WWECW

[Jimmy Redman]

To be honest I think Big Show's whole run as ECW Champ was really good, especially early on when he was having great matches every week on TV with a weird assortment of people. In the early period Heyman had creative control and he seemed to be on a mission to prove some kind of "THIS is how the Big Show should have always been booked" point, because he was portrayed as a total monster for an entire six month period (probably a record for the career of the Big Show) and he really delivered in that role.

 

His July 2006 is one of the single best calendar months of work I've seen on WWE TV. That's a weird thing to say, but it happens that he just had really good matches on telly four weeks in a row...vs RVD on 4/7, Flair on 11/7, Undertaker on 18/7, and even Kane on 25/7. I wonder if anyone has watched or will watch the non-Flair matches and agree with me.

 

The matches I kind of liken to a reverse NWA travelling champion thing, where instead of the champ travelling to different territories and being challenged by the local hero on his home turf, you instead had challengers from the normal brands "travel" to ECW to challenge Big Show on his home field, under his rules (allowing for the idea that "extreme rules" are now to Show's advantage now that he's on the ECW roster, as per WWE Storytelling Logic). So every other week you get the Flairs and Takers and whoevers of the world coming in to work an "ECW match" against this unstoppable monster, and at the same time there's this overarching "ECW Originals vs Evil Paul E" storyline that links everything together. You get the stand-alone curiosities of the third brand, as well as the episodic television that Heyman specialised in.

[El-P]

WWECW TV Episode 2 (06.20.06)

 

Match of the week : Sabu vs Tony Mamaluke. Basically a competitive squash, but there you go, this is the best stuff this episode has to offer. The FBI's hot valet is named Trinity and she throws a mean high kick, showing her panties in the process. Nothing special here, just your standart fun Sabu stuff with Mamaluke doing the honors.

 

Squash of the week : Big Show destroying Tommy Dreamer. It's not even a match. Big Show looks like a monster here. If it keeps going that way, it's indeed how he should have been booked since 1999 instead of being just another guy.

 

Throwback sexist angle of the week : The jealous boyfriend covers up his sexy girlfriend's body. This is right out of 1998 Vince Russo booking with Debra and Jeff Jarrett. I liked Debra's body better BTW. No idea where this is going, but probably not in a "good wrestling" direction. I have no idea who the guy is either. Poor Kelly, she really wants to show you her tits and ass you know.

 

Poor main event of the week : Kurt Angle & RVD vs Randy Orton & Edge. When RVD is the second best worker in a match, you're in trouble. Orton & Edge don't show me shit. The match is only tolerable when Angle hits the ring. RVD does his goofy spots and bumps, at least that's something. Orton & Edge are sleep inducing. They cut Angle's offense by clipping a knee, even the announcers are making a big deal out of it, then don't even try to work on it. Lita is actually pretty efficient in a Sherri way, and she takes an Angle Slam at the end. I wonder if woman abuse was still common back then or if it was only an WWECW thing. The end sequence was decent with a timely Edge counter, but that's it.

 

Test is coming. Feel the excitement. All the backstage stuff is awful, with that stale and dull WWE directing and delivery. There was also a fake and fat "luchador" imitating Randy Savage getting squashed by Sandman. In 2006 ? How petty. Poor TV show again. The PPV matches all look pretty dreadful except Sabu vs Cena which is at least intriguing on paper.

[(BP)]

The jealous boyfriend was Mike Knox. I didn't think much of him during his WWECW run, but I liked his intellectual Brody-knockoff gimmick from 2009 Smackdown. I think he had a short stint in TNA after his release.

[SomethingSavage]

Knox is no Gallows, but he's an okay "big man" worker at times. Had a string of solid matches against Rey over on the SmackDown brand in early '09 or so.

 

Regarding his ECW run as the jealous boyfriend though, Knox worked a tag match with Test against Dreamer & Sandman that at least felt a little authentic to the original ECW rep. Kelly did a run-in, got her skirt lifted, spanked, and even kissed Tommy if I recall correctly. I may be remembering that wrong though. Either way, it was a fun cluster and not all bad.

[goc]

Mike Knox also ends up having a pretty good little series of matches with Finlay in 2007 or maybe 2008.

[El-P]

ECW matches at Vengeance 2006

 

Kurt Angle vs Randy Orton

 

Pretty much the same match that at One Night Stand, without the funny crowd chants. Orton is such a nothing worker and actually kills the already luckwarm heat that they got at the beginning with his usual restholds. Angle goes crazy with 8 suplexes in a row. Then the usual ankle lock reversal into a finish. Nah, this was worse than the ONS match. Angle looked pretty good (although goofy at times), Orton looked like the black hole he's always been.

 

Edge vs RVD

 

Surprisingly good. At first I thought Edge was gonna try to Jerry Lynn his way into an RVD spot match, but on the contrary he stayed very basic and provided a good base for RVD's spots. RVD himself did some interesting stuff in terms of using some of his key spots (like the Rolling Thunder when Edge was still on all fours). Of course there was bad punching galore on his part and sloppiness too, but that's to be expected. Lita didn't really interfere before the end, and I thought she was effective again at doing it at the right times. No, really, surprisingly good, Edge was solid here. Nice match.

 

Sabu vs John Cena

 

This is a lumberjack match which negates a lot of Sabu's cool stuff outside, but I guess we get Sandman caning Cena. This is really nothing, Sabu does some of his trademark spots, Cena sells and sells but never really gets into trouble, then wins after almost killing Sabu by throwing him on the edge of a table outside. They really made Sabu look like a jabronie here, since he did all of his stuff and Cena really never was in danger, and he got beat after two moves in a bunch of minutes. It kinda reminded me of the babyface Savage TV matches in 95/96 in WCW. Cena didn't look good at all and the way he through Sabu outside was dangerous as hell. Waste of time appart from the novelty of watching Sabu in a WWE ring against Da Man.

 

The rest of the PPV looked like complete shit BTW. Maybe the multi-man IC title was decent, but outside of that, Kane vs a fake Kane, Umaga vs Eugene... It's interesting that although RVD vs Edge was the WWE title match, it got positionned third to the top, before the Cena match and of course the godawful DX reunion vs Spirit Squad which was the main event. It also struck me how everything looks *exactly* like today. Nothing has changed a bit in the production and presentation (except the HD and the constant references to social medias). JR was still announcing and it's amazing that although he was way past his prime, he still sounded amazing compared to the shit we get today. That's how bad things have became, and it's not like they were very good back then.

 

2006.06.25 Edge vs RVD

[El-P]

WWECW TV Episode 3 (06.27.06)

ECW Match of the week : Sabu vs Roadkill. Basically a little more than a competitive squash this time, with Sabu still kiling himself and ending up with a nasty cut on his back after an atomic arabian facebuster through a table. Yeah, this is ECW for you. I'm surprised WWE even picked up Roadkill, he was overrated in ECW to begin with and his gimmick had no depth to it at all even in the original setting.

Squash of the week : Big Show destroying Tommy Dreamer. It's not even a match. Big Show looks like a monster here. If it keeps going that way, it's indeed how he should have been booked since 1999 instead of being just another guy. (yeah, sounds familiar)

Throwback sexist angle of the week : The jealous boyfriend covers up his sexy girlfriend's body. This is right out of 1998 Vince Russo booking with Debra and Jeff Jarrett. After this week, I'm not so sure I liked Debra's body better BTW, as Kelly obviously is a 19 year old lingerie model after all. Not exactly the greatest stripper, but there you go. Mike Knox debuts and he has a throwback kinda look which I kinda like. Still, this angle goes nowhere. Kelly wants to show her tits to a guy at ringside, who gets pushed back by Knox.

Surprisingly good main event of the week : Kurt Angle vs RVD. Angle can't kick, and he love to transition back into offense by kicking. RVD still can't punch or throw a forearm to save his life, yet loves to do a comeback with forearms. Apart from that, this actually pretty good, Angle grounds RVD quite a bit so we don't get too much nonsense early on and save the big spots for key moments. I kinda like that Angle quite a bit after all, expect for his flat WWE trademarked german suplexes and the overreliance on the ankle lock (with all the infamous obligatory counters).

Test is coming. Feel the excitement. All the backstage stuff is awful, with that stale and dull WWE directing and delivery. There was also an awful segment with a short and fat male stripper getting squashed by Sandman. There's a vampire stalking around. And Tazz can't say "exhibitionnist". Those funny guys, ah ah.

2006.06.27 Kurt Angle vs RVD

[El-P]

Ok, the fourth episode would be enough for me to not even keep on at this point. Same crap with Kelly Kelly. Test looking roided as heel squashing Al Snow in twenty seconds, I guess to piss old ECW fans off. Then a lumbering Big Show overpowering RVD, whose spots just don't make the match interesting at all either (I expected something much better to be honest, on the strentghs of old matches with Bam Bam and Taz) with a stupid swerve at the end with Paul E. turning on RVD and the ECW fans.

Best match was Mike Knox vs Guido, who sadly seems to be a JTTS. Not feeling the show at all. I'll probably still watch a bunch more, but the perspective of having to go Big Show vs Taker, Kane and Batista just renders the whole thing totally uninteresting to me. I'll watch the Flair match though, because I've never seen "garbage Flair".

[goc]

I tried to tell you that you didn't want to start at the beginning.

[Matt D]

Like anything else in modern WWE, it gets more interesting when Vince stops paying attention to it.

[goc]

Like anything else in modern WWE, it gets more interesting when Vince stops paying attention to it.

This makes me imagine Vince walking through backstage and seeing Colin Delaney for the first time. "Hey pal, where's your parents at? You shouldn't be walking around back here by yourself."

[Stiva]

Yep, WWECW (I think I might have said it in this thread) gets good when Miz and Morrison are an official team and becomes great when Finlay, Matt Hardy and Mark Henry are drafted across. Anything pre-September 2007 is awful.

[El-P]

Yep, WWECW (I think I might have said it in this thread) gets good when Miz and Morrison are an official team

 

The mere thought of Miz & Morrison being the signal of things getting "good" just makes me cringe, to be honest.

[goc]

They were legitimately a good tag team. I loved their series with Shannon Moore & Jimmy Yang.

[Johnny Sorrow]

Miz and Morrison were a great example of two guys they had nothing for who got thrown together as a team. Then they worked hard and got way over and became a great team.

[El-P]

Episode 5

 

WWE-like promo by Heyman, who's now a corporate heel owner of ECW I guess. How creative.
So, we get Test and Dreamer in a bad match. Test looks like he's gonna explode. Yeah, looking roided up and fucking divas surely was a great way to live. But I already outlived him by 6 years, so who looks stupid now ?

 

Nothing match between Sabu and Justin Cedible, which ends up by DQ because although we're in ECW, it's not an extreme rules match. Ok, this show is stupid. Poor Justin looked bad BTW.

 

CM Punk is coming. Cool. That vampire guy is coming, and he's got Ariel with him. Cool. Shannon Moore is coming, and he looks like a minion of Dump Matsumoto. Hum… not sure.

 

And now we get to the infamous Flair vs Big Show match. Ok, I've heard enough time that Flair reinvented himself as a garbage worker and was awesome. I always took it with a grain of salt, to say the least. Now I see this match. Ok people, Flair looks like shit. He bumps awkward, he looks old as dirt, he bleeds like a pig and can't do anything but chops. And no, he works nothing like Onita. I mean not at all. Using a bunch of props, bleeding profusely, using a barb wire baseball bat and taking a sloppy bump on thumbtacks doesn't make him an Onita-like worker. It makes him look like the shittiest Shoji Nakamaki ever. And the Big Show just isn't very good either BTW. This match is trash, I've probably seen the same stuff in IWA Japan circa 95 between Leatherface and Hiroshi Oono, and it didn't look that much worse. It's actually pretty pathetic to watch Flair do that shit (poorly I might add) at his age when twenty years before he was an all time great.

 

So, this TV show is pretty much garbage. Oh, yes, there was one good segment : Kelly Kelly and Candice Michelle (whoever she was) doing some erotic dance before Mike Knox came spoiling the fun. Then the Sandman shows up and canes Knox down the stage. That was nice. Candice was a better dancer than Kelly, too.

[goc]

I see I'm not alone in thinking people went way overboard in praising Flair/Big Show.

[BigBadMick]

I was completely baffled by that also, goc.

[SomethingSavage]

I see I'm not alone in thinking people went way overboard in praising Flair/Big Show.

 

To each their own. I personally found it immensely entertaining & crazy enjoyable. I liked the story setup for Show as the immovable object. He was this sort of dragon, and the "Land of Extreme" was his guarded domain. Knights from the two other brands would come in, challenge the dragon, and try to slay him. It was a nice way to help separate the ECW brand at the time, which was desperately needed. Show fit the part fine, even if he wasn't in the best of shape or whatever.

 

I don't think Flair looked any more sloppy here than he had in the few years prior. His work never really changed. The guy's always taken shit back bumps. He's been looking like an undressed mummy since Evolution. It's like the guy aged fifteen or twenty years between 2001 and 2003. This is hardly something that sprung up in time for the match with Show.

 

And the American Onita thing is just a term I've seen used across the Interwebz. Not sure who's credited for coining it, but I don't know that anyone ever said he "worked LIKE Onita." It's just that he adopted the death match style in his later 'E years.

 

Still, I don't care if I'm alone in thinking that this is some entertaining stuff from Flair. It's not his best work by far, but it's damn sure better than a truckload of his nineties stuff. And, if he was going to stick around & request to work anyway, at least he had the good sense to reinvent himself a bit in the process.

[El-P]

And the American Onita thing is just a term I've seen used across the Interwebz. Not sure who's credited for coining it, but I don't know that anyone ever said he "worked LIKE Onita." It's just that he adopted the death match style in his later 'E years.

 

Yeah but you see that's the thing. Flair didn't work "death match style" either. There Flair worked like a shitty garbage guy from IWA Japan in the mid 90's. And I have to say that I've seen Nakamaki look better than this actually (not much, but still). Really, Flair emulating Gypsie Joe is not exactly a compliment any way you slice it.

[El-P]

Episode 6 is just as bad, if not worse than the previous one. Zero good match again. The best one consisting of a competitive squash of Stevie Richards by Sabu. Poor Stevie, after a 6 years career in the WWE, he's lower than Sabu on the totem pole than he was in ECW in 96.

 

The rest of the show, well, a stupid angle with Tommy Dreamer and Paul E. leading to a Test feud. Test looks like Warrior without the paint and the tassles actually.

 

A dull kick-punch exchange main event between Big Show & Taker, which isn't worked like an ECW match at all. So I guess Flair really whored himself for nothing the previous week since Taker apparently doesn't have to do nothing but his usual MMATaker routine, which clearly isn't his best work. And Show, again, shows me nothing more than bad punches, his stock is clearly dropping (not that I ever was a big Paul Wight fan, but still, this was supposed to be him being *good*) watching that kind of stuff. Well, and the ending is awful, with who else but the Great Kali showing up, and with the help of Show putting Taker through the announcers' table. I guess all that "compelling" work on Show's knee by Taker was for naught.

 

And like this wasn't enough, we get Kelly getting caned by Sandman. The set-up was extremely poor, and the poor girl looked terrified to take the hit, yet she still took it like a trooper. Mike Knox just flew away after winning a bad match. So not only he doesn't like the fact Kelly is a striper (I refuse to call her exhibitionnist), but he's also a complete asshole on every level since he pushed Kelly in front of him. Kelly gets carried out on a stretcher (hey, just like that TNA show with Francine I just watched !)

 

Not a single actual good match since episode three, and zero good angle since the beginning. That show is a winner thus far.

[goc]

You must really hate yourself to be doing this and early TNA at the same time. You know, Ring Ka King was right there as a pallet cleanser for either one of these

[SomethingSavage]

Scott Steiner and Abyss threatening & chasing off fans in Ring Ka King = Indian Brody & Hansen.

 

Boom. I said it.

[El-P]

You must really hate yourself to be doing this and early TNA at the same time.

 

Thus far, TNA weekly PPV's murder WWECW in term of content, when you ff the crap. And yeah, I guess I'm masochistic. Well, in fact I know why I'm doing this...

 

Episode 7 is still crap, but less so. First off we get a semi-decent ECW original match between Justin Credible and Balls Mahoney. Sadly it still has to end with Balls caving some craniums in with a chair, despite the match being "not extreme rules", which is stupid in itself if you're reviving ECW. Anyway.

 

The whole Kelly angle is apparently leading to a Sandman & Dreamer feud with Knox & Test. Well, at least there's a ECW originals vs WWE guys thematic here, but Steroid Test is not a guy I want to watch.

 

Then you get the debut of that vampire guy, who doesn't get an intro because we cut from a stupid backstage vignette in which Paul Heyman has his security guys beat Guido up and drag him to the ring. Poor Guido, he can work circles around anyone in this roster and he's at a sub-Barry Horowitz level it seems. The vampire guy looks like a metrosexual Twilight fan doing cosplay, he's not spooky at all (as opposed to Dave Heath who looked like a freak). I dig Ariel though.

 

And then the main event of, oh man, Big Show vs Kane. And actually, this is probably the best match of the four Big Show macthes thus far. I wouldn't go that far to say it's good, but it certainly beats a generic Taker match or Ric Flair whoring himself to new lows. Kane looks better than Show here, and the fact they use gimmicks makes it easier to convey the idea that it's ECW we're talking about, although Show's bump through the table looks really deliberate. Of course everything kinda does, and they work a snail pace, but it's a little bit more of an actual garbage brawl this time. This will lead to Sabu vs Show, and the question is, will Sabu be able to drag something semi-interesting out of that big oaf ?

[El-P]

Ok, this TV show has to be a giant troll. Episode 8 takes place at the Hammerstein Ballroom, with a bunch of ECW mutants. So you know they'll shit on a main event like Big Show vs Batista, rightfully so, as it's a terrible match. And even in a 8 minutes or so TV match, they are so bad that the only way they try to work a "good match" is, yeah, you guessed it, spamming nearfalls and kickouts. Well, spamming in a lumbering, very deliberate way. Batista reminds me why this era of WWE is so terrible on every aspect, the generic roided look with tribal tatoos on the trunks, the robotic style. Anyway, match ends on a DQ (in an ECW title match) and Sabu proceeds to do a bunch of chair spots on Show who then falls down through a table, so I guess that was their way on redeeming themselves.

 

Anyway. Kurt Angle squashed the Brooklyn Brawler. Yeah, WWE hilarity here and not a waste of time at all. Kevin Thorne cuts a typical WWE promo, devoid of any character. This promotion is lifeless.

 

And then there's this Tommy Dreamer & Sandman vs Mike Knox & Test match, which is pretty much useless too, the worst Nakamaki & Ohno vs Leatherface 1 & 2 match ever. The highlight is Sandman throwing a dropkick. We get Dreamer sexually assaulting Kelly. You know, even in ECW, I don't see the purpose of a babyface spanking a girl who really hasn't been portrayed as a heel at all and never did anything bad to begin with. That was pretty appaling to be honest. Then we get Heyman's security running in and Test throwing Dreamer in the barb wire board twice. The ECW originals are pictured as complete jobbers again.

 

The only saving grace of this show was the debut of CM Punk against Justin Credible, in a pretty good short match. Punk got over big time in front of this audience of course, and Credible looked decent, busting out a cool Lance Storm leg roll up. But really, this show… Oh yeah, and Sabu talks too now, because those WWE dialogues are so good.