out a little bit more and you go from July or late June of 1996 through December, a half a year period, and you have Kai and Tai taking over, the Delfin babyface turn, the Delfi- Delfin/Sasuke pairing, and you go through August, you go through Skydiving J, you go through the August tournament with the World Championship title series into 10/10/96, into the Tag League, into December.

And then when you zoom out just a little bit more and you think about the spring that they had with a, a, a number of great matches, you know, in that March 16th show with Sasuke and Tiger Mask and Shiryu versus Delfin and Taka Michinoku and Gran Nawa.

You think about the CMLL tours that Sasuke and Tiger Mask did that year.

It's such a busy year for the promotion, and I, I, I guess we can start with the big picture, which is that having not reviewed '97, '98, or '99 or the very little bit of 2000 that we'll cover, just knowing what we knew going into 1996 and now looking at it in totality, having watched every bit of footage of Michinoku Pro proper from 1996, all of the hyped New Japan stuff, some of the hyped FMW stuff.

I understand why it has the reputation that it does.

Yeah, and if anything, I don't think, uh, w- the, the hype is enough for how 1996 is.

Uh, e- especially as a promotion versus, like, Sasuke's 1994, Delfin's 1993, or the entirety of Gensai Shinzaki and his first stretch in the promotion.