So then, this last week Al and I were at the Chikara show in Glasgow, which was the last date of their UK tour and isn’t yet available to buy (though you can pre-order it, if you want).  It’s a great show, and they’re right – wrestling, or at least good wrestling, is indeed best experienced live, because of the atmosphere, because the little things in the way of crowd interaction are so much more effective in person, and because things that can be fairly routine on video get a renewed impact live.

At any rate, it’s been a while since I’ve done one of these 2015 re-watch posts, and it strikes me a better way of doing this is to cover a whole weekend at the same time, since in some ways that’s kind of the booking unit for the big picture in Chikara.  So here are the two July shows…

15.14: “Storming the Castle”

It’s Saturday 25 July 2015, and it’s been a little over a month since the last show.  We’re at somewhere called Nomad’s Adventure Quest in South Windsor, Connecticut, which is apparently some sort of combination laser tag centre, video arcade and sports complex.  It’s a moderately sized hall, nicely lit, pretty full.  The main event of this one is somewhat important in the big picture; the rest, to be honest, is mostly burning through matches for the Challenge of the Immortals tournament, which, being a double round robin between ten teams, means there are a lot of matches to be got through.

The tournament scores as we go into this: the Wrecking Crew have 6 points, the Nightmare Warriors have 5, the Snake Pit and Dasher’s Dugout have 4, the BDK, United Nations, Battle Hive and Arcane Horde are all on 3, and the Gentleman’s Club and Crown & Court share last place on 2.

1.  Challenge of the Immortals: Crown & Court v. The Battle Hive.

It’s a tag match.  Crown & Court’s best tag team is Princess Kimberlee and Jervis Cottonbelly… but they’re challenging for the tag belts in the main event, so we’re getting Los Ice Creams (Ice Cream Jr and El Hijo del Ice Cream), a pair of clowns who haven’t won a match in years.  The Battle Hive team are Amasis and Worker Ant, and even though they’re not doing brilliantly in this tournament either, they still ought to have an easy night against the Ice Creams.  Despite their squad’s dire standing, the Ice Creams are still joking around.  At first this is typically ineffective, but then they pull themselves together and get the upper hand on Amasis for several minutes.  They debut a new double team move – which consists solely of them picking up their opponent, swinging him, and chucking him in the general direction of the turnbuckle, but it turns out that it actually works.  They’re so thrilled by this that they… just keep trying it until the Hive figure out how to block it.  At which point Worker Ant tears them apart and pins Ice Cream Jr with his Get The Sugar finisher in 12:49.  So near but yet so far.  The Ice Creams are terribly disappointed.  Nice little story there.

2.  Lucas Calhoun v. Argus.

This is a Magic Move match – if either wrestler hits the “randomly selected” Magic Move then everyone in the crowd gets a prize.  Tonight’s Move is the fisherman suplex.  You’ll recall that Calhoun is the pet project of Kevin Condron, who dubiously believes that Chikara treated him as cannon fodder during the Flood invasion storyline of 2014, and is trying to recruit abandoned Flood henchmen into a stable ostensibly themed around cannon fodder made good, but actually themed around the massive ego of Kevin Condron.  Calhoun used to be the Flood henchman Volgar, but Condron’s pestering have broken him out of that persona and turned him into a much happier (though still subservient) rockabilly wrestler.  Condron and his sidekick Troll make their own entrance.   The basic story is that Condron keeps interfering and trying to steal the spotlight.  Calhoun wants to hit the Magic Move and make the crowd happy, but Condron tells him not to.  So Calhoun hits the Honky Tonk Man’s Shake Rattle & Roll instead, and Condron doesn’t like that either, supposedly because Calhoun’s not being his own man.  Argus does hit the Magic Move, but the Troll distracts the ref, and Calhoun gets the pin with a Rikishi Driver in 5:56.  Condron promptly leaps into the ring to celebrate as if he’d won the match.  Basically there to establish the Condron/Calhoun schtick, which it does very well.

3.  Challenge of the Immortals: The Snake Pit v The Arcane Horde.

This is face-face.  The Batiri (Obariyon & Kodama) represent the Horde, which is sensible, since they’re the regular tag team on that squad.  The Snake Pit are team captain Ophidian with Eddie Kingston.  In a pre-match promo, Ophidian makes clear that Kingston is not being much of a team player, won’t discuss strategy, and hasn’t shown up for the promo we’re now watching.  Still, he has faith that Kingston will fight when the bell rights.  And he’s right up to a point – Kingston does want to win, but he’s also singularly unwilling to take orders, which means the Snake Pit’s teamwork is much less effective than the regular team.  Kingston and Ophidian are good enough to put up a fight regardless, but the Batiri double team Ophidian for the pin in 14:32.  Kingston helps Ophidian up, but then walks off.  Good match, but it’s furthering a Snake Pit angle that never really comes to fruition because Kingston winds up getting diverted to fill the plot gap left by UltraMantis Black’s injury last month.  (Incidentally, at this point in time Mantis is still officially just on the injured list.  He doesn’t announce his retirement until after King of Trios in September.)

4.  Challenge of the Immortals: The Gentleman’s Club v. Dasher’s Dugout.

It’s the complete teams – Chuck Taylor, Orange Cassidy, Drew Gulak and the Swamp Monster versus Dasher Hatfield, Mark Angelosetti, Heidi Lovelace and Icarus.  Backstage, Mark gives an “inspiring” pep talk to his team reminding them how he and Dasher lost the tag titles, and Icarus lost the Grand Championship.  But hey, they’re still doing okay in this tournament.  And Icarus saved the company!  Heidi is still the Young Lions Cup champion (though “you should be defending it more”)!  Dasher is challenging for the Grand Championship tomorrow night!  Let’s do this!  The others seem willing to play along.  All this is foreshadowing Mark’s desperation to get his career back on track by winning the tournament, which will be an emerging theme as the year goes on and leads into a storyline that continues to the present.  It’s a fast-paced comedy match (as you’d expect with the whole Club in play).   Finally, Orange asks Heidi to kiss him, so she kicks him in the head and pins him with the Heidicanrana in 15:48.  The Dugout stay in contention and Mark’s dreams live.

5.  Challenge of the Immortals: The Wrecking Crew v The BDK.

Both teams are rudos, but the round robin format demands that they fight.  It’s a singles match with Jaka for the Wrecking Crew versus Nøkken for the BDK.  In a pre-match promo, BDK leader Jakob Hammermeier sings Jaka’s praises and says – well, shouts – that he has an eye for talent.  Nøkken is understandably a bit put out that Jakob’s promo seems mainly about how great the other guy is.  Nøkken winds up leaving the company before that sort of tension comes to a head, but Jakob will indeed go on to recruit Jaka into the BDK in December.  Anyway, since Nøkken is a giant, Jaka is the visual underdog, so he wrestles as the de facto good guy.  Jakob tries to interfere to help his man, but it backfires, as Jakob accidentally decks Nøkken and Jaka pins him after a spin kick in 11:40.  Better than you’d expect, and one of Nøkken’s best singles matches, but heel-heel is always tough.

6.  Challenge of the Immortals: The United Nations v. The Nightmare Warriors.

Again, these are both rudo teams.  But it’s UN captain Juan Francisco de Coronado against Silver Ant, the token tecnico who Hallowicked drafted into the Nightmare Warriors in an attempt to recruit him.  Silver Ant has wound up as the weak link in the team, more through bad luck than anything else, and the story is the Warriors trying to convince him to be more aggressive and join the rest of his team in the worship of Nazmaldun, god of rot.  It’s a long, back and forth technical match with some great exchanges – your purist showcase for the night – and once again, Silver Ant’s insistence on wrestling clean doesn’t pay off, as Juan sneaks in a low blow (not very visibly) and pins him with a German suplex in 18:12.  Very good match which plays (gently) into Silver Ant’s season-long arc.

The COTI scores at the end of the night: the Wrecking Crew are on 7, the Nightmare Warriors and Dasher’s Dugout are on 5, the Snake Pit, the United Nations, the Battle Hive and the Arcane Horde are all on 4, the BDK are on 3, and the Gentleman’s Club and Crown & Court are in joint last on 2.  So the Wrecking Crew stretch their lead to two points and the Dugout move up into joint second.

7.  Chikara Campeonatos de Parejas: The Devastation Corporation (c) v. Crown & Court 

The latest instalment in this slow-burning feud.  The rudo champions are Max Smashmaster and Blaster McMassive, with their manager Sidney Bakabella; the tecnico challengers are Princess Kimberlee and Jervis Cottonbelly, as already mentioned.  DevCorp pinned Kim in Chikara’s first match of the year, and they’ve already beaten Crown & Court in their first COTI pairing.  But Kim is starting to drag her team in the right direction, and she and Jervis are the stronger half of the team.  Even so, they don’t have much of a chance.

As always with Chikara tag title defences, this is best of three falls.  Despite claiming to be completely relaxed about these challengers, DevCorp attack during the ring announcements and wipe out Jervis with a Black Hole Slam and a powerbomb to win the first fall within a minute.  Kim spends the second fall on her own against the big guys, occasionally escaping them but finding nobody to tag, to her increasing horror and frustration.   It’s kind of fascinating looking back a year and seeing her doing this stuff, because it’s so different from the way her character wrestles by the end of the year and going into 2016 – crucially, she’s much more of a Disney princess here, and she’s much more alarmed at the prospect of going it alone.  At any rate, she finally gives up waiting for help and makes her own comeback, which goes better than expected.   Blaster tries for a superplex – the same move he pinned her with in January – but this time she slips out, powerbombs him, and pins him with the Alligator Clutch to level the match, to her own astonishment.  Through the miracle of wrestling recovery times, Jervis finally makes it back to the ring and gets the Downton Lock on Max.  (It’s an ankle lock.)  Max taps, but Bakabella distracts the ref.  Jervis gets a near fall on Max and the crowd is starting to buy that the good guys could win.  But the Dev Corp get their act together, throw out Kim, and pin Jervis with their Death Blow double team finisher in 12:28.  Excellent storytelling there, both within the match and in the bigger picture of Kim getting personally stronger (note that the DevCorp never manage to pin her tonight).  And it’s all building to a pay off at the end of the year.

Encore match: A rather odd little thing which starts as a singles match between Fire Ant and Missile Assault Ant, only for the Proletariat Boar of Moldova, Oleg the Usurper, Frightmare and Shynron to come out as it goes on.  General chaos ensues  until Oleg and Shynron hit their finishers on Missile and pin him in 6:52.  According to the official results this is a trios match with Fire Ant, Oleg and Shynron as the winners, but you’d never know from watching it.  Fast paced but a bit too confusing to really work.  They try something similar with the encore at “Exit Strategy” in October which works much better.

Worth watching?  It’s a solid show but in storyline terms it’s largely an exercise in burning through tournament matches and a bit of long-term build.  The main event is great, though.  These shows are, of course, on the Chikaratopia subscription streaming service by now.

15.15: “The Immaculate Election”

It’s Sunday 26 July 2015 and we’re at Fete Music in Providence, Rhode Island.  This is an odd venue for Chikara.  It’s a nightclub of some sort, and most of the crowd are standing right up against the ring.  Fortunately there’s enough room to move that they clear out of the way when people want to use the ringside area, but it’s an unusual atmosphere.

1.  Frightmare v. Amasis.

Amasis has two points, so a win here will give him the third point needed for a shot at Hallowicked’s Grand Championship.  The champ’s mini-me sidekick Frightmare is acting as spoiler.  It’s a fast-paced opener; Frightmare hits his Kneecolepsy finisher on the second attempt, but Amasis kicks out and gets the pin with a 450 splash in 5:45.  So Amasis is the next challenger (which is kind of a strong hint to the result of the main event, but so it goes).

2.  Challenge of the Immortals: The BDK v. Dasher’s Dugout.

It’s a tag match.  The BDK are represented by team captain Jakob Hammermeier and the still-brainwashed Soldier Ant.  The Dugout team is Icarus and Heidi Lovelace, with a very intense Mark Angelosetti in their corner.  (Dasher isn’t here because he’s in the main event.)  Soldier Ant isn’t always under Jakob’s control, but today he is, and the BDK have the upper hand throughout.  Heidi heroically kicks out of some of his big moves, and she does get some near falls on him – even though he seems to be impervious to pain thanks to his brainwashing, you can still wrestle the guy to the ground – but but finally Soldier takes her out with a terrifying looking fallaway slam, then pins Icarus with the Trench Slam in 12:27 for the BDK win.  Pretty good, though the match story didn’t really need that much time.

3.  Four corner elimination match: The United Nations v. The BDK v. The Wrecking Crew v. The Batiri.

The winning team gets a point towards a tag title shot for every team they eliminate; none of these guys have any points going in.  (The current leaders in the tag field are N_R_G, with two points, but they’re not working this month.)  The UN team is Juan Francisco de Coronado and the Proletariat Boar of Moldova.  The BDK duo are the loyal henchmen Pinkie Sanchez and Nøkken.  The Wrecking Crew are an interesting pairing – Jaka and Oleg the Usurper.  These two teamed regularly in 2014, but Oleg isn’t part of the Wrecking Crew tournament squad, having been palmed off on the Arcane Horde in the belief that he was a liability.  Bakabella is still trying to assert managerial control over the big lug in order to exploit his singles success and sabotage the Horde.  The dimwitted Oleg seems to have only a hazy understanding of all this.  The Batiri (Obariyon and Kodama) are also members of the Horde, but at this point they don’t much care for Oleg, who they regard as a massive nuisance.

Oleg and Nøkken start, but Jaka promptly tags in, apparently because he wants to continue his fight with Nøkken from the previous night.  They fight and take each other out.  The UN and the Batiri go at it next, and Kodama rolls up de Coronado out of nowhere for a surprise elimination in 6:43.  The BDK immediately (and quite legally) race in to take advantage of the UN’s work by isolating Kodama themselves.  Without Jakob around to yell at them, the two lackies work well together.  Jaka  tags in and distracts the ref as Bakabella nails Obariyon with a shoe.  Oleg doesn’t like that, and Bakabella takes him aside to patiently explain the contract situation again.  While that’s happening, Jaka throws Kodama out of the ring and he lands on Oleg; Bakabella tries to convince him it was a deliberate attack.  Oleg is befuddled.  During this confusion, Nøkken pins Jaka (at 12:42), but Bakabella doesn’t care because it’s all contributing to the wider manipulation of Oleg (and he already manages the tag champions too, so it’s not like he cares about the points).  Sanchez finishes Kodama with a moonsault in 14:22, so the BDK leave the match with two points, both earned cleanly, at least on their part.  It’s been an unusually good night for Jakob’s misfit army, and Nøkken and Sanchez now need only one more point to earn a shot at the tag titles.  We’ll get back to that in September.  A good match with a lot going on that played into the wider picture.  Virtually no direct involvement between Oleg and the Batiri, which I think seemed a bit of an anticlimax at the time, but it’s not an issue in hindsight.

4.  Challenge of the Immortals: Crown & Court v. The Snake Pit.

This is face/face.  It’s an eight-man tag with the full teams: Princess Kimberlee, Jervis Cottonbelly, El Hijo del Ice Cream and Ice Cream Jr for Crown & Court, and Ophidian, Eddie Kingston, Argus and Shynron for the Snake Pit.  In a pre-match promo, Kimberlee accepts that her team isn’t doing very well, that the Ice Creams never win, and that Jervis is too nice for his own good.  But (in a trying-to-convince-herself tone) she insists that she believes in them and we’ll see.  Obviously, the Snake Pit are serving here mainly as the foils for Crown & Court’s storyline, though there’s the side issue that Kingston is not playing well with the rest of his team.

They do some comedy working through the various pairings, and the Ice Creams’ shenanigans exasperate pretty much everyone else in the match.  Things get more serious when Kim tags in to slug it out against Ophidian.  With her directing traffic, Crown & Court manage to keep the upper hand for a while, until the Snake Pit manage to isolate Jervis.  Once again, Kim gets to be the strongest person on her team, standing up to Kingston’s offence.   The match starts to break down and Ophidian and Shynron hit some incredible double teams on Kim (Shynron taking advantage of the fact that it’s a slightly smaller ring tonight to hit a diagonal coast-to-coast dropkick).  C&C debut a new triple team where the Ice Creams throw Kim onto Shynron’s shoulders for a rana.  But he kicks out at 2.  There are some big dives, and Shynron climbs a pillar in order to jump off it.   El Hijo Del Ice Cream decides that this would be an excellent time to pinch Eddie Kingston’s arse, which predictably gets him nailed with the Backfist To The Future.  Shynron pins him with an assisted 450 in a mighty 20:44 to win the match for the Snake Pit.  Great stuff.  Very long, but there were enough phases to the match (and enough different characters involved) to make it work.

Jervis complains that while Kim is doing a great job as team leader, the Ice Creams are letting the side down.  Kim tells him to wait and he’ll see.  This is leading to a segment on the next show where she attempts to inspire them.

5.  Blaster McMassive v. Silver Ant.

A rematch from “Sword of Destiny” last month, when Silver Ant won after Blaster passed out in a submission hold.  It’s a Magic Move match, and the move is a triangle choke.  They have a good competitive match, vaguely of the power versus skill type – not that you really get pure power guys in Chikara, where even Blaster has dives in his repertoire.  The commentators try to sell the idea that Silver’s association with the Nightmare Warriors is making him more aggressive, though how much that’s apparent from the actual match is rather debatable.  Silver gets the triangle choke, but Blaster makes the ropes, then hits a black hole slam and Liger bomb for the clean win in 10:48.   The ending’s a bit abrupt.  I’m not a big fan of parity booking either, but it works okay here, since it fits the wider story of Blaster developing as a singles wrestler (he makes a point of reversing moves that worked against him last time) and Silver Ant struggling to gain momentum as a member of the Nightmare Warriors.

Kevin Condron, Lucas Calhoun and the Troll come to the ring, with the backpack that they stole from Missile Assault Ant at “Shock and Aww” last month.  Kevin explains that Missile Assault Ant used to be a member of Condor Security, the henchmen for the evil owners from a few years back.  He produces a diary from Missile’s backpack and starts to read it.  Missile runs in to retrieve it, but Lucas and the Troll hold him down.  Kevin then claims that while he was a Condor mercenary, Missile blew up a school bus full of Zimbabwean children.  Yes, really.  He demands that Missile acknowledge his guilt in order to free himself from his guilt.  The crowd rather generously chant “We forgive you”.  Kevin tells Missile that it wasn’t his fault because he was following orders.  I think the idea is that he was brainwashed, like Volgar was, though it really doesn’t come across as a clearly as that.  At Kevin and Lucas’s prompting, and after much stalling, Missile unmasks.

I’ve never been sold on this segment, even though the performances are good.  The school bus thing does fit the story idea, which appears to be that the Colony: Xtreme Force – who were always at best eccentric – were all psychologically damaged former soldiers who Condor dumped on Chikara to get a last bit of use out of them and to torment the Chikara regulars by mocking them.  But it feels tonally off for the show, and probably more specific and over the top than it really needed to be.  At any rate, this segment leaves Condron with the team he wanted for the King of Trios tournament in September.  Condron is obviously hoping that Missile Assault Ant will shake off his Condor persona entirely and emerge as a functional, cheerful, subservient henchman, just like Lucas did.  As we’ll see, it doesn’t work out quite like that…

6.  Challenge of the Immortals: The Gentleman’s Club v. The Battle Hive.

A trios match – Chuck Taylor, Drew Gulak and The Swamp Monster for the Gentleman’s Club against Ashley Remington, Fire Ant and Worker Ant for the Battle Hive.  Technically the Club are the heels here, but they’re so beloved that it doesn’t really matter.  Anyway, Taylor pins Fire Ant clean with the Awful Waffle in 14:01, and that gets the Club out of joint last.  Fun match with a lot of comedy in it, as you’d expect with these guys.  The tournament scores at the end of the weekend have the Wrecking Crew with a clear lead on 7, the Nightmare Warriors, the Snake Pit and Dasher’s Dugout all on 5, the United Nations, BDK, Battle Hive and Arcane Horde on 4, the Gentleman’s Club on 3, and Crown & Court on 2.

7.  CHIKARA Grand Championship: Hallowicked (c) v. Dasher Hatfield.

This is Hallowicked’s third defence.  In a pre-match promo, he says that all warriors are ultimately the same and that he believes the saintly Dasher will compromise his principles to win the title.  Hallowicked has Frightmare in his corner.  Oddly, none of the Dugout are there – with hindsight, it would have made sense for Mark Angelosetti to be there.  Hallowicked works the midsection for a while, hitting his Go 2 Sleepy Hollow (a Go 2 Sleep to the midsection, basically) twice.  Dasher gets 2 from an exploder suplex and tries for his Jackhammer finisher, but the damage stops him getting Hallowicked up.  Eventually he blocks a third Go 2 Sleepy Hollow, and hits the Jackhammer, but he’s slow to cover, and it gets 2.  The crowd is surprisingly divided, which is really not the desired response, but at least they’re into the match.  Hallowicked gets the title belt, but then thinks better of using it.  The ref is bumped while removing the title belt from the ring.  Dasher teases using the belt as a weapon, but then throws it aside.  That’s the pay off for the promo, I guess.  Dasher hits the Grand Slam (a top rope powerslam) for 2.  He tries for the Chikara Special submission, but Hallowicked blocks and applies it himself.  Dasher submits in 14:22.  For long-time viewers, the Chikara Special used to be an all-purpose finishing hold for Chikara babyfaces to use against invaders, and it’s All Kinds Of Wrong to have Hallowicked using it as heel champion.  Good main event, basically feeding another strong opponent to Hallowicked – but it’ll also feed into the Dugout’s storyline by dashing Mark’s hopes of getting some titles back into the stable.

No encore on this one, for some reason – the ring announcer’s farewell remarks suggest they were running it as a double bill with another promotion, which might be why.

Worth watching?  It’s a strong show.  The Condron/Missile segment doesn’t really work for me, but it’s good wrestling and storytelling up and down the card.

Just one proper show to go before King of Trios in September…