It’s time for another edition of the Puroresu Press where we will be talking about various news, rumors, and all sorts of goodies involving the Puroresu scene. Wasn’t much to go on in the previous week but now, we got a lot to cover for your reading pleasure. So let’s get to it, shall we?
Keiji Mutoh Producing A Show For New Year’s Eve!
You heard it right, Keiji Mutoh will be producing a special event to end the year of 2019 called the Wonder Carnival. It’s a cross-promotional show involving Wrestle-1, All Japan Pro Wrestling, and Dragon Gate. The event will take place at the Edion Arena in Osaka, Japan. As of right now, there is no official card for the show but we do have some confirmed participants that will be listed at the bottom of this piece. If this show goes well, then it could lead to hopefully more cross-promotional shows along with a future partnership between all three of these promotions. So be sure to be on the lookout for official matches announced in the upcoming weeks.
Confirmed so far
Wrestle-1:
Keiji Mutoh
AJPW:
Jun Akiyama
Takao Omori
Zeus
Dragon Gate:
Masaaki Mochizuki
Kzy
Genki Horiguchi
Freelancers:
The Bodyguard
Jiro “Ikemen” Kuroshio
Pro Wrestling NOAH Not Announcing a Card for January 5th Show?!
For those that are aware, Pro Wrestling NOAH has announced that they’ll be having shows on both January 4th and 5th, which are the same days as New Japan’s big event, Wrestle Kingdom. For the 4th, both shows will be live around the same time, so for that one, you’ll need to go to one or the other. On January 5th, however, NOAH will be having their show in the morning, meaning you can go to this show and make it in time for day two of Wrestling Kingdom.
That all sounds great but here’s one problem with that. It’s apparently confirmed that they won’t be having an official card announced before the event and everything is going to be a surprise when the wrestler is revealed by their theme music. So it looks like we won’t be expecting any big title matches on this event as they’ll most likely be on the 4th show. While NOAH gets a lot of credit for taking a risk at having two shows the same day as Wrestle Kingdom and of course you’re going to have fans wanna attend both or at least one of those events.
Since you could go to both promotions on the 5th, it seems like a good idea to do but at the same time, they might not wanna go without an official card since we might not expect anything big to happen to peak their interest. So if you’re going to Japan around this time like myself, this is something to think about if you really wanna see NOAH in person or if you wanna be surprised before Wrestle Kingdom.
All Japan Pro Wrestling Announces Junior Heavyweight Tournament!
We sadly lost Atsushi Aoki a few months ago while he was the Junior Heavyweight Champion and Jun Akiyama would announce that they’ll let Aoki hold onto the reign for six months after his death out of respect for everything he’s done for the company. Six months have now passed since he won the championship and it’s now time to crown a new champion. We will have four shows involving the event on November 21st, December 17th, and January 2 & 3, 2020.
We will have two of the first matches on both November and December shows where January 2nd will have the semi-final, and January 3rd is where we will crown a new Junior Heavyweight Champion. Now seems like the right time to move forward with the junior division as they’ve been rather impressive this year and this could now see who will lead the future of this division in 2020 as Atsushi Aoki has done over the years. Listed below will be the official participants of the tournament.
Koji Iwamoto
Fuminori Abe
Atsushi Maruyama
Susumu Yokosuka (DG)
Black Menso~Re
Hikaru Sato
Yusuke Okada
KAGETORA (DG)
New Japan Pro Wrestling Is Making Action Figures!
Now, who doesn’t love pro wrestling action figures on the Puroresu Press? They’ve been apart of every wrestling fan’s childhood and for some, it still carries over to them years later. During a toy collection in July, Zack Ryder got confirmation from Super7 that they will be producing action figures for New Japan Pro Wrestling, While that’s great since fans have been wanting to get action figures of them and with Storm Collectibles making Jyushin Thunder Liger as a figure, it’s every Puroresu fans dream.
A couple of weeks ago, Super7 has released a video with some prototype images of the first wave of action figures. For the first wave, they will have Kazuchika Okada, Hiroshi Tanahashi, Will Ospreay, and Tomohiro Ishii and all four of these figures look amazing. They have the same detail and articulation of a regular WWE Mattel Elite figure and any one of these four is a must grab.
On the Super7 website, they said pre-orders for them will only be available between November 1st to November 30th.
It looks like they’ll only be making the number of figures depending on the purchases for the duration of the month. Each figure is about $45 due to the limited quality it looks like and our only expected shipping date for them is in June 2020. As a little treat, I’ll post the links of the New Japan Figures from Super7, Jyushin Thunder Liger from Storm Collectibles, and Lucha Bros from Legends of Lucha Libre, who are also available during the summertime.
Jyushin Liger:
It can be seen here.
NJPW Figures:
It can be seen here.
Lucha Bros:
It is available here.
This will conclude our time for this week’s Puroresu Press and I hope you have enjoyed this read. I’ll be sure to have more content within the next edition of the Puroresu Press. Thank you for taking the time out of your day to read and enjoy the rest.
