Hey y’all, as I’ve mentioned earlier this year on twitter, I have been doing research on a subject I feel is neglected in wrestling discussion and has been for decades, and that’s the popularity and importance of the Beauty Pair and the entire boom period AJW had in the late 70s. Discussion online about joshi wrestling is heavily focused on the early 90s, specifically the years of 1991-1995, despite this decade seeing the biggest decline in business up to this point in time most online discourse about joshi wrestling settles into this period. A big reason for this is the early to mid 1990s had the most coverage by the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, various online forums focused on wrestling, and tape trading circles and saw some joshi wrestlers even make the jump over to the Pacific for exhibition matches or extended runs with American promotions. What most in the American audience and English-language internet didn’t know was that there were two tag teams that helped create the biggest boom periods in not just AJW’s history but in the history of joshi pro wrestling.

The Crush Gals are discussed in wrestling circles online but any mention of the mania surrounding their celebrity status is condensed to just how popular they were with school girls and how they were like heroes to them, the predecessors and archetype of the tag team idols, Beauty Pair, is rarely discussed outside of discussion circles of hardcore wrestling fans and wrestling historians. With this podcast and future written posts I hope to help people understand how this phenomenon came to be and why it resonated so much with the new teen audience.