New York City's first live monster wrestling event took place on June 9, 2001, in a Tribeca performance space.
To understand Kaiju, think of art nerds from Boston making their own Japanese B-movie monster costumes and getting into backyard wrestling.
Except these are heavily tattooed art nerds that have taken a lot of martial arts classes. Reviewers like to call the Kaiju events "performances", but I
think that's too arty. It's creative, it's funny as hell, and it kicks ass!
The event on Saturday got underway with several DJs spinning for a couple of hours, which was cool -- SoundLab had
dumped their songs onto Nintendo cartridges, and was playing directly from Nintendo game systems hooked into
big amplifier stacks. It was ninety-five degrees in the space, though; by the time the Battel was scheduled at 12:30 AM, everyone was sweaty and hollering for the show.
A Lucky Strikes table at the front of the room handed out disposable black-and-white cameras along with packs of cigarettes; here are the shots!
Kaiju monster Multi-Moog makes his appearance at the back of the room.
The monsters file by on their way to the arena.
Dino Kang Junior (who seems to be scaring the audience.)
Kung-fu Chicken Soup.
First round: Pablo Plaintain and American Beetle square off inside the steel cage. You can see a skyscraper in the back of the ring.
American Beetle owned Pablo Plaintain and his twin brother Pedro Plantain. Just seconds after the photo above was taken, Pablo is brutally slammed into the cage wall.
Who says live monster wrestling is fake? We all knew when to shout, whether a monster was getting thrown through a table or having its mandibles tied in a painful knot.
American Beetle celebrates his dirty victory at the top of the cage wall. I bet that this is the first time this downtown performance space has rung with chants of "U-S-A!! U-S-A!!"
Next round: the heinous Doctor Cube ("destroys by appointment!") and his minions enter the ring, preparing to put the hurt on reigning champion Uchu Chu.
The New York Times covered the show,
proclaiming this a "great time to be a nerd" in Manhattan.
Especially, of course, a heavily tattooed martial arts nerd.
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