What I'm Watching: The Motor City Machine Guns

The MCMGs are wrestling Photo via IGN

As you may have seen from my Midnight Express article, I do enjoy a finely-honed tag team machine. And while the Midnights were as close to the perfect ideal of this as you might be able to find anywhere in the wrestling world, in recent memory, only one was good enough, and had enough chemistry, to make me think that what they were doing was more tribute, and less cosplay, to what the Midnights were doing. What the difference between tribute and cosplay to me is the difference between Davey Richards and Chris Benoit in regards to Dynamite Kid. Richards, at least on the indies, cosplayed as the Dynamite Kid. He did a lot of his moves, acted in a lot of the same ways, and was trying to mimic Tom Billington as much as possible. Meanwhile, Benoit paid tribute to his trainer. He never let you forget his heritage to Dynamite, but built his own style with his own signatures and chestnuts that he relied on.

It wasn't just that the Guns were inspired by Ikuto Hidaka and Minoru Fujita as much as they were by the Midnight Express. And it isn't just that they did a lot of their best work on the indies, where, if we're being perfectly honest, you have the freedom to experiment and try new things in a way that you just don't have even in TNA. It's that you believed, in an era where teams are largely two people together as opposed to two people thinking as one mind, that this was a team. They were invested in each other's successes, and wanted to win together.

But I'm not watching a wrestling match of theirs right now. There is too much good stuff out there on YouTube, and Dailymotion, and Vimeo. Instead I'm watching a highlight video of their most well-known feud, and a highlight video of them just putting in work. Enjoy, and seek more out. Wrestling like this is rare.