Tuesday, June 14, 2005

Survival Tobita, Kaiju Battler

The beasts that run roughshod over at Kaiju Big Battel better not dare head over to Japan anytime soon. Because not only does Japan get its share of kaiju attacks as it is, but they've got Survival Tobita. Who exactly is Survival Tobita? His T-shirt says it best:

KNOCK OUT ALL ENEMY!  ATTACK ALL MONSTERS!

Actually, I believe the real shirt may in fact say "Destroy all monsters!" but whatever. Survival Tobita ran a tiny, TINY, Japanese indy wrestling federation called Saitama Pro in which every month he'd fight a different evil monster which was set to threaten Japan's stability if not for his vigilance. Now, NON BELIEVERS may want to note that just about all of these monsters are actually another guy Naoshi Sano in some outlandish getup, but THEY'RE MONSTERS YOU HEAR ME?!

Here's some of the many foes Survival Tobita has faced off against. First, Ape Virgon, a monkey who'd hump the ringpost and has an off the top rope manuever that is just TOO DEADLY to spoil:

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Then there's Automatic Warrior. I have no idea what he's supposed to be, but he has a deadly sort of "chain with a sawblade at the end" thing.

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Notice that there's no ring. Unless invited to some other federation, rings were never used because Saitama Pro was too tiny to afford the cost of owning one. Instead, all battles are conducted on tatami mats inside high school gymnasiums, WHICH IS WHERE THE FRONT LINES OF THE BATTLEFIELD ALWAYS ARE.

Bauxite Medium carried two large metal boxes, moved at a snail's pace, and probably couldn't actually see, but that didn't mean he wasn't a MENACE.

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And finally, there's Survival Tobita's most dangerous (and well-known) adversary: Mokujin Ken, aka Ken the Box. Despite not being able to actually enter inside of a ring, his devastating "Swinging Branch Punch" (which looks remarkably similar to the monkey dance) is so effective that even Survival Tobita is powerless:

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CAN ANYONE CHOP THIS BIG TREE DOWN? Personally, even though Mokujin Ken is Survival Tobita's deadliest adversary, I'd say this terrible monster was the most terrifying:

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I made encodes of all these "matches" (except for the one against the cosplay masker since I don't have that) to send to Phil, but Phil hasn't been answering his emails for the last few weeks. Check your inbox, man!

4 comments:

Unknown said...

After reading all of this I have to ask: Do they have Backyard Wrestling in Japan?

Unknown said...

Is there a Survival Tobita DVD or VHS out or is this something that's being torrented?

Daryl Surat said...

I captured all of this footage myself from a VHS tape compilation entitled "The Legendary Battles of Survival Tobita," which is now somewhat of a rarity due to the fact that the guy who made it vanished off the face of the planet after taking a bunch of people's money.

See, despite the onset of BitTorrent, many of the Japanese wrestling tape traders are still very much entrenched in the old 80s mentality of "charge $10-$20 a tape for stuff you copied." Sure, some of them have DVD-Rs, but the attitude remains.

Some of the bootleggers made so much money that they started their own wrestling federations for the sake of owning their own footage and selling the shows. The premier independent wrestling organization in the US, Ring of Honor, is a good example of this.

Unknown said...

That's a great idea. We'll rent out a high school gym and get some Japanese wrestlers and maybe some Luchadors from Mexico. Heck, find some of the great retired wrestlers and make a day of it. Set up some tables for selling merchandise, and some tables for autographs and film everything and sell the DVDs on eBay...