As anyone who follows professional wrestling already knows, the last real "boom" period of popularity for this form of "sports entertainment" (as Vince McMahon likes to call it) began in the mid-nineties and lasted until around 2001. This was when McMahon's World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) effectively won the inter-promotional wars of the nineties, absorbing his competition, and emerging as champion, or at least as the last man standing.
But for most of the nineties, McMahon's WWE did in fact have some very stiff competition in the form of Ted Turner's World Championship Wrestling (WCW) and, to a lesser extent, Paul Heyman's Extreme Championship Wrestling (ECW). For the fans, this meant a win-win situation as the competing federations tried their best to one-up each other each week on the Monday night wrestling programs Raw (WWE) and Nitro (WCW).
First, WCW, under the leadership of Eric Bischoff, went on a no-holds-barred raid of top tier WWE talent like Hulk Hogan, Bret Hart, Kevin Nash, and Scott Hall and blurred the lines of wrestling myth and reality with the invasion storyline of the NWO (New World Order). For awhile there, WCW had McMahon beat at his own game by convincing viewers that WWE wrestlers were showing up on WCW broadcasts to "take over" the promotion.
One of the many ways McMahon responded to this was by coming out with a more reality-based product of his own, or in this case by mimicking the more "extreme" style of ECW.
This was done both through the creation of characters like "Stone Cold" Steve Austin, whose beer-swilling anti-authoritarianism borrowed heavily from ECW's own beer-swilling, cigarette smoking Sandman, and by introducing plunder like tables, ladders, chairs, and barbwire into the matches — another ECW specialty, popularized by former ECW stars who defected to WWE like Mick Foley and the Dudley Boys.
What had sold out bingo halls for Heyman was now filling arenas and spiking TV ratings and pay-per-view buyrates for McMahon.
Unfortunately, this high-risk style was also shortening the careers of people like Foley and in some cases ending them altogether, as was the case with Darren "Puke" Drosdov, who was paralyzed in one such mishap. So when McMahon finally won the war and acquired the assets of both WCW and ECW, one of the casualties was a toning down of the product. Within a year of McMahon's re-introducing the ECW brand, there was little resemblance to the formerly "extreme" product and many of the bigger names from ECW were likewise gone.
So where do fans of hardcore wrestling featuring insane high-risk spots and buckets of blood turn to get their "sports entertainment" fix today? That's where the independent promotions and DVDs like Wrestling Underground come in.
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