Joe's Gonna Kill You-- On youtube! (And other

For reasons I don't care to elaborate on, here are some random Samoa Joe matches on youtube, which I am totally using for research purposes.

Joe vs. Essa Rios- From Jacked in 2001. Or Jakked; I could swear WWE went with the edgy (mis) spelling there, because that's where they were at in 2001. As opposed to their more understated, nuanced product today, of course. This could join Danielson vs. Cena and Styles vs. the Hurricane on a "When they were lowly jobbers on C-List WWE shows" DVD. Highlights include Joe sporting a really heavy dye job and wearing a t-shirt, denying us of his trademark doughy physique and impressive moobs; Rios fitting a jaw dropping plancha over the turnbuckles and his awesome moonsault in to this four minute squash; and a lot of hype about the about the XFL and the feud between Chris Benoit/Eddie Guerrero that preceded Wrestlemania 17, which may surprise you, since they never happened, according to the WWE's new version of reality. Which, all things considered, isn't all that hard to accept. It's easier than thinking about what Benoit did. Or all that awful football.

On a lighter note, here's Joe (sporting basically the same look) vs. Masato Tanaka. Ignoring any thoughts related to Tanaka's series with Mike Awesome that might lead you back to thinking about how things with Awesome ended up, of course. Man, watching wrestling sure can be depressing. Or maybe I'm just excessively morbid, even considering all the people that died last year, and how you don't even have to do six degrees of seperation between other wrestlers to be reminded of that.

All right, I'll get off that downer of a tangent and talk about the match now. It's from Japan's Zero One promotion, complete with Japanese commentary; pretty much all I've been able to make out from it is ECW. Joe looks positively svelte here, and hits some really agile moves I haven't seen him do in TNA, including a float over to the apron off a whip, a Muta like snap elbow, and even a somersault plancha! That was just crazy on a number of levels Anyway, following that insane plancha, we get some ECW-esque chair antics, as Joe statrs pulling them out of the crowd and tossing them Tanaka, which turns out to not be a terribly bright idea, given that using him is his bread and butter and all. That leads to one of those goofy chair fencing sequences that Tanaka used to do in ECW all the time, which is pretty much the only ECW I could ever be nostalgic for.

That said, all of this chair related stuff is kind of hard to mark out over after the Benoit toxicology reports and all, which sucks. That's right, I'm angry because Benoit ruined my enjoyment of guys wailing on each other with chairs. They don't go as nuts with the unprotected shots to the head as Tanaka and Awesome used to (which, again, makes those matches hard to watch in retrospect, considering how all that abuse probably contributed to Awesome's suicide), but it still reminds me of them. The spectre of that fun ruining, murderous bastard rears its head a little later when Joe hits a german, then rolls over and hits a dragon suplex, and then follows that up with a brigded german for a near fall. Which brings up the point that no matter how well the WWE's done in their attempt to wipe him out of existence, his influence will still be around. I'm not trying to advocate this or anything, I'm just acknowledging that it's there. Maybe too much in the face of a pretty good match that obstentially has nothing to do with him or other dead people, but I still felt like it was worth mentioning.

Anyway, this had a lot of near falls, which I always like, even if they feel a little forced in a relatively short match like this. Tanaka busts out Diamond Dust, a pretty awesome finisher (if you've never seen it, the guy performing it slaps a rear chancery on his opponent from the top rope, like he's going for an inverted DDT, and then flips over and does a stunner instead). Joe gets his foot on the rope before the three. Being that this is Japan, Tanaka tries it again, only for Joe to block it and hit an over the shoulder slam (I remember Tenay calling it an Island Driver when he's used in TNA) for the pin. Despite the fact that it came nowhere near my expectations of what it could have been, given that Joe was still pretty early on in his career and did none of his signature spots, it was still fun and worth watching.

And, for no reason other than I found it on the sidebar when I was watching the Essa/Joe squash, Essa Riso (as Aguila) vs. Super Crazy (as Super Loco, just in case you weren't sure if he was a Mexican or not) from RAW. No, seriously.- Yes, this was actually on RAW, as an attempt to counter WCW's use of Luchadors. Ah, for the days when Vince had competition he had to actually react to. Crazy (er, uh, Loco) was spottier here than I can remember him being in ECW, although to be fair he was weighed down by about 10 pounds of tassles here, as well as the fact that Aguila/Rios was supposedly 19. This was very spotty and everything, but if nothing else, it's nice to reminded of a time when Vince and co. were not only willing to do things outside of their comfort zone, but basically had to in order to compete with WCW. That, and while it was no Mysterio/Psychosis, it was a nice slice of lucha, ignoring Brian Christopher's obnoxious commentary (from the "things are funnier when they're louder" school of comedy, or at the very least, a very bad version of his dad back when he was a bitter heel and thus fun to listen to) and Jim Cornette's verbal felating of him, which if nothing else shows how good a company man he was. And hey, no reminder's of dead people for me to fixate on!