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The Pro Wrestling-Shonen Anime Connection

I read this article and I loved it. It's almost making me want to get started on njpw despite the fact that I would have no idea as to what anyone is saying. This article made me very happy and I can see it has made many other people happy as well. I can hardly wait for the shojo/wrestling article.

Chojin Sentai Jetman is probably still my favorite of the sentai tokusatsu shows. I think it's because I first saw it via the Malaysian(?) English dub, which was exceedingly wacky because English was clearly the second language for everyone in the cast, but if memory serves only about half the series was dubbed into English. The melancholy final scenes of its last episode struck me as something influenced by Hong Kong action cinema from that era (Jetman came out in the early 1990s), which Japanese stunt teams and tokusatsu creators would certainly have awareness of. Still, the similarities to Rikidozan are indeed there!

Octorockandroll wrote:

I read this article and I loved it. It's almost making me want to get started on njpw despite the fact that I would have no idea as to what anyone is saying. This article made me very happy and I can see it has made many other people happy as well. I can hardly wait for the shojo/wrestling article.

You're in luck! The cable channel AXS TV (formerly known as HDNet) has been running noteworthy New Japan matches with English language commentary since last year (the interviews and in-ring promos are kept in the original Japanese but subtitled in English), and quite a few major cable providers do carry that channel. The episodes air on Fridays. At first, the play-by-play was handled by noteworthy boxing/MMA announcer Mauro Renallo, but since he is now employed by the WWE, as of last month the currently play-by-play duties are now being handled by Jim Ross, whom many consider the greatest professional wrestling announcer of our generation. Color commentary is by Josh Barnett, who was a famous MMA fighter as well as NJPW performer, so if you want to know who all these unfamiliar faces are and why they're doing what they're doing that show's an excellent primer.

BEST ARTICLE OF ALL TIME

Simple fact, without All Japan Women's Professional Wrestling aka AJW, we wouldn't have The Dirty Pair!

Japanese pro wrestling? Anime? Post-WWII politics and culture? Thanks for tailoring articles to my exact tastes, ANN.

Certainly, the easy examples of the latter are pro wrestling characters derived from anime such as Tiger Mask, Jushin Liger, or Mushiking Terry, but for my money's worth the circle best looped around with regards to classic shojo anime and Japanese women's wrestling circa the 1970s and 1980s. But that's another story, the telling of which depends on how many of you actually cared to get this far!