Trivia / Fighting Opera HUSTLE

• Acting for Two:
  • Many of the Monster Army's endless list of mooks were played by a fixed team of wrestlers from Michinoku Pro Wrestling, with occasional guests from Kaientai Dojo and other promotions.
  • Parodied with Yinling and her daughter, Newling.
• All-Star Cast: The entire premise of the promotion, no doubt one of the greatest rosters in the history of pro wrestling. Almost every big draw in Japanese pro wrestling that wasn't at the time with New Japan Pro-Wrestling or Pro Wrestling NOAH had at least some appearances for HUSTLE, and that without counting PRIDE fighters, TV personalities and pop celebrities. In its all time roster we had members of NJPW's Three Musketeers (Shinya Hashimoto and The Great Muta), AJPW's Four Heavenly Kings (Toshiaki Kawada), stars from the the Inoki/Baba era (Genichiro Tenryu, Riki Choshu), junior mainstays from The '90s (Shinjiro Otani, The Great Sasuke), Toryumon aces (Magnum TOKYO), shoot-style big names (Nobuhiko Takada, Yoji Anjo, Wataru Sakata, Minoru Suzuki, Yoshihiro Takayama), multi-sport stars (Naoya Ogawa, Bob Sapp, Akebono), WWE superstars (Yoshihiro Tajiri, Rikishi) and joshi legends (Aja Kong, Devil Masami, Jaguar Yokota), and the list just goes on.
• Awesome, Dear Boy: While there were several stars attracted by the huge payments and chances of exposure, there were many others that jumped at the call for how just wacky and fun the entire concept was. Hashimoto in particular was a big manga fan who took delight in kickstarting what was basically a shonen manga come to live.
• Dawson Casting: Parodied with Monster Bono, who was only six years younger than his "father" and seven years older than his mother.
• The Other Darrin:
  • Tiger Mask character Zebra Man was played by Mikey Henderson and later by Kazuhiko Ogasawara.
  • HUSTLE Kamen Red was played by Masaki Okimoto in his debut match against Super Crazy, but later Takuya Sugi adopted the character and Okimoto joined him as HUSTLE Kamen Blue.
• Production Posse: Due to Takada's presence, a lot of people from both the old UWF International and PRIDE Fighting Championships were in the company.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Rumoredly, the promotion was originally going to follow a more restrained WWE style sports entertaining, and it was later when they decided to take it up to eleven and turn the company into animeland.
  • Yoshihiro Takayama and Joe Son were meant to debut in HUSTLE-4, which is why the latter had a music number in the previous event. However, executive problems impeded it; Takayama wouldn't debut until two whole years later, while Joe Son never wrestled a match for HUSTLE.
  • Takehiro Murahama was initially going to sign up with DSE to keep wrestling in HUSTLE, but he instead signed with rival MMA promotion HERO'S, as he desired to keep competing in K-1 and expected to use HERO'S (which had the same owners as K-1) as a trampoline. It didn't work, so he returned to pro wrestling and signed up with ZERO-ONE, HUSTLE's sister company, although by then the big chance to get in the latter had passed.
  • The Esperanza's role was going to be played by Antonio Inoki, and Hard Gay's tag team partner for the same event would have been his real life friend Hiroshi Tanahashi; in exchange, HUSTLE would have sent Toshiaki Kawada and TAJIRI to New Japan, with Kawada possibly participating in the GP again. However, negotiations fell short and those angles never happened.