YMMV / Jumbo Tsuruta

• Awesome Music: Jumbo had four entrance themes throughout his career, each one a banger.
  • The first was "Chinese Kung Fu", a 1975 French "Kung Fu Fighting" cash-in record. It was actually one of the first entrance themes in puroresu, having first been used for Jumbo that same year, but it wouldn't catch on until early 1977, shortly after Mil Mascaras had a resurgence in popularity due to the use of "Sky High".
  • The second was "Rolling Dreamer", used from 1980 through mid-1983. Jumbo recorded a vocal version in 1979, for which he himself had written the lyrics.
  • The third, "T.T. Backdrop", is by far the most obscure, as he only used it once.
  • Finally, there is "J". The most famous of these, but not undeservedly so.
• Base-Breaking Character: While this had long since ceased even before his death, Tsuruta actually was this for a while. Tsuruta's public image averted a lot of the tropes associated with professional wrestlers in his day, even saying in the 1970s that he "didn't want to become a professional wrestling idiot". A commonly cited reason that he alienated the core demographic was that, when he announced his signing, he was the first professional wrestler to say that he had found employment, as opposed to having passed initiation or taken an apprenticeship. In subsequent years, as his public image continued to avert the trends of the common Japanese wrestler, this built to the point where Tsuruta was considered the first "salaryman wrestler".
• Funny Moments: Jumbo's performances in AJPW's 1980s television skits. His turn as Mario is relatively well known: less so are the times he played Snow White and Lady Oscar.
• Growing the Beard: While he had been a very good wrestler for over a decade at this point, a fairly strong consensus has emerged in subsequent years that Jumbo's best work was in the back end of his (pre-hepatitis) career: approximately from around 1987 until mid-1992.
• Periphery Demographic: Wakadaisho-era Jumbo was actually more popular with women and children than the men that made up the bulk of the 1970s puro audience. This paralleled his NJPW counterpart Tatsumi Fujinami, who garnered a large female following during his junior ace run in the latter part of the decade.