Was ECW all it was cracked up to be?

[JaymeFuture]

So for this weeks podcast, we're going to look at ECW, and discuss the merits of the product throughout it's history, and talk about how much of the stuff was genuine quality, and how much of it was the Heyman illusion. I think it's a pretty interesting topic, given the loyalty amongst hardcores it seemed to have, given the microscope that was always given to the Big Two.

 

As usual, I'll be reading feedback on the show and crediting you accordingly, but I want to get a bit of a gauge on opinions here - did you like the ECW product during the time? How do you feel it looks retrospectively? What periods were best, which ones were worse, how important do you believe it was, and moreover, does it deserve the reputation it had and has to this day?

[khawk20]

I liked it at the time. Still do now, in smaller doses.

 

I know a few people that had drifted away from watching wrestling on TV over the years that tuned into ECW when it finally came on TV here and were blown away with what they were seeing, and got dragged back into weekly viewing. The thing for them was that it was such a different product than they had been watching when they faded away from it. The initial shock of what they were seeing was enough to capture their interest again.

 

Don't discount the rabid, chanting, nutty crowd and the effect they had on newer viewers either. It was a very, very different vibe than many had left their wrestling fandom on in the 90's.

[Sidebottom]

ECW peaked in 1995 in terms of in ring (Malenko, Guerrero, Benoit), Character development (Raven, Sandman, Taz, Sabu) and storylines (Dreamer & Raven / Foley vs ECW). 1995 is when they were consistent. After that time they were a mixed bag. For every consistently great show from top to bottom you had (i.e. Anarchy Rulz 99, Guilty as Charged 2000, Heat Wave 98) you had an equally dud card from top to bottom such as Wrestlepalooza 1998 (which for my money was the worst card of 1998) and November to Remember 1999. The promotion would seem stale at times. The likes of Nova and Guido etc seemed to float around in the same spots for years (which ironically started to change towards the very end when Nova got in shape, and Guido formed that excellent tag team with Tony Mamluke (who seemed hell bent on killing himself) and were knocking it out of the park with a revived Mikey Whipwreck and Tajiri. But again, for every one of those tag matches you had a Danny Doring & Roadkill Twilight episode, nothing tag team match.

 

But to summarise, I loved ECW when ECW were presenting a hot product. Were they everything they were cracked up to be? Depends on who is hyping them up and to what extent. I'd argue their influence (taken from Onita, who in turn took elements from Memphis) was obviously very important to Western wrestling.

[BillThompson]

I've said this before, but I'm not a big fan of ECW and for the most part I believe their importance and general quality has been overstated. Up until 1995-1996 I enjoyed ECW both as an in-ring product and as a fun time spent watching wrestling. Post-1996 I've found that the promotion became stale, predictable, and too in love with being hyperbolic and over the top just for the sake of being hyperbolic and over the top. The funny thing is that I believe the quality of the in-ring workers stayed pretty consistent throughout the history of the promotion. It was the booking and writing of Paul Heyman that took a nosedive post-1996, and by 1999 ECW was a product that I would contend was among the worst week to week wrestling I've had the displeasure of seeing.

 

There's also the issue of the rabid ECW fans who I believe have done more damage to wrestling than people care to admit. The smart crowd with their chants of "ECW, ECW", "This is Awesome," "We are Awesome", "You Fucked Up," etc. made the matches a chore to sit through. It was no longer about the wrestling or the angles, but about the fans and their desire to get themselves over. It didn't matter if two of the wrestlers were trying like hell to entertain them, should they have the audacity to slightly mess up a move or to grab a headlock to talk things over for thirty seconds then the fans would start with their incessant and overbearing chants. To me that is ECW's ultimate legacy, and it's a terrible legacy to have,

 

In the end of the day ECW is a promotion that never made any money, that suffered from truly awful booking from its promoter, and way overstayed its welcome. ECW still has a great reputation in most wrestling circles, but it is an unearned and dishonest reputation that is fueled by myth and nostalgia. To me ECW has become much like WWF's Attitude Era, something people want to remember fondly, but if they truly go back and revisit that promotion or that era they find out that 95% of what they thought was great is actually hogwash.

[Loss]

In regards to ECW in 1998 and earlier:

 

Was the FBI involved? No? Then chances are it was pretty bad. Not necessarily, but most likely.

 

(I only use that dividing line because I still need to revisit 1999 and 2000)

[Childs]

The word that comes to mind is bloated. I didn't watch ECW at the time, so I feel no nostalgia for it. In going through the '90s stuff, I've been struck by how many of the matches and promo segments could've benefited from a tighter focus. There were lots of good kernels--the Foley promos, the FBI, the showcases for wrestlers such as Scorpio, Mysterio and Tajiri. And Heyman certainly succeeded in creating a distinct vibe. But I dislike a lot of what ECW birthed, especially the stunt-focused brawling style. Even the stuff a lot of others like--I'm thinking of the Funk-Sabu barbed wire match--I find tedious.

[khawk20]

But I dislike a lot of what ECW birthed, especially the stunt-focused brawling style. Even the stuff a lot of others like--I'm thinking of the Funk-Sabu barbed wire match--I find tedious.

 

It's a good point, but to be honest at the time I personally was not thinking of the impact their style had moving forward on other promotions and on wrestling in general.

 

It was only later that the idea came to me that taking things to the level they did violence-wise and stylistically would be so hard to dial back. At the time, it had no consequence on how I and my groups watched it or discussed it.

[Sean Liska]

I'm not going to try to win you guys over on the quality of ECW. But you've got to remember the context of the time to see why ECW appealed so much to people. The territories had all been put out of business. WCW had been the last bastion of hope for the American smart fan and then Bischoff came in and totally sold out the promotion's soul, Hogan retired our hero Ric Flair after treating him as a whipping boy for several months, and Starrcade was headlined by Hogan and his buddy Brutus Beefcake. The WWF had always been the enemy, but it had become worse and more irrelevant than ever, bottoming out with a catastrophic KOTR 95 and a SummerSlam headlined by Diesel and Mabel. As pessimistic as people feel about today's wrestling scene, it was much much worse then because business was in the toilet and their views of talent were quite a bit more out of date than now.

 

So yeah, this company comes along that treats Terry Funk with the reverence due to a hardcore fan God, and Sabu is blowing people's minds, and they're bringing in guys like Benoit and Guerrero that the Big 2 wouldn't touch because they're so out of touch, and they're using current music and producing videos that look like stuff from MTV, and you've got great angles like the Sandman pretending to be blinded, and Heyman and Douglas are preaching to the choir about everything wrong with American wrestling, and the Raven character fit the time perfectly, and they're ahead of the curve in tapping into UFC with Taz, and the Pulp Fiction montages were so much more hip than anything else we were getting, and they're bringing in the AAA guys and Joey Styles is saying everything we think about Eric Bischoff.

 

You can look back at parts of the ECW or the Attitude Era and say, "This sucked, why do people look back on this fondly, how was this successful". But there was a reason it connected with people, it's not that easy to fool people into becoming passionate about pro wrestling.

[Sean Liska]

 

 

There's also the issue of the rabid ECW fans who I believe have done more damage to wrestling than people care to admit. The smart crowd with their chants of "ECW, ECW", "This is Awesome," "We are Awesome", "You Fucked Up," etc. made the matches a chore to sit through. It was no longer about the wrestling or the angles, but about the fans and their desire to get themselves over. It didn't matter if two of the wrestlers were trying like hell to entertain them, should they have the audacity to slightly mess up a move or to grab a headlock to talk things over for thirty seconds then the fans would start with their incessant and overbearing chants. To me that is ECW's ultimate legacy, and it's a terrible legacy to have,

 

 

Yes and no. That seems like more of an NYC crowd thing to me. In Philly you could bring in guys who had never performed on a big American stage before like Mysterio and Psicosis, or Malenko and Gurrero, or later years an Antifaz del Norte and Mosco de Merced, and the crowd would be respectful and more passionate than any other American audience.

[Coffey]

Loved ECW. But it's not the 90's anymore, it's not innovative anymore & I'm not a teenager anymore.

 

When I was 17, of course I liked a wrestling promotion that was filled with blood, cussing & women running around in nothing but a thong.

 

I bought in to a lot of the characters. I was a huge Raven mark and him going to WCW was a big deal to me. Taz & The Dudley Boys were also huge for me. Admittedly, I also thought the world of Rob Van Dam at the time as well.

 

I was a lot younger, a lot more hormonal & it felt more "real." Also, it can't be overstated how much the crowd was a big part of the appeal. They all seemed to be having a blast & I wanted to be a part of that. It was like a secret underground promotion that not everyone was supposed to know about. When I was staying up until 1 A.M. to watch an ECW TV show on a throwaway sports channel on a Saturday Night, it felt a helluva lot different than a Saturday morning recap WWF show when I was a kid or the 6:05 Sat WCW show featuring jobbers & scrubs.

 

All the wrestling itself wasn't great but it was more about the over-the-top stories, the characters & there was a lot of good promos in ECW too. I could buy into the show & was emotionally invested in seeing things play out. ECW was really my first exposure to a hardcore wrestling product. I had seen bloody brawls & whatnot but I wasn't exposed to Japan or anything yet in 1998, so seeing New Jack jump from a balcony or The Dudley Boys put Spike Dudley through a flaming table...that was all new to me. And Sabu was just straight-up insane. Table spots were new & fresh to me. So were the kendo stick blows from Sandman.

 

Was it all it was cracked up to be? I mean, I'm sure there's a lot of revisionist history going on. I feel like a lot of newer wrestling fans associate ECW with what WWE tells them it was & others look back on it with rose-colored glasses (probably myself as well). I liked it for what it was at the time. I don't have a huge desire to revisit it but it filled a wrestling void in my life when I was looking to branch out.

[pantherwagner]

Like others I don't feel nostalgia for ECW even though I watched it during its heyday (through the supershows and commercial tapes, I didn't really follow the TV). When they started gaining a following I had already seen Onita doing crazy shit and I already knew the 1995 top talent (Scorp, Benoit, Eddie, Malenko, etc.) from Mexico and Japan where they were having better matches. I largely stopped caring after 1998 but I hope someday people start recognising the FBI as the best thing that ever happened during the promotion's history.

[pol]

It's strange to hear people chanting 'ECW' at RVD in 2014. You have to imagine the majority of the people chanting never saw a single second of ECW when it was actually active.

[NintendoLogic]

The problem with ECW isn't that it was bad wrestling (though it certainly was that). It's that it made wrestling as a whole significantly worse. The damage ECW did to American wrestling can hardly be overstated. The supplanting of traditional brawls by stunt wrestling and the rise of annoying fans who do everything they can to put the focus on themselves are arguably the two most appalling trends of the past two decades, and they can both be traced back to ECW. And it's not like it produced tons of greatness to counterbalance this legacy. In fact, I can't think of a single positive trend that it bequeathed. ECW's rightful place is on the scrap heap of 90s trash culture alongside the likes of Jerry Springer and Marilyn Manson.

[Shining Wiz]

ECW succeeded because it was different. All the "annoying trends" that grew out of it are annoying because, by copying ECW you by definition miss out on being different. It becomes derivative and obnoxious. 20 years later, you go back and look at the shows and you think, I've seen this a thousand times - because by now you have - but you also still feel some of that authenticity, originality and energy that they had by being different.

 

ECW started to make national waves when I was 15 and two or three years away from getting a dial up connection. It existed in the Apter mags in pictures and stories. Then, it existed in write ups and web pages for a couple of years before I could actually sit down and watch it live(ish) and up to date. They put on athletic matches WCW and the WWF wouldn't or couldn't, had characters that were more modern and story lines that were less insulting to a fan's intelligence. It was different at a time wrestling was stagnating and gave a group of fans who had nowhere else to go a bit of hope that the pro wrestling they liked wasn't quite dead yet.

 

That's not to say everything they did was great. Far from it. A lot of their wrestlers were awful, a lot of matches were awful.....but that fit into the show. It fit into the grimy, gritty atmosphere they created better than someone like Shawn Michaels, Sexy Boy ever could.

 

In the op, the question of whether it was genuine quality or a Heyman illusion was asked. There was no illusion....it was just ECW. When guys like the Public Enemy or 911 left and were incredibly awful in other promotions, it wasn't a shock to find out they weren't great wrestlers, but it was a disappointment to see them used in a way that didn't reflect what skills they did have. There's no illusion there, that's just smart wrestling and storytelling.

[Johnny Sorrow]

There's a big difference between the Philly crowd having fun and being a part of the experience and douchey smart fans chanting "CM PUNK" or whatever just to be "smart". Especially since Paul E wanted the fans to be part of the show.

[KrisZ]

When ECW took over RAW in 1997 the game changed for them......they had fun stuff after that but the magic of what they had the two years earlier was gone. 1995 was a fun year but as far as matches goes 1996 was their best year IMO

[Dylan Waco]

Within the last five years I've watched every ECW match that exists on tape (including every handheld), seen a good friend of mine complete a documentary on the company that was ten-plus years in the making, and studied the details of 1990's U.S. wrestling in intimate detail. So you would think I would have a ton to say on this topic. But the truth is I'm not sure that I do anymore, in part because the projects I was involved with that dealt with ECW have been completed, but also because I think the degree to which ECW has been covered, discussed, given credit to, given blame for, et. is totally out of proportion to what the company actually did historically. There are many reasons for why I believe this to be true, some of which have been covered in this thread, others of which are perhaps beyond the scope of it (for example I think Paul Heyman's ability to self promote, and the way he has been covered by wrestling media, have greatly contributed to the fact that ECW is still seen as super relevant in the eyes of many), but the point is that I think I've finally reached the point where I am just sick of talking about it, at least in these sort of "how good/how bad was it?" terms.

 

As recently as a year ago I would have been the guy jumping to the defense of ECW and how it has "aged" as I believed then, and still believe now, that even in the rear view it was more often than not an exciting, interesting and fun product to watch, that produced far more good matches than it is often given credit for. But now? Well if people don't want to see those things, or simply don't see those things through their own observations that's fine. I'd rather talk about Puerto Rico, or Montreal, or Portland, or the Maritimes, or any number of other promotions and territories that haven't gotten a modicum of the coverage that ECW has received over the years.

 

In the end ECW is both underrated and overrated in my eyes. Underrated because it's fiercest critics want to believe it was all one thing (crazy violence, horribly sexist portrayals of women, bad comedy et.) and it's biggest advocates want to believe it was another ("ECW was the most revolutionary brand in modern wrestling history, and genius booker/promoter who never made any money Paul Heyman set the wheels in motion that changed wrestling forever!").

[Matt D]

The best stuff ever attached to the name ECW was Christian, WWE TV Champ.

[Goodear]

WWE era ECW with Christian, Zack Ryder, Regal's army, the Hurricane-Burchill feud was way underrated. It really went to show how by pairing down the people available and the time you had to fill a week, that a show could really come together in a focused way. Honestly, it served as a proto-NXT more than anything else and laid the blueprint down for what we get now out of those sets of initials.

 

But I'm guessing the question posed has a whole lot more to do when it was a separate entity from WWE. While I think imitators took a lot of ECW did and boiled it down to flabby guys in T-shirts hitting each other with stuff, that there was more there than all the negatives being discussed. This is not to say that those negatives aren't a reality and the idea of turning the crowd into an active character in a show is one of the most damaging things to hit the scene ever. But what ECW really did well was delve into the current culture and counter culture in ways larger organizations have never been able to do. Raven and New Jack especially managed to tie things going on in the music scene into wrestling while WCW had a guy disco dancing (and WWE currently has one doing ballroom).

[flyonthewall2983]

It seemed ECW knew their audience well, where I think WWF and WCW at best guessed and at worst didn't care at all for the sake of massaging and satisfying egos. Not just Paul, but the talent as well. On one hand it's pretty easy to do that when everyone is from roughly the same part of the world that they were performing in, on the other it's still quite endearing anyway. The same could be said for Memphis, the Carolina's, Texas, Florida, etc. etc. Even WWWF. In making his product a world-wide attraction, Vince lost a lot of that and the people who tried to compete with him didn't go for it much at all.

[iamthedoctor]

I would say yes. It was a huge factor that contributed to the Hardcore style you saw over the years in the 2 major companies.

 

I had garnered some slight interest in ECW Id say around 1994 time when a UK magazine Powerslam covered it with pics and man did they look bloody, reading about Barbed Wire Bats & Glass fists got my attention then there was a guy who was selling tapes of the show and I ordered 1 or 2 shows. I think the first show I got was the one where Richards & Luna squared off in a Cage possibly one of the Heatwaves.

 

Many look at it as a indy show but with PPVs they had Id say it was good enough to be a top major company which it did get labelled at one time as one of the big 3 ie the other two being WWF & WCW.

[ButchReedMark]

I never saw it as a top major company. Did it even do one big arena?

[Sidebottom]

I never saw it as a top major company. Did it even do one big arena?

 

They did over 6000 in Illinois which I think is the best they got by some distance. When you factor in Memphis crowds ranging from a few thousand to that same figure on a continued basis with Fargo on top, WCCW far exceeding those live gate numbers... attendances weren't ECW's strong suit. But they played against this publicly. I liken it to a singer who can't fill an arena opting to promote an "intimate setting" as the selling point, wink wink.

[kjh]

The problem with ECW isn't that it was bad wrestling (though it certainly was that). It's that it made wrestling as a whole significantly worse. The damage ECW did to American wrestling can hardly be overstated. The supplanting of traditional brawls by stunt wrestling and the rise of annoying fans who do everything they can to put the focus on themselves are arguably the two most appalling trends of the past two decades, and they can both be traced back to ECW. And it's not like it produced tons of greatness to counterbalance this legacy. In fact, I can't think of a single positive trend that it bequeathed. ECW's rightful place is on the scrap heap of 90s trash culture alongside the likes of Jerry Springer and Marilyn Manson.

 

Was that specifically ECW's fault or the natural evolution of the art-form after kayfabe was killed? The problem of wrestlers taking insane amounts of punishment to get themselves over as being really tough and focusing more on spots to quickly pop the crowd than heat and psychology was a problem that pervaded the industry. I'm sure ECW can be partially blamed, but to give them all the credit for those trends is probably overrating their influence, which is hard to tease out, because there were a lot of cooks around that somewhat independently went in a similar direction to the route ECW went down.

[Hollinger.]

For every consistently great show from top to bottom you had (i.e. Anarchy Rulz 99, Guilty as Charged 2000, Heat Wave 98) you had an equally dud card from top to bottom such as Wrestlepalooza 1998 (which for my money was the worst card of 1998) and November to Remember 1999.

 

My favorite ECW match is on that top to bottom dud NTR99.