FMW - the W is for WTFX

So I've been watching my old FMW dvds over the course of the last 3 days. Since I only have three it didn't really take me very long. I got the idea after watching a ton of stuff on NJPW's YouTube channel, figuring I'd go back to where my interest in Puroresu (Japanese Pro Wrestling) began. It all started with the masked Hayabusa and went down hill from there.

Let me give you a small bit of history before jumping into the tragedy that is FMW's dvds. FMW was a Puroresu company that was founded in 1989 on the "deathmatch" principle, meaning over the top "wrestling" matches with fire, bladed weapons and the ropes replaced with barbed wire. Atsushi Onita was the hero of the company for the first six or seven years. After he fucked off into politics the high flying ninja/luchadore combo known as Hayabusa stepped into the spotlight. He continued the tradition of deathmatches and had some legendary feuds with Mr. Gannosuke, Masato Tanaka and Mike Awesome. Sadly control of the company ended up in the hands of Kodo "Samson" Fuyuki who proceeded to go the WWE route of entertainment above matches. This led to Hayabusa unmasking and becoming simply H, and fighting Mr. Gannosuke in an anus explosion match. A fucking ANUS EXPLOSION MATCH! Gannosuke put a FIRECRACKER in Hayabusa's ASSHOLE and lit the damned thing. That was the entire concept of the match! Well it is a fitting metaphor for all of FMW, or WEW as it came to be known, at the time. A while later Hayabusa suffered a career ending injury which quickened the downward spiral, and then Kodo Fuyuki died which also put an end to the company.

That's a quick and very brief history of FMW. For a much more thorough one check out BAHU's FMW site. His HISTORY of FMW is an great in depth read. I recommend it highly. About ten years ago the company decided to start branching into the USA, forming an alliance with ECW and TokyoPop. In theory this should have helped them gain a whole new audience. In reality it led to a series of pure ridiculous crap. A side effect of the ECW partnership, however, was the Rob Van Dam & Sabu vs Jinsei Shinzaki & Hayabusa tables match which stands as one of the best ECW matches of all time. Seriously, go watch that shit. Anyway the whole point here is that they gave TokyoPop the rights to release their footage in America. The problem with this is that the FMW footage was raw, as in the commentary was in Japanese. This was really an era where information on the internet wasn't as easy to find as it is now and meant many of the fans didn't know a thing about FMW. So TokyoPop decided to make the shit up because nobody knew any better.

When I say they made it up I mean they literally just made the shit up as they went along. FMW Crash 'n' Burn is the first FMW dvd I ever got and it's the one I'm going to focus on today. The show starts off with our hosts John Watanabe and Eric Gellar. Saying that these two are the absolute worst commentators in the history of wrestling may not be a stretch. It's an painfully awkward pairing as Watanabe is left speechless by the utter stupidity that comes out of Gellar's mouth more than once. This guy clearly had no experience whatsoever with FMW or even wrestling! I could that both of them had not been given any direction and were just making it up as they went along. It was like Stranglemania! I almost think that it was an attempt to rewrite what was going on in the matches, kind of like a much less funny Most Extreme Elimination Challenge. To be fair, Gellar was eventually dropped on later DVDs for the much less foolish Dan "The Mouth" Lebronsky and they started referencing the real FMW storylines and history.

Let's take a look at some of the bullshit that was going on in this DVD. Let's take Mike "The Gladiator" Awesome. They claimed he was in the Japanese Marines, which don't exist, and that he was kicked out for fighting in underground street fights. And they were very serious about this! Every time Masato Tanaka was in the ring they kept talking hush-hush to each other in an awful attempt to avoid a touchy subject. Eventually they caved and revealed that Masato Tanaka had KILLED "Lord Darkness" in the ring and that the FMW board were reviewing the match to see if he had cheated. Of course, because that's what we were all concered about! What was this supposed to do for Tanaka? Make him look like a killer? They were trying to treat it so seriously which is the really sad thing. Kintaro Kanemura is just a fat guy that does some serious deathmatch stuff. What could they come up with for him? He was a professional circus clown and circus strongman who made the move into wrestling because that's just a natural move, y'know? They really played up his how all of his moves were variations of stuff he had learned in the circus. Chigusa Nagayo was a "naughty nurse" that used her skills from the medical field to do more damage to her opponents! And Sub Miss Sato? Well she was a prostitute of course. Not a high class one, a street walking, disease ridden prostitute. And apparently John Watanabe had frequented her quite often. Seriously.

If the fake commentary wasn't enough there were cutaway sections between matches in which Eric Gellar and two very underdressed models/prostitutes attempted to "teach" moves to the viewers. This was a trainwreck of Diva search proportions. Gellar just didn't know what he was doing. Hell the moves he was trying to "train" us to perform weren't even real. He just made up a name for something and let the models touch each other. This really served no purpose other than to show off some boobs. This was also dropped in later DVDs due to pointlessness.

I really want to pick up the other 5-6 DVDs just to see how bad they were compared to this one. The other two that I have, Rule the Asylum and Final Encounter, weren't half as bad as this particular outing. I know that Gellar is on at least one other DVD so I really want to get that one to hear what kind of outlandish bullshit they make up. It's really worth watching if you're an informed Puroresu fan since you know exactly how bad these stories are.

FMW wasn't bad by any means and was in fact one of the more entertaining promotions in wrestling history. They just attempted to expand their influence into America in a very half-assed and ill advised manner.