Are you ready for more overused moves? This week’s overused move is the Shining Wizard. In modern wrestling, the Shining Wizard doesn’t get a lot of love, you might see it every now and then however, in the 2000s it was everywhere.
What Is The Shining Wizard?
This was the new move Keiji Mutoh—better known as The Great Muta—in the early 2000s. See, Mutoh would often finish matches with his Moonsault. However, after over a decade of doing it, it was time to at least put it on the back burner.
Now he needed a finisher that could get the job done and was had a good amount of razzle-dazzle to it. Enter the Shining Wizard. After managing to get his opponent to the mat, Mutoh would wait for them to get to one knee. While the opponent is still recovering, he would use one of their knees as a step before catching them with the knee.
At least, the original Shining Wizard was a knee smash. As he continued using it, he began performing it more and more smoothly to the point it became more of a knee-step-assisted kick to the head.
It’s this polished version of the Shining Wizard that got around the U.S indies. It would also spawn variants. Some of the notable users of the move were The Hurricane, AJ Lee, Adam Cole, Homicide, Jimmy Rave, and Tegan Nox.
The Overuse
While these four—and a couple of others—used it as a finishing move or their backup finisher, on the indies it was often mixed in as another cool move in a match. Actually, this was right around the time that the first wave of American strong style started—which is another article for another week.
Think of it in the same vein as the Super Kick, another move that fell into overuse. Now imagine if there was no variant of the Super Kick at the time. Because with the Super Kick, you also had the thrust kick which Rikishi was doing while HBK was using Sweet Chin Music.
They’re pretty much the same move but HBK’s had the theatrics and was promoted as being stronger than a regular-ass thrust kick. The same with a clothesline vs. The Lariat.
What was different about the Shining Wizard was that it was simple in action but unique at the same time. No one else was blasting fools with a kick to the head after using their knee as a step.
Once those New Japan and All Japan tapes from the period made it over it was a done deal for the uniqueness of Keiji Mutoh’s Shining Wizard.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vk1C7lvqD4s
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