It has been a while since we posted scenes from the old Tiger Mask wrestling cartoon from Japan. In Episode #89, “An Oath for Victory,” Tiger Mask and his friend Ken prepare for a Tag Team match, having an intimate conversation in the locker room (and making me wish I spoke Italian so I could understand what they’re saying…)
Soon Tiger Mask stands and puts on his mask, which symbolizes the separation between the partners, the inability for two men to be truly open with each other due to society’s restraints on male intimacy. He turns his back and leaves the locker room alone, again a reference to the chasm between himself and his partner, who were earlier sitting side-by-side in identical arms-on-knees poses.
Our heroes are fighting against the bearded Bad Brothers. They are obviously the Heel team given their cold blue skin and purple clothing (which contrasts with the flesh color and warm reds and oranges worn by the Good Guys.) We can look forward to poor Ken suffering some serious abuse from these two brutes, who look like any number of evil Heel tag teams from the Golden Age of pro wrestling.
The usual phallic symbols we see in most Tiger Mask wrestling matches are in play here — Ken’s red boots and bent knee ramming repeatedly into the opponents’ skulls, a wrestler positioned between his opponent’s legs near the crotch, etc.
The reason I never featured this match before now is because the Baby-Face team is dominant for most of the match, so it wasn’t as exciting to me as a display of prolonged torture and abuse by the villains. But then I received a comment that reminded me that variety is the spice of life, and that different folks get into different strokes:
“I think it’s time for a Jobber Revenge Week, where we get to see the heels be the victims of squashes for a while! And I do mean squashed. Not a close-call win. I mean domination. Just for a bit of variety!”
Some nasty rule-breaking enables the Bad Brothers to gain the advantage over poor, pretty-boy Ken. After all, we’ve got to have SOME Baby-Face punishment to give the match tension and sex appeal. After gouging his eyes and choking him in their corner, the Bad Brothers drop their sharp knees into his lower back like they’re trying to break him in half. I created an animated GIF of the sadistic rope-choke in the corner (I am still a little rough at animation, but I’m getting better I think!)
Now the ring ropes are used as the symbolic separator between the two partners, the barrier that keeps them from being intimate or close to each other. The ropes represent society’s constraints that prevent male-on-male bonding beyond a superficial level and prevents men from connecting homo-socially.
When Ken fails to tag him, Tiger Mask grabs Ken’s arm and slaps his hand to take over in the ring (which is kind of a dick move on Tiger Mask’s part, doubting his partner’s ability to perform as well as Tiger Mask himself.)
Then Tiger Mask dominates the competition, easily beating up both Bad Brothers. Ken (who fell for their dirty tricks earlier) is left feeling emasculated, forced to watch his partner show him how it’s done.
By the way, this match is available on YouTube. The locker-room conversation begins at the 5:40 mark of the clip and the wrestling starts at 6:40.
One of the messages of the Tiger Mask series, or at least this episode, is that men can never remain intimate and close because men are always competitive with each other. Tiger Mask took the reins and won the match, but doing so has alienated and embarrassed his friend.
Tiger mask leaves the ring first, walking down the aisle ahead of Ken and talking to him over one shoulder.
Again their physical distance connotes an emotional distance — a lack of true intimacy between the men. Ken’s pensive expression and the aversion of his gaze away from Tiger Mask and down on the floor demonstrates his feelings of humiliation and resentment. Ken’s tragic flaw is that he forever wants to show he is just as tough and skillful as Tiger Mask, which ends up getting him bloodied and injured by a stronger wrestler in Episode 101: “The Defeat of Ken”.