At AEW Revolution, Jon Moxley and Kenny Omega battled in an exploding barbed wire deathmatch.
The bout was won by Omega, but the story coming out of the event was the lack of explosion after the countdown hit zero. AEW put a lot of hype into the bout, including having exploding barbed wire deathmatch legend Atsushi Onita appear in a video package as part of the build for the match.
While Onita had nothing to do with the match or dud explosion, he felt bad for how things ended.
"I want to show American fans my original explosion match. I sometimes feel like I have to. American deathmatch fans have been disappointed twice, first with the explosion deathmatch CZW held in 2017, and secondly AEW’s. At the time of the CZW show, maybe because of costs, CZW said “we don’t need Japanese engineers, don’t worry, leave it to us,” and I believed them. I sent a cheering message to Kenny Omega and Jon Moxley, but AEW did the preparations for their explosion match on their own, and I wasn’t involved at all. However, I was disappointed that the fans were disappointed, and I felt responsible," Onita said in an interview with Colette Arrand of Fanbyte.
Onita was invited to attend the bout by AEW, but was unable to travel due to COVID and prior commitments.
Moxley has since paid tribute to Onita by adopting "Wild Thing" as his theme song.
When learning of Moxley's use of the theme, Onita replied, "Jon Moxley uses my theme music? Thank you, Moxley. I think if he has a spirit of JADO (evil ways), we might stand in the same ring some day. It would be interesting, wouldn’t it?"
Onita is set to launch his new promotion FMW-E on July 4.
Fightful will have live coverage of AEW Dynamite beginning at 8 p.m. ET.
