AEW’s Sammy Guevara Describes His Love for Dragon Ball Z

Inside the wrestling ring, All Elite Wrestling‘s Sammy Guevara is known as “The Spanish God,” a loud-mouthed jerk who can back up just about anything he says with insanely athletic moves. But outside the ring, Guevara is known for being one of the biggest Dragon Ball Z fans in all of wrestling. So much so that at one point he and fellow AEW star Marko Stunt uploaded a video where they imagined what pro wrestling would look life in the world of DBZ.

Guevara spoke with ComicBook this week to talk about how the video got made and his love for Akira Toriyama’s creation.

ComicBook: How did this video come about?

Sammy Guevara: That was super fun to do, and it was even funnier to watch the crew watching us dress up and then trying to film this thing, were like, “What are these guys doing?” Because we went there early, before the show started, before everybody got there.

I just saw other people doing similar stuff on YouTube, and I was just like, “But there’s not one with wrestling, we can do it with wrestling.”

Do you think we could see something like this wind up on Dynamite?

I don’t know, I mean I just kind of do stuff and hopefully they like it, so I hope they did like it, it did get a lot of good feedback.

The Dragon Ball Super manga is still going but we’re waiting for the anime to come back. What are your thoughts on Super overall?

I think there’s good and bad, but really that’s the Dragon Ball, the whole series in general. They get some stuff good, they forget some other stuff, there’s some continuity errors, like when they had the beards. [I was like] ‘but wait, I thought they can’t grow beards? But overall I think it’s a great series, I mean they make Goku really dumb, that’s my biggest complaint. Goku was never this dumb in Dragon Ball Z. But besides that, I love the series. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug.

Favorite DBZ arc?

The Cell one for sure. [Constantly changing up your expectations] and there was time travel and there were all these different things. I was like, “This is the best, even though he probably stole some of this from Terminator and other stuff, but whatever.”

So is Cell your favorite villain?

I guess I’m going to go with Frieza, just because if Frieza wasn’t this bad person, we don’t have Vegeta, we don’t have all these things that set up for later in the series.

It seems like there’s a ton of crossover between pro wrestling and Dragon Ball, and a lot of wrestlers turn out to be fans. Why do you think that is?

I think it’s just because it’s a show we watched when we were littler, and the show itself is about overcoming an obstacle, a bad guy, becoming stronger. And in wrestling I feel like it’s very similar because you’re trying to beat the opponent and sometimes you might even hulk up and that’s like turning Super Saiyan a little bit. You’re doing no-selling and you’re going Super Saiyan to beat Frieza,, all of them. I don’t know exactly why, but I definitely would love to meet [Akira] Toriyama one day, it’d be awesome.