Villano IV

Welcome back to more Dream Matches! And this time I have a hell of a brawl for you, as Terry Funk shows just why he may be the greatest seller of all time in a brutal bloodbath against the monstrous Stan Hansen in 1983 All Japan!

I’ll also get to another request, as I visit two Attitude Era matches featuring the Hardy Boyz vs. Too Cool, back when Too Cool was a reliable “Secondary Contender” team in the very heated WWF tag team ranks! Also, a sequel to one of my “Halloween Eve” reviews, as Damian 666, El Espectro Jr., Karis La Momia (a mummy!) & Halloween take on Pierroth Jr. and three Villanos! And finally, I throw in one last Kurasawa (Manabu Nakanishi in WCW) match, as I find him facing Sting in a long WCW Saturday Night contest!

STAN HANSEN vs. TERRY FUNK:
(All Japan, 1983)
* Ohhhhhhh yeah- I’ve seen very little 1980s AJPW, but Terry & Hansen were HUGE back in the day, with the crowds adoring them beyond all other foreign wrestlers. Terry had an emotional connection with the fans, while Hansen just had them in a combination of amusement and awe. The crowd absolutely mobs Terry when he comes down, but holy god to they part ways for STAN, who swings wildly and blindly. Both guys are in black trunks, with Stan dwarfing Terry- it’s so weird seeing Funk with big muscles, though- my only memories are of him as this old man. He’s still giving up a LOT of mass to the burly Hansen, though.

Welcome to another Dream Matches column! Kind of! I mean, didn’t you ever want to know how Zangief would do in a REAL pro wrestling ring?

Okay, so let’s get this out of the way- YES, probably, Victor here is the basis for Zangief from Street Fighter II. He is a hairy-chested, mustached Russian named “Zangiev”, often wearing red, with legitimate wrestling skill, and he trained and wrestled with New Japan in 1989 for a tour or so- this makes the timing match up pretty well for SFII, which came out a short time later in Japan. He even wrestled for WCW in their weird “Pat O’Connor International Tag Team Tournament” in 1990. That was it for four years, until he randomly did a tour for UWF-I. The short version of that promotion is that they were the biggest deal in the world for a hot minute- being a Fake Shootfighting promotion that pretended to be real, making grandstand challenges at all the “fake” wrestlers… at least until a combination of killing all their Ace’s challengers and the revelation that they were fake as hell (hard to pretend your stuff is real when UFC becomes a thing and people realize you can’t just “make the ropes” out of a fully-applied cross-armbreaker) completely destroyed them and the promotion folded right after they were huge.