Sunday, April 29, 2007

Triple Six

In Japan, as everyone knows, they take professional wrestling very seriously. Unlike the Americans and the Mexicans, they still like to maintain the pretence that they're watching a real sporting contest. Everyone knows this is complete nonsense, but it amuses the audience to play along.

Naturally, there are alternative promotions which take, shall we say, a different line. HUSTLE is probably the most notorious, but DDT and its sister promotion 666 are also way over the line into complete insanity. Take, for example, the DDT Iron Man Heavymetalweight Title, which has been going since 2000. You can find the full title lineage, at least up to April 1, here. It starts off relatively sane, and then swandives off a cliff.

The Heavymetalweight Title is defended under 24/7 rules, just like the WWF Hardcore Title used to be. It's been held by a bewildering array of cameramen, minor celebrities, women, and wrestlers parodying other wrestlers. On Christmas Day 2004, a monkey called Yatchan won the title and held onto it for a month. The next year, the title was briefly held by a Hello Kitty stuffed doll. On three separate occasions, it's been won by a ladder.

And then there's the stretch of random title swaps from 2006. The story here, apparently, is that President Ramu of the 666 group won the title and decided that it would be, like, really cool if somebody from the 666 group could be the 666th champion. Unfortunately, the list of champions was only up to 293. So the group engaged in some intensive trading of the title among themselves, "defending" it in games of rock paper scissors and so forth.

The great thing about this is that somebody could put the title on President Ramu and then decide that the storyline wasn't quite silly enough. Because President Ramu is a twelve-year old girl who uses the Undertaker's finisher.

Really. Look, here she is.



The most recent reported holder of the DDT Iron Man Heavymetalweight Championship, by the way, is a miniature daschund called Cocolo.

UPDATE: Courtesy of the F4WOnline message board, just in case you figured she only does the chokeslam, here she is in a (heavily clipped) 6-man tag. Girl power!