That One Time Vader Wrestled Necro Butcher

(credit to Indy Wrestling Flashback for the cover image, they also uploaded the match!)

This is something that, honestly, I never thought I would see in my life. A match that I had no clue it even happened until it randomly popped into my YouTube recommendations the day i’m writing this, and even then I had to double take because I absolutely thought it was some random person’s 2K simulation. But it’s real! I just knew I HAD to watch this.

The match itself comes from “Pro Wrestling Superstars,” a North Carolina based promotion that, according to the very base-level research I did, has not been active since maybe about 2012. I say base level because the only evidence of this company’s existence is its Cagematch page and a Facebook account that has barely posted anything since 2009. Hey, they did have Hulk Hogan be a special guest referee for… something! It’s on the level of House of Hardcore, Northeastern Wrestling, really any low tier fed that mostly books legends/ex-WWE talent looking for a weekend payday alongside whatever mildly popular indie talents are making the rounds at that moment in time. Both men at this point are definitely not in their physical primes at their current moment, which is unfortunate really. Necro’s still getting decent bookings in mostly JCW, with some odd popups in CZW and IWA after leaving ROH during the start of the HDNet era two years prior. Meanwhile I'll admit that I haven’t seen a whole lot of Vader’s post-WWF run outside of some odd NOAH & AJPW bits and the incredibly funny Will Ospreay match. However, in this instance, what they do against each other is… not terrible, to be honest? If both men were in their prime then I'm sure this would be a lot better than it actually was, but here it’s mostly just a fun, decent little Vader squash match that you probably would’ve seen on some WCW B-Show taping. Necro doesn’t really get any kind of big moves in on Vader, pretty much of the offense he does get in amounts to punches, kicks, and elbow strikes. But he does a good job in trying to make a 56 year old Vader look rather impressive for what it’s worth. The commentary also helps reinforce the idea of it being a squash match with Shane Douglas and some man I'm not really able to identify mostly focusing on Vader, his comeback, how devastating he is, etc etc. I’m giving it a solid *** on my personal rankings, if mostly for the wonder of seeing two people who are basically some of my favorite wrestlers of all time facing each other. If you have like… five minutes to spare then I think you should give this match a look, definitely a fascinating one. As a small extra note: I would like to find more interesting matches like this, so if anyone knows of any that I can find then please reach out to me through my usual social media channels and I may try and feature more for the blog.

An Introduction To The (Ian) Rotten Archives, I Suppose.

It’s about time that I dust this off once again. I have to apologize really, my 2025 has been all over the place and while I meant to do more with this I earnestly kinda forgot about the blog for a while. That’s on me, that’s my fault. I plan on doing more with this blog whenever I can, especially as I actually do the thing I've been meaning to do for ages and put more focus on wrestling for my now-main YouTube channel. I wanna try and actually get at least one or two videos out on my YouTube before the year ends (because to be honest with my mental health, this year's probably a wash in terms of content), and then hopefully in 2026 I'll be able to really lock in I guess.

Anyways, it’s time for me to introduce a new project.

I’ll be completely honest in saying that I don’t really know a terribly massive amount about IWA Mid-South, a lot of my experience comes from the latter half of the promotion’s existence (2020-2022) which includes the moment where Jake Crist burned their World and Light Heavyweight Championships due to multiple instances of not getting paid by Ian Rotten, that also led to IWA hopefully ceasing operations for good, and in general learning about a lot of the various other incidents that have happened over the years that i’m not really go over here, (Really, with how infamous Ian is, it would probably take a simple Google search to find at least most of them) PLUS some various matches sprinkled in such as Eddie Kingston vs. Chris Hero from 2007 which is quite honestly one of my favorite matches of all time. So, because I have severe problems and I love turning anything at all possible into content, I've decided to start a project I'm currently calling The Rotten Archives. The name is a work in progress, obviously, but is inspired partially by snowboiiii’s 2005 watchproject where he watched every single wrestling show that occurred in the year 2005, and also by @MarilynOfDeath who is watching every CZW show ever. I also want to give a quick shoutout to Tom Green for his video on the 2004 Ted Petty Invitational (which you should check out, he’s really cool) as that was part of the inspiration for why I went with IWA. I will choose a completely random year of IWA:MS to watch and review every single show that has made tape that I can even FIND, talking about what I do and don’t enjoy from it in hopes of… well, to be honest, I don’t really have much of a goal with this. I guess you could say to fully understand the “lore” and “mythos” around IWA Mid South, but honestly I thought it would be funny to do this one night and it’s stuck around in my brain like a mildly catchy song. I’m still really trying to figure out how I'm gonna format this, there’s a high possibility that once I finish a year I might make a big YouTube video compiling everything within the year and talking about it but it really depends on how I'm personally feeling. There’s also a high chance that I could expand this into other indy companies if I get bored of just doing IWA:MS, hence why the title isn’t an “official” one. Hell, everything’s kinda just a complete crapshoot work in progress and I won’t fully know what I'm doing till I really get into the whole meat and bones of it, soooo…. I mean, I dunno, I hope you guys can understand?

To decide WHAT year I’ll exactly be watching I put a bunch of years that were available on the “Sugiura Holdman” VK channel (IWTV does not have a complete archive, I also do not have IWTV currently) on a wheel and spun to find out that i’ll first be watching 2005. A year featuring both a mildly interesting TPI lineup (some of the members pictured above) AND an interesting KOTDM lineup, AND Samoa Joe vs. Necro Butcher, AND a War Games match from the vague look I had on Cagematch! It’s honestly probably not the WORST choice I could’ve gotten? I will begin this project very soon, in the next couple of days and posting updates alongside hopefully gifs/clips of my watchthrough progress on Twitter and Bluesky (@emmosWRLD/@emmosfunnywrld respectively).

There's a total of four shows in January 05, most of them being over two hours so i'm gonna have a crapload on my plate. I hope you guys will be as entertained as I will be with this. Hopefully I'll have the fuller details of what ENTIRELY I wanna achieve with this soon.