Wrestling Wednesday: The Rise of CHIKARA!

CHRIS HERO

Independent wrestling offers many great things to the common wrestling fan. Accessibility, talent, and often a much higher workrate than you see from top WWE or TNA stars. But it often fails on other levels. Monthly or semi-monthly booking means less storytelling potential. Workers that set their own gimmick as they work a half dozen different promotions (or more) a month often end up rather generic as well. Ninety percent of indy wrestlers have a character best described as “edgy athlete dedicated to beat the best opponents” or “shady weirdo willing to take the win at any expense”. Some wrestlers have excelled at the first (Bryan Danielson, Low-Ki), others have excelled at the second (Jimmy Jacobs, Austin Aries), and a few do both with amazing credibility (Chris Hero, Nigel McGuiness).

It often leads to great wrestling, but it doesn’t offer much in the way of solid storytelling pre- and post-match outside of the “I don’t like you” and “I want my revenge”. Both key features to wrestling storytelling, but not the only features to wrestling storytelling.

Which brings me in a roundabout way to the promotion I want to talk about today: CHIKARA.

MIKE QUACKENBUSH

Founded in 2002 by independent wrestling stand-out Mike Quackenbush (a good example of the “edgy athlete” gimmick back in the day) and the soon-to-step-aside “Reckless Youth” Tom Carter, the promotion slowly built a fan following around the Pennsylvania area. Eight years later it has expanded operations to much of the northeast, from Michigan to New York.

Built around the talents coming out of the CHIKARA Wrestling Factory as well as Quackenbush’s friends, the promotion brought elements of Lucha Libre in to the United States full-time for the first time. With the Mexican element of pro wrestling came a lot of high-flying maneuvers, innovative rules changes, and masks, a lot of them.

And with those masks came characters and comedy. Some of the earliest masked wrestlers were comedy gimmicks at best, but over the years the company proved to be able to make its fans take even silly gimmicks seriously.

THE OSIRIAN PORTAL

Some of the top technicos (faces) in the promotion include the team of the Osirian Portal (the serpentine Ophidian and the dancing “Funky Pharoah ” Amasis), old school baseball player Dasher Hatfield, and the ever-growing ant team of the Colony.

Tag teams and trios also play a major part of CHIKARA wrestling which adds another layer of action to an already solid format.

The levels of storytelling have varied over the promotion’s history but over the last two or so years a lot of effor has went in to forming a coherent ongoing narrative for the program.

The driving force behind this narrative, a new group known as Der Bruderschaft Des Kreuzes. More on them in a future column.

CHIKARA DVDs (over 145 of them) are available from their distributor Smartmark Video, including several best of DVDs. But the fine folks at CHIKARA won’t make you buy a DVD without ever seeing anything about their promotion. Every week they bring an episode of their Podcast-A-Go-Go, a ten minute show focused on what’s happening in CHIKARA today. It is available free through ITunes, on Youtube, or through the CHIKARA Podcast-A-Go-Go website.

If you are a wrestling or comic fan, I highly recommend you check them out.

Wrestling Wednesday: Kaval

Wrestling Wednesdays is going to be a little brief today as I am still working on some more looks in to the dichotomy of the hero/villain relationship as it pertains to wrestling and super-powered fiction.

Today, I just wanted to briefly mention a member of the current WWE NXT roster, Kaval.

I have been a huge fan of the wrestler formerly known as Low-Ki and Senshi for almost a decade now, ever since I first discovered him working many a Jakked and Metal match in around 2000. I really realized how awesome his in ring prowess could be when I started ordering Ring of Honor tapes in 2002.This guy could go like no one else in the business. he presented an amazing, no nonsense face in a way that I never quite saw in wrestling up until that point. (At the time, I had to yet to discover Taz’s somewhat similar persona as a face in ECW.)

My point is that Kaval is one of the best wrestlers in the world today. While I understand everyone’s love for Bryan Danielson (he’s great, don’t get me wrong), I will always be more of a fan of the awesome martial arts style of Kaval. His talent shines through in every match I have seen.

But what’s most amazing to me is that as a result of a rather terrible segment on last night’s NXT, Kaval is now the face of WWE.com, at least for a day. A decade ago, he was jobbing to Crash Holly on Jakked. Now he’s the face of WWE.com. That, my friends, is pretty cool.

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Youtube is filled with highlights and videos featuring him in all three of his personas, so be sure to do a search for him sometime. I am sure his past will come up at some point in future columns.

Until then, go search for some Best of disks and see just how great this man can be.

Wrestling Wednesday: The Nexus and Kane: Summer Slam Follow Up

So, Summer Slam has came and went, RAW has came and went, and WWE still clearly doesn’t quite seem to know what they are doing with the Nexus. The big surprise of the night at Summer Slam came with the return of the (still horribly named) Daniel Bryan. As the seventh member of Team WWE, he finally got to shine on WWE television as a capable wrestler and helped beat multiple members of the Nexus. But the surprise came in the end when the final two members of Nexus (Justin Gabriel and Wade Barrett) fell to John Cena, only moments after Cena’s head was spiked on the concrete. It seems fitting that the regular focus of this blog is on superheroes, as John Cena clearly came off as one last night.

The follow-up made even more of a mess of the storyline as the Nexus’ membership dropped to six. Darren Young left the group after a defeat by John Cena in a match that amused me mostly for the fact that the two men look disturbingly similar (albeit with different skin tones). This did little to revive the Nexus from their loss the night before. It remains to be seen if the story can rise from this debacle in to something solid leading in to the next couple pay-per-views. I still expect this storyline to come to its end in November at Survivor Series and we will continue to monitor it going forward.

Kane’s big storyline comes with the not unexpected return of Undertaker at the pay-per-view. Surprisngly, Kane proved to be the winner out of the storyline so far. Even after his match with Rey Mysterio, he was able to stop his brother with little problem.

While I pretty much knew this entire storyline was a set up for Kane turning heel and feuding with his brother, I hoped that WWE would have waited to pull the trigger on this for awhile. We have all seen Kane vs Undertaker before as detailed in my first post about the superhero style feud between the two. I hoped that WWE would provide us with a few more twists in this plot line before the inevitable confrontation. Instead it seems Kane and Taker are on a one-way collission course sooner, not later.

All in all, despite the great feeling of seeing Daniel Bryan both back and allowed to shine, Summer Slam came off as rather weak to me. I think a lot more could have been done to make both these storylines fresh. Instead it seems WWE wants to shovel more of the same.

That’s okay. We have far more than WWE to check out in this column. We will take a look in that direction next week.

Wrestling Wednesdays: The Nexus

Before I digress from WWE television for awhile (something I do quite frequently as the company often fails to hold my attention for long periods of time), I thought I would share a few thoughts on what will almost certainly be the storyline of 2010: the rise of the Nexus.

Made up of seven of the eight original rookies from the WWE show NXT, the Nexus consists of leader Wade Barrett, high-flyer Justin Gabriel, celebrity-turned-wrestler David Otunga, boxing-oriented Michael Tarver, “Cornfed Meathead” Skip Sheffield, party boy Darren Young, and West Virginia-born Heath Slater. An eighth member, Daniel Bryan, made only one appearance with the group, but more on that later.

None of the stars have much in common except for their shared origins on NXT. A few of them seem like natural babyfaces (Gabriel and Young in particular) despite their role as Nexus members. Several still have had little or no time to display much personality at all. The storyline seems to be framed around the advent of Wade Barrett winning the first NXT competition, and where that should force both him and the other characters from the show going forward.

That being said, they debuted in explosive fashion. On the end of a special three hour “Viewer’s Choice” episode of Raw, the group interrupted a match between John Cena and CM Punk. They surrounded the ring and brutally beat down Cena, the face of Raw. In the process, they went from those guys on the third show to being major players in WWE, and in the case of Wade Barrett, a potential main eventer.

The problem is that WWE clearly didn’t really know what direction to take the storyline in. The Nexus reappeared over the next several weeks and brutalized several WWE stars, though John Cena remained their constant focus, even after he dropped the WWE title to Sheamus. The reason for their attacks: well, your guess is as good as anyone’s. The Nexus want to make a name for themselves, but beyond that they seem to possess no reason for their constant attacks.

The attacks have flooded Raw, pay-per-view, and even house shows for weeks. It is a rare main event that isn’t interrupted by an attack by the Nexus. It has reached almost NWO levels of insanity, except for the fact that we knew why the NWO did what they did. Not so much with the Nexus.

Which seems to be the Nexus’ major problem. What could be a major heel group seems mired in pointless attacks and predicatable storytelling. They rarely have wrestled matches so far and they rarely do anything beyound brutalizing John Cena, his allies, and his enemies.

This leads of course to the upcoming Summerslam where the first PPV match to come out of the storyline finally comes after months of build-up. John Cena will lead a 7 on 7 team of WWE superstars against the Nexus in a tag match. The predictions are already well underway. Everyone suspects one of Cena’s team to turn on the WWE stars, with most suspecting it will be Cena himself.

If that’s the case, it shows the narrow vision of WWE storytelling. Why would Cena be the center of all these attacks, even lose the WWE title because of them, if he is the secret mastermind behind the Nexus. It makes no sense, but WWE in recent times has fallen away from common sense quite frequently. No matter what the outcome of the Summerslam story however, it does little to salvage an invasion angle that WWE has let fester past the point of sense.

Strangely the wrestler that might come out looking best from this story is the aforementioned Daniel Bryan. After choking out ring announcer Justin Roberts, Bryan Danielson found his WWE career cut short do to “excessive violence” on television. He has made a massive splash upon his return to the indys even going so far as to mock the reason for his release with a new t-shirt:

He has kept his dignity while escaping a storyline that would do him no good in his career. He is in a good place to return to one of the two big companies with more focus behind his push and more drive than the Nexus would ever give him.

Even TNA has gotten a lot of mileage out of the firing. Multiple chokeholds in TNA have been coupled with Taz commenting: “You can get fired in some companies for that move.&8221;.

Strangely, Bryan Danielson has found his way in to another promotion that has its own invasion storyline going, but more on CHIKARA in a future installment.