Catch me up on the last decade of Indie Professional Wrestling

August 8, 2014 3:25 AM

I've recently, sparked by Colt Cabana's podcast, come to love Indie Professional Wrestling and would like to check out it's recent-ish history. What would you recommend as the standout events from the last decade?

I particularly love what I've seen of Chikara ("You only Live Twice" and "High Noon") and PWG ("Steen Wolf"). I don't like "extreme" blood all over the place stuff at all. It would be preferable if the events were available as video downloads as I live in Australia and the postage is a killer. Thanks!

posted by coleboptera to Sports, Hobbies, & Recreation (6 answers total)

Best answer: This may be a question that would have a better response on Reddit. (I'm also a wrestling fan, their communities are pretty active and prone to sharing youtubes and such, especially /r/squaredcircle).
posted by softlord at 7:41 AM on August 8, 2014 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Hey, we have a wrestling community here! I'm too new to wrestling to know much about the indie wrestling scene but I just posted a heads up in our Raw FanFare thread asking folks to chime in here.
posted by misskaz at 7:53 AM on August 8, 2014

Best answer: The preeminent American indy is Ring of Honor. I don't know whether their VOD cards are available outside the U.S., but try their YouTube channel.
posted by Etrigan at 8:00 AM on August 8, 2014

Best answer: If you can find the early releases of IWS (French Canadian, Internet Wrestling Syndicate, later International Wrestling Syndicate), maybe along with their online show (IWS Bloodstream), I recommend to check it out. They are no longer active, but were the place where people like Kevin Steen, Franky The Mobster, El Generico and others started. IWS had hardcore/ultraviolent matches, but extremly limited (a few a year) to keep them special. All their death match workers actually can wrestle and were not exclusively in ultraviolent matches. They were quite gimmicky at times, and if that is what you like about Chikara, you'll appreciate the same thing here. (Despite being French Canadians promoting in Quebec, the DVDs and most of the live shows had English commentary, save for a few workers who only spoke French by gimmick.)
According to wikipedia, they are going to promote again. (I'm out of the loop myself, so no idea if that is true.)

CZW's "Best of the Best" tournament has always been excellent (no idea about recent years, but you asked for the last decade). It's an annual lightweight tournament and one of their most successful shows. It should easily be available on DVD. Other than that, CZW always had a lean toward ultraviolence/death matches, so I'd avoid their other big shows.
posted by MinusCelsius at 1:01 PM on August 8, 2014

Response by poster: IWS and CZW are good tips, thanks - I have seen a few ROH shows, the recent "War of the Worlds" event with NJPR in particular was fantastic. With Chikara and PWG it's their general lightheartedness and celebratory nature that's great - hardcore matches don't appeal to me because they're just kinda grim and I end up being too worried for the wrestlers. Thanks for giving the heads-up in FanFare, it didn't occur to me; Reddit did occur to me but I'd really like to avoid there if possible though maybe my general aversion can be put aside for the love of wrestling.

The problem I'm having is that every one of these promotions puts out a lot of dvds and has been doing so for years. I'm totally frozen by the tyranny of choice!
posted by coleboptera at 9:33 PM on August 8, 2014

Response by poster: Thanks everyone. Turns out variations on questions like this are asked regularly on /r/squaredcircle and the pwg forums so that's probably the best way to go.
posted by coleboptera at 9:19 PM on September 7, 2014