CHIKARMY Insider at 20,000 Feet! (Season 10 Premiere Preview + Much More)

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Welcome everyone to the first new CHIKARMY Insider of 2011! Twenty Eleven! TWO ZERO ONE ONE!!! Not only is this column back and better than ever, CHIKARA Pro is returning, too. They have a brand new Director of Fun in Wink Vavasseur, a new owner in the WMD Corporation, their website has been streamlined & revamped and they’ve already announced five matches for their Season Premiere show taking place Sunday, January 23rd in Philadelphia. Also on tap this week: a list of the other announced dates, a word from Larry Sweeney, breakdowns on each of the five announced matches for Philly and so much more! Press on, Intrepid Reader!
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CHIKARA Is Under New Management!

It has been hinted at for quite some time now, but reality has set in and Chikara Pro has been bought out! The company in question, Worldwide Media Development Corporation, announced the purchase on January 3rd of this year on their official site, which you can view here. Here is there statement: “Worldwide Media Development Corporation (WMDC) of Reseda, CA is proud to announce the acquisition of CHIKARA, Inc. / Five Star Promotions of Philadelphia, PA, effective today. Robert Lippincott, Executive Director for WMDC finalized the agreement of sale through the assistance of Karen Wright, acting vice-president of acquisitions. ‘Karen (Wright) and Anton (Frady) deserve all the credit for bringing this exciting property to Worldwide. After nine seasons of reinventing an entire genre from the bottom up, CHIKARA is the premiere brand in its field, and it’s time for the rest of the world to find out why.’ It is expected that some of the directors from CHIKARA / Five Star will remain on during the transitional period. ‘I understand that Dave Coulier has an office there,” Lippincott remarked, “and I’d really look forward to doing lunch with him (laughs).’” What this means for the future is anyone’s guess. The company is based out of Reseda, California, same as the popular west-coast independent Pro Wrestling Guerrilla. On the Chikara101 message board, a comment I made regarding my hopes that Dino Winwood would be involved in all of this has mysterious vanished. I’d never claim censorship or anything like that, so whatever the reason that happened, you’re getting my opinion here. Ah, the benefits of having a column…
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CHIKARA Announces Tons of 2011 Events!

Season 10 is growing near and Chikara has announced a plethora of events for the first half of the year! Thanks to one Wink Vavasseur, King of Trios makes its return to Philadelphia in April after former Director Dieter VonSteigerwalt tried to abolish it. Chikara is also making a huge return and a huge debut: New York in March, North Carolina in May! In addition to all of this, the company will hold its first non-tournament triple shot weekend in quite some time as they tour the Midwest in June! And these are just the events they’ve announced so far! Here’s the complete list:

• Chaos in the Sea of Lost Souls – Sunday, January 23rd – Philadelphia, PA
• Caught in a Cauldron of Hate – Saturday, February 19th – Reading, PA
• Clutch of Doom – Sunday, February 20th – Easton, PA
• Operation Big Freeze – Saturday, March 12th – Williamsport, PA
• Creatures from the Tar Swamp – Sunday, March 13th – Brooklyn, NY
• King of Trios 2011 – April 15th, 16th and 17th – Philadelphia, PA
• Engulfed in a Fever of Spite – Saturday, May 14th – Burlington, NC
• Aniversario: The Legendary Super Powers Show – Sunday, May 22nd – Union City, NJ
• The Case of the Bulletproof Waldo – Friday, June 24th – Chicago, IL
• A Demon in His Pocket – Saturday, June 25th – Taylor, MI
• The Evil That Lies Within, Part 4 – Sunday, June 26th – Cleveland, OH

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Jakob Hammermeier Wants Revenge!

After having perhaps the most tumultuous season for any debuting Chikara mainstay in its history, the ever-reviled announcer of the BDK Jakob Hammermeier appears to have had enough. He’s taken Backfists, Death Valley Drivers, stunners and more. By season’s end, he was in a neck brace, arm sling and leg cast. Now, it appears, he’s had enough! Watch Here.
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The Portal Ponders A New Member!

Quite a while ago, after besting The UnStable at Chikarasaurus Rex to be precise, The Osirian Portal made it clear that, while they were a dynamic tag team, the Egyptian faction needed a third member. Drake Younger, who helped Amasis & Ophidian get the win at C-Rex, has his own goals. Former member Escorpion Egipcio is nowhere to be found…thankfully. They took their sweet time finding someone but finally, at the Season 9 Finale, they gave the relatively unknown Jonathan Gresham a shot in the group. Gresham was electric, getting the crowd behind him and helping The Portal obtain a win over the Bruderschaft. Needless to say, the move was a surprising and smashing success! Now Gresham is being put to the test to find out if he has what it takes to join up with “The Funky Pharaoh” and the reigning Rey de Voladores. As the theme song dictates: foreign types with the hookah pipes say ay oh whey oh, ay oh wh…wait. I mean: walk like and Egyptian. That’s only step one though. You gotta talk like an Egyptian, too!
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“Sweet & Sour” Sounds Off!

One of the icons of Chikara was kind enough to drop off a huge blog on the revamped Chikara site. Larry Sweeney, last seen taking out Pinkie Sanchez at The Dark Ciberkentico, had quite a lot on his mind. “Hey CHIKARA fans!” he wrote. “Your old pal ‘Sweet ‘n’ Sour’ here, with a special holiday disbatch from the bayou! Whenever the holidays roll around, I like to take an account of what’s going on in my life; the people, places, so on and so forth. And seeing as one of the highlights of my year was my return to CHIKARA, I thought I’d send a little shout out to, as the great Iron Sheik would put it, ‘all my intelligent wrestling fans.’ This past year has been a good one. After getting my fair share of maxing and relaxing under my belt at the bungalow in Redondo Beach, I thought I might go about arranging a little change of scenery. Shake things up, hit the road a bit. It’s a good thing for the blood, a good thing for my Sweet ‘n’ Sour spirit. So far, I’ve wrestled in 31 states and five countries, and won the glorious ICW/ICWA Texarkana Television Title a record 27 times. As I’ve gone about working on my wrestling resume, I’ve lived in a number of different locales, and they were all good spots. I also put in a fair bit of time in India, where I first decided to become a professional wrestler, and a destination to which I do long, someday, to return. So, in considering what I wanted my immediate geographical surroundings to be, I had a number of places on my mind. But in, the end, there was no contest: it was time to go back to where it all began. The two-lane highways, cold cup of coffee in my hand, doing the calisthenics when I got too tired to drive on. It was time to go back to The Loop. The Loop!!!! What a great place. My home away from home. A place where I’ve put in plenty of time, but never a place that I’ve actually called home. A few phone calls and an express train ride later, and I was in that great mecca of Shreveport, Louisiana. And you know what? Just as I suspected, I love it down here. Between the cajun cooking, the pace of life, and those vivacious Southern debutantes, the living is easy and the living is good. Coinciding with my move down South was a return to professional wrestling after an extended time off. I’d been gone for a while, but once I returned to a region where I have so many memories and the roads that so many of the true greats of the business have ridden, my return was inevitable and it felt GREAT. And with my return to wrestling, I became aware of what the lay of the land looked like up in CHIKARA. I’d kept up with my old buddy and longtime spiritual mentor, the devious UltraMantis Black, but he hadn’t told me how out-of-control things had gotten with the BDK running roughshod over everybody in their path. When I heard what the lay of the land was like, I uppped my training just in case what I suspected might be true. He told me of his trials and tribulations in assembling a CHIKARA team for the all-important Cibernetico that transcended previous boundaries and disagreements between CHIKARA’s originals – the Allentown boys. The formative days of the Wrestle Factory unite a unique group of us in a way that might be hard to comprehend. Claudio and I still have a lot of bad blood, and when the devious one finally asked me to join forces with him, I was more than ready. But to give us a psychological edge in this war, we decided to borrow a tact from the BDK themselves. Watching the events of the previous year unfold, it was obvious how Ares and his goons sought to undermine the confidence of CHIKARA’s major players. Betrayals. Sleeper Agents. Intimidation. I guess we figured it was time to unnerve the BDK a little bit. So we targeted the least stable, and least intelligent of their group – Pinkie Sanchez. (And that’s saying something when Delirious is on the team.) And we made him live out a nightmare in the weeks leading up to the Cibernetico? And you know what? It worked like a charm – because the same guy who won last year’s Cibernetico was the first one eliminated this time around. By me – Sweet n’ Sour daddy! My return to CHIKARA, while brief, is a memory that I will always cherish. Louisiana might be a good fit as my current home-away-from-home, but when it comes to the fans and the good friends that I have in this business, nothing beats returning to CHIKARA. It was one of the loudest reactions that I’ve ever been a part of, definitely the most emotional, and everything just felt right that night in Easton. And then it was over. I gave all I could that night, and then it was back to laying out in the Louisiana sun, perfecting my Texas two-step at the local honky tonks, and getting down with boudin and cracklins (if you don’t know what these are, do yourself a favor and get down here.) But with that one night back, I solidified all of my connections with my friends in the CHIKARA locker room as well as the fans, and believe me, I’ve got the inside scoop on what’s going on. Don’t count me down, and don’t count me out…not by a longshot. I’ve got unfinished business in CHIKARA, and when the time is right, I’ll be around to settle the score. Meanwhile, I’ll be hitting the loop and honing my game down here, and when the time is right…? Watch out. 12 Large, brother!”
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An Update from Rogue Brains on Rudo Resurrection!

The collective known as Rogue Brains, who have been diligently working on the Chikara video game Rudo Resurrection for quite some time, dropped off their first real production blog in over half a year: “Hello loyal fans of CHIKARA, gamers that love beat’em up style arcade classics, and all of you wonderful spammers that inundate our inbox with comments to approve on our blog. We have a little blog here for you. We realize that we haven’t kept our promise to provide regular updates about Rudo Resurrection, but the fact is that the updates were more time consuming than we anticipated and they ended up being slightly disruptive to members of the team so early on in the process. We decided that we wanted them to use their time to work on the game and not have to prep marketing assets and write developer journals. Work on the game is moving forward even though we have hit our snags and technical issues, but we’re still forging ahead and hope to provide more information about when you might be able to get this game in your hands in the not-too-distant future™. Now on to the stuff you really want to know. Previously we had announced four of the CHIKARA stars that would be playable characters in Rudo Resurrection but we know you all clamored for more. So as a token of our appreciation for your patience, we have decided to give you a (nearly) complete roster of all of the characters that will be playable. We may have a few surprises up our sleeves and there may be some cameos here and there that we’ll reveal later, but here is the confirmed list:

• Fire Ant, Green Ant, Soldier Ant, Eddie Kingston, Jigsaw, Mike Quackenbush, Hallowicked, Frightmare, Ophidian, Amasis, Dasher Hatfield and Sugar Dunkerton

So there you have it. Let the debate begin. Is your favorite CHIKARA star listed? If not, who would you like to see as a playable character? You never know, they might just show up in the game in another fashion. And we still haven’t listed all the enemies you’ll be fighting…but that’s an update for another day, folks. Before we wrap this up, we had one more surprise for you. We’d like to share some of the concept art of three of the playable characters. The 3D models of these characters were modeled based off of these concepts and they will look very similar to what you see here. We hope you enjoy them. Your pals @ Rogue Brains”
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In perhaps all of Chikara, no two teams have more beef with the Bruderschaft than Mike Quackenbush & Jigsaw and Fire Ant & Soldier Ant. The Colony was decimated by the BDK last year, with Claudio Castagnoli & Ares claiming their tag team titles as well as defeating them in the finals of King of Trios. Soldier Ant failed to capture the Young Lions Cup from Tim Donst and Fire Ant went on a long losing streak and suffered a foot injury, putting him out for a large part of the year. Near the end of the year though, the duo seemed to find their rhythm and are currently holding two points towards a title shot. Current tag champions Quack & Jigsaw went down a similar path as well. Every time the duo gained two points, The Bruderschaft positioned a team in their way to block along with their referee Derek Sabato. That combination was enough to rob QuackenSaw of three points on two separate occasions. They managed to accumulate all three points in one night during a four way elimination tag match, besting Sara Del Rey & Daizee Haze on the final fall to earn it. At Reality is Relative, they beat the odds and became Campeones de Parejas. Now it’s the BDK who are looking for some revenge. Claudio & Ares want their titles back. Tim Donst, after pinning eight different former YLC champs throughout the season, may look to add to his resume with a win over his teacher Mike Quackenbush. You can’t count out Delirious in this either, as he played a big role in all of the BDK’s successful defenses of the tag titles. Claudio recently stated on the Chikara Blog, “I am the best in CHIKARA. The best, bar none. And I prove it every time I step in the ring.” Jigsaw was quick to respond, saying, “If you wanted to make the argument that Frightmare is CHIKARA’s best, he’s got the Young Lions Cup to back up his claim. But as far as I’m concerned, the guys with the golden belts, the Campeones de Parejas are the best CHIKARA has to offer. No single person is bigger than a promotion’s championship, Claudio, no matter how big their ego might be.” With the events of the season finale seemingly turning the tide in the Chikara vs. BDK Wars, for the first time since they’ve arrived, it’s the Bruderschaft who need the win.
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As crazy as it sounds, El Generico has not been in a Chikara ring since Night 3 of King of Trios 2009! How in the world Chikara fans made it a full year without Generico is mindboggling, but we don’t have to wait long before seeing him in there in 2011. As fate would have it, on the same show we last saw Generico, Eddie Kingston took on Austin Aries, defeating him in dominant fashion. The moment was significant for many reasons: it saw him prevail in Eddie’s most notable singles match to date, started a still-active trend with Kingston facing a multitude of dream opponents like Christopher Daniels & Bryan Danielson and it started “The Last of a Dying Breed” on an early 2009 singles win streak that only ended (under extreme controversy) at the hands of Claudio Castagnoli. For the first time in their careers, these two men will go one on one. Some might say that Generico, after his long ROH feud with partner Kevin Steen, may still be banged up coming into this. I say that, injuries or not, El Generico has proved that he can put down any loud-mouthed, overweight, risk-taking brawler, whether they’re from Yonkers or Quebec.
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At Scornucopia, Grizzly Redwood & Brodie Lee reunited as The Roughnecks once again. They beat down Dasher Hatfield after his match with Buck Hawke, mocking him as he was sprawled on the mat bleeding badly from his nose. Sugar Dunkerton arrived to check on him, but Dasher was too furious for words, grabbing the bat he’s had since he debuted and embarking on a man hunt for The Roughnecks. The next night, it was The Throwbacks who jumped The Roughnecks, leading to a frenzied brawl that once again left the Throwbacks lying…on their backs. They finally fought in an official match at the Season Finale, where The Throwbacks scored the victory but still suffered yet another beating after the match. This time, Grizzly made it personal. He used Dasher’s bat to lay them out and took it with him afterwards. They will square off once again at the Season Premiere and after what Grizzly did to the Dasher’s bat, you can expect the violence to escalate once again.
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Before last year’s Season Finale show in Reading, I could not conjure the name of a more maniacal, egotistical human being / angry insect than UltraMantis Black. He’s belittled Hydra, beaten down Hallowicked and had to hypnotize himself a friend in Delirious. He lost everything in his war against the Bruderschaft, but in starting over he seemed to gain some confidence while having to fight by himself. He gained wins over Delirious, Ares and even Hallowicked, all of which were down post Neo Solar Temple. He had two druids who stood with him on commentary, but he never called for them. At The Germans, in a hellacious Falls Count Anywhere Match against Ares, all of this changed. He beckoned for their assistance, sliding back into the sinister leader that accrued him so many losses. He spat in karma’s face once again, and once again he was punished. His druids, who would turn out to be Obariyon and Kodama, were called away from helping Mantis by another. Ares blasted Black with a chair and pinned him in the center of the ring. The next night, after losing to Hallowicked, it was revealed that Mantis had taken in three creatures he wanted for his Dark Army known as The Batiri. The hooded man who beckoned them back at The Germans was the same man Mantis asked to train them: Sinn Bodhi, also known as Kizarny. Bodhi angrily demanded the Eye of Tyr, something Mantis has not had for quite some time. Sinn then sicked Obariyon, Kodama and the third, unnamed creature on Mantis. Bodhi, who still holds the Kizarny moniker as if it carries a shred of residual Entertainment weight, has kept the Batiri and proven to be just as if not more fanatical than Black himself. UltraMantis appeared to have learned nothing from his fight with the BDK…or so it seemed. Minutes before these revelations came to light he congratulated Hallowicked on a hard-fought win and suggested a truce between them. He didn’t offer him a spot in an army, a shot at being his sidekick or as his lackey. He simply wanted to be on the same side again. In the end, Wicked and Frightmare saved Black from a terrible beating at the hands of Bodhi. Now, at the season premiere, Mantis will do battle with a man just as devious as he is. So the question remains: can Mantis fight off Bodhi, The Batiri and his own ego?
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The war between the Bruderschaft and Da Soul Touchaz trio of Acid Jaz, Marshe Rockett and Willie Richardson is just as personal as the BDK’s fight against Chikara Pro. For the first time since the appalling attack they suffered at The Germans that ended the careers of C.Red and Dymond, DST will get their hands on members of the Bruderschaft. Both Rockett and Jaz commented on the group’s status and headspace on the Chikara Blog. “These are trying times for me, Willie and Jaz.” Marshe wrote. “Seeing Red and Dymond attacked by the thugs of the BDK has changed us. Changed our outlook about wrestling, and about life. We’ve been flooded with e-mails and messages from people asking us what’s next. Where do Da Soul Touchaz go from here? Well, the second Red told all of us he and Dymond were done – not because they chose to step away, but because of what the BDK pulled in the ring – I personally fell to my knees and couldn’t get back up. These 2 people have guided every step of my career, they’re like family to me. I owe them everything. When I think back to November 21st, in that cold back room of the ECW Arena, where Red and Dymond were in such bad shape they couldn’t even talk to their own children to tell them what had happened…to hear their little girls crying and screaming over the phone asking me where’s my mommy and daddy? Why won’t they be home for Thanksgiving? It was unbearable. Infuriating. I would rather be smacked upside the head with a steel chair before witnessing anything like that again. While all of this is quite painful and still seems surreal, I know deep down Red and Dymond want us to stay strong and keep touching souls. And make no mistake about it, that’s exactly what we’re going to do!” Jaz commented two weeks later, this time with a biting message for the Bruderschaft: “Point One: The so called “King of Trios” were defeated by a team that didn’t even qualify for the tournament. Imagine that? Guess you were ready for all the CHIKARA regulars, but you weren’t ready for us. Point Two: All year long, Da Soul Touchaz stepped up and answered the challenge of the BDK and did what no one else could do – we shut’em down every single time. You wage war on too many fronts, guess what happens? Last, and probably the most pertinent: Since you couldn’t beat us in the ring, you took something away from Da Soul Touchaz – you took Red & Dymond. WOW! How big and bad are you? Cheap-shotting us from behind and beating up on a manager and valet…and for what? Because you’re frustrated? Because you can’t actually bully us around? Da Soul Touchaz don’t back down. We cower from no team…ever. You wanna play the numbers game then cool – but you better knuckle up and guard your grill, ’cause we don’t play games! You said “A War is Coming.” You were right. Da Soul Touchaz are born and bred for competition! And we just declared war ON YOU!”
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– Please leave any comments or questions you might have and I’ll do my best to respond with as many creepy Romanian incantations as I can conjure. I’d like to do a contest or something cool like that, but I’m not sure how much interest there’d be. Let your voice be heard! Also, let me know if there’s anything you’d like to see in the column, like fantasy booking, treasure hunts, wish-lists, secret handshakes, etc.

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