...You bastards!
So call me a pessimist. But with this past week's broadcast of ECW on the Sci-Fi Channel, I think it is safe to say that the burial of the once proud Extreme Championship Wrestling franchise is now complete. Like he did when he purchased the dying World Championship Wrestling (WCW) several years ago, Vince McMahon has killed another wrestling promotion dead.
What really sucks is that the idea of permanently reviving the ECW brand was one which held so much promise less than a year ago. It all sounded so good on paper. The company (in this case, Vincent Kennedy McMahon's World Wrestling Entertainment) had already tested the waters with two highly successful ECW "reunion" pay-per-view broadcasts — the 2005 and 2006 One Night Stand PPV's, drawing both good buy rates and positive reaction. The revived ECW brand would also be built around the already wildly popular Rob Van Dam as champion, with the creative end (as in storylines determining who wins and loses matches) to be handled by Paul Heyman — the "evil genius" behind the original ECW.
But then not one month into the relaunch of the ECW brand on the Sci-Fi Channel, Rob Van Dam was busted for pot possession (along with fellow "ECW original" Sabu). And with that, the wheels began to come off of the wagon. First Rob Van Dam was stripped of the ECW title. Well okay, he "lost" it to WWE star The Big Show, but you know what I mean.
Then WWE stars began showing up on the ECW broadcasts with frightening regularity, thereby robbing ECW of any chance it had to establish any sort of identity of its own as an individual brand. Not long after that, Heyman himself was sent packing in a dispute over creative direction. Meanwhile, as WWE continued to import its "D list" of stars over to ECW — guys like Test and Hardcore Holly — original ECW stars like Van Dam (who was apparently never really forgiven for his pot bust) continued to be buried, despite their popularity.
So why do I bemoan the way that ECW is being ruined — correction, has been ruined — the way I do? Well, you've just got to understand something. ECW, the way it was originally presented in the nineties, represented the last dying gasps of the old school of wrestling that in spite of its outlandishness, had the sort of faux realism about it that made you believe. At the same time, ECW took this approach to entirely new and unheard of (at least in America) levels of staged violence. In other words, ECW was special.
Article comments
1 - Vichus Smith
Why didn't this article come sooner? I can't comment on WWE, et al, but I feel i've grown apart from the product.
ECW was a hardcore, rebelious, underground dirty gem. Now it's on sci-fi (???) and it stars WWE talent, and it's toned down.
Boo!
2 - Glen Boyd
Vichus,
Thanx for the comment. The reason I didn't write this sooner is because I was holding out what turns out to be a misguided hope that the product would eventually turn itself around. I based this hope largely on the fact despite all of WWE's efforts to hold him back, C.M. Punk was getting over with the fans. Now that they've gone and turned him heel and aligned him with the decidedly "not over" New Breed faction (and seriously you could literally feel the air go out of the room when they did this), I feel that they've squandered the only opportunity they had left to make this thing work.
As the mighty Gorilla Monsoon himself used to say, stick a fork in this one baby cause it's done.
Thanx again for the comment.
-Glen
3 - Matt Paprocki
I guess my main issue isn't that they've taken away the edge, or even the new guys. You're always going to need a stable of fresh talent, and I can handle the new breed. You don't want guys hurt week in and week out either.
My problem is how this isn't ECW in a sense of a separate promotion. Each week someone from Raw or Smackdown shows up for a one time thing and is never seen again, leading to the feeling that the company has no faith in the product otherwise. As a die hard viewer, even I begin to wonder how any of this works together.
On Smackdown and Raw when someone shows up from the other show, it's a huge hyped deal. The ECW group is tossed around to fill in time gaps, and the Wrestlemania hair crap didn't serve a purpose either. Then, you have the 8 man tag at WM which bombed entirely, and the next week on Sci-Fi, they go all out with tons of great spots. Why wasn't that the match at WM again?
To make it worse, you have Lashley taking the belt (which I'm fine with, great talent and presence) and Big Show disappearing immediately afterward. No rematch, angry promo, nothing. No one can seem to step up to Lashley either. We had around three straight weeks of Lashley and Holly a bit ago. Whoopee.
The problem is I keep watching because, like yourself, I take it all in. WSX, ECW, Raw, SD, and even a cheapo local fed Cleavland All Pro Wrestling. ECW is simply part of that mix.
4 - Ty
I gave up on the new ECW long ago.
The funny thing is, it wasn't just the PPV buys that had Vince interested in making money off ECW, but he also released a DVD of old ECW matches that sold like crazy. That caught his eye.
But I don't think the pot bust is to blame for how things went wrong. Sure it did remove RVD as champ, but go back to the first show: the first show was not all that.
From the beginning Vince was trying to bring it back in the sense of bringing back a brand name and making it appeal to the WWE core audience.
He never once thought the old ECW would appeal to his core audience (or thought about potential money from bringing old ECW fans who tuned out pro wrestling when the org. ECW died in 2001), so from the get go, from the first show, he made sure it looked like WWE/WWF than ECW.
Bringing back ECW, even in the WWE realm, had promise assuming Paul Heyman was going to get full creative control. Remember that the strong point of ECW was Heyman as the creative guy, the weak point being Heyman as the business guy.
We all hoped that this would be Heyman handling creative, Vince handling business (cutting paychecks).
From the beginning this didn't happen, so ECW was doomed.
It wasn't too long before we saw "Exreme Rules" (instead of old ECW in which all matches were ECW rules) and The Big Show defending the ECW Title against Ric Flair (WTF??????).
I wish it didn't have to be like this, but Vince screwed it up. I know Vince is the god of pro wrestling, but all of his moves aren't in the best interest of the company (XFL comes to mind).
5 - LMFAO
OK the original Ecw was some-what entertaining in a sense of staged stunts being toted around.. i actually heard that ecw fans had "respect" for that? huh??
IF the original ECW had the type of money that WWE has and WCW had, do you really think they would be doing crazy stuff like that??? NO they would not if they had WWE/WCW type of money they would be exactly like WWE and WCW if not worse... they did all that risky stuff to get picked up by major financiers, but unfortunately it eventually failed, basically because think about it they do crazy stunts risking their bodies night after night after 5-10 years they would be all beat-up and they wouldn't be doing too many shows because of serious injury, major financiers would have lost more money in the end..
why blame vince for this? the ecw brand died even if wwe kept the old ecw trend it would have helped nothing... like hayman said is was a horrible idea to bring ecw back in any sense including the One Night Stand PPVs ...its been dead for a long while even b4 its final year.. i mean cmon now the original ecw was just like watching street fights in a more "controlled" it wasn't great at all... it would have been more entertaining for wwe to create a whole new brand for Tuesdays instead of wasting it on ECW seriously, its not even hardcore anymore..its just a waste of a time slot