The Micro Wrestling Federation’s Greatest Hits

(Mindstab Media Inc.)
by Duke Crevanator

I’ve been a huge fan of professional wrestling since 1976. I have over 450 hours of ’70s and ’80s-era WWF, NWA, UWF/Mid-South, Florida Championship Wrestling, World Class, Mid-Atlan-tic, and AWA footage in my video collection. I know and appreciate my wrestling. Although my video collection may be lacking in the lucha libre style of Mexico (where midget wrestling is much more common), I do have a healthy respect for the talent level that the vast majority of midget wrestlers possess. In all seriousness, some of the best workers in history have been midg-ets. For example, Sky Low Low, Tom Thumb (immortalized in the late ’70s film I Like to Hurt People), and Lord Littlebrook (famously destroyed by King Kong Bundy at Wrestlemania 3 in 1987) were highly-respected for their ability by “full-sized” wrestlers. With that in mind, I was intrigued by the idea of a wrestling group made up entirely of midgets. In fact, I thought it was a great idea. Midget wrestling is something that has been dropped from the modern day era, much like the great motor-mouth managers that used to ply their trade at ringside. Short of working in Mexico, these talented workers have nowhere else to ply their trade.

Unfortunately, with all of my best intentions going in, I was disappointed by the product. Midgets in wrestling has always been exploitative, but this DVD brings it to a new low. Not by the wrestlers’ abilities; in fact, most of them are quite talented workers and can work a match better than a lot of so-called “superstars” you see on cable every week. The problem is in the presentation. Although there are supposedly features on each wrestler, and even on the referee (who is pretty damn funny and would be great on the big stage), it’s so poorly edited and tossed together that you end up feeling no connection whatsoever to the characters. They don’t show a single match in its entirety. Not even an edited match. It’s just a bunch of clips that make absolutely zero sense. If you’re trying to sell your wrestlers, there should be a reason to care about them. Instead, it’s just chaos. I realize MLW doesn’t have a TV show, so it’s impossible to sell story lines (they try, but don’t attempt and figure it out: I did and it wasn’t worth the effort). What they need to do is sell the abilities of their workers.

MLW have a really niche product here that could work on a limited scale. They’re not going to get anywhere by trying to be an ECW clone (yes, they have midgets breaking light bulbs over each other’s heads, etc.). They also are not going to get anywhere by producing fourth-rate video clips of their matches set to bad music. WWE may be able to do that, but they can’t. MLW has a lot of talented workers and should showcase entire matches on their next DVD. They’ll have a much better chance of appealing to the types of people who would buy a midget wrestling DVD. MLW should realize (especially since they allude to it several times) that there’s way too much midget porn out there for sale. If people want to see midgets doing sick stuff, they’ll buy that instead.
(www.mindstabmedia.com/mwf2.html)