The Colonel’s Fry #1 – The Fascination with ECW

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Troy

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Welcome readers to The Colonel’s Fry! This will be the first of hopefully many columns written by myself discussing everything and anything about wrestling. For my first column I will be focusing on the fascination with ECW that still remains in the wrestling industry nearly a decade after ECW closed down. I will not only be looking at the wrestling promoters but also at the fascination the fans still have with ECW as well.

I assume that most are at least aware of what ECW was, although that indeed may not be the case and I will touch on that specific point later in the column, but if you are not familiar with the ECW that existed before the WWE third brand ECW then here is a very brief summary. ECW was a small independent wrestling promotion that, during the mid to late nineties, worked its way into the position of the third largest wrestling company in the United States. It was a company that had a fanatical following, it had the most passionate and loyal fans going and the reaction that the company would get from its core fans was just incredible. The reasons behind the company closing are numerous but the loss of a television deal with TNN and financial difficulties were the key factors.

For a company that closed its doors in 2001 its continued impact on wrestling today is simply astonishing. You only have to watch any recent wrestling show to see the impact that this relatively small company had on the wrestling industry as a whole. Listen to the crowd chants, if anything remotely “hardcore†happens you may hear an E-C-Dub chant ring out or even a “Holy Sh*t!†chant, if someone makes a bad mistake then you may even hear a “You F**ked Up!†chant from a section of the audience. Look at some of the match stipulations floating around, especially in TNA, a lot of the more extreme match types were certainly influenced by ECW and by the level that they went to with regards to violence in wrestling. Look at the rosters of both WWE and TNA and in the independents and you are bound to find a fair few wrestlers who wrestled in the original ECW.

Hell ECW even made a return under the WWE umbrella after an incredibly successful DVD entitled The Rise and Fall of ECW which, according to numerous sources, became the second best-selling WWE wrestling DVD of all time. That DVD spawned a highly successful PPV, another DVD and then ECW became WWE’s third brand. Granted the WWE/ECW brand was ECW by name only, a cunning marketing ploy by WWE to attain the biggest interest in another brand of WWE. It started with a large number of ECW originals on the roster but that quickly diminished to a select few.

Turn on TNA IMPACT this week and you will see the latest attempt to make money from the ECW name and legacy. Another ECW stable is being created, this time in TNA, Tommy Dreamer is leader of course and he only has to walk out in view of the audience and the ECW chants start raining down from the rafters. Why is TNA bringing in an ECW stable you ask? Well according to multiple wrestling news sites, TNA had a focus group do some research and many fans responded that their favourite period in wrestling was ECW. The fans still want ECW in some shape or form and so TNA are going to give it to them in a way to draw in ratings and money like WWE were able to do previously with the ECW name and contents. Slight problem for TNA in that from my knowledge they will be unable to use the ECW name as WWE owns the rights to it and everything that goes with it. Anyway because of this research TNA hired Tommy Dreamer and aligned the likes of Raven, Stevie Richards and most likely Rhino with him to form the nucleus of an ECW stable.

They will certainly garner a good reaction from the crowd when they come out and especially when they use weapons and go all “hardcore†on IMPACT. TNA needs to be careful though in how far they take this, yes they can play a part and be a productive part of the show but a lot of the wrestlers in this group are either not over as individuals anymore or are nearing the end of their careers and their place inside a wrestling ring is questionable, especially if TNA hire a few other ECW alumni who are well past their use by date Sandman and Sabu I am looking at you. I don’t want to this to turn into another The Band, which was quite simply put horrible. It was three old guys who can’t wrestle anymore reliving something from fifteen years ago. Yes these ECW guys are younger, well some of them are, but there are some clear similarities between the two groups. It will be interesting to see the reaction that the ECW group gets over the next few weeks and months particularly when they are in a match. Will the reaction be the same? Will it last? There is certainly a market out there for ECW revivals but it isn’t that large anymore. Will is sustain a small group for a short period of time, yes I think it can but the more the name keeps being used and abused the smaller the market gets.

A gripe that I have is I am sure that a fair portion of those who chant E-C-Dub during shows over the past few years never even watched ECW, they most likely don’t understand the reasoning behind it all and why the company drew such a strong following. Some will certainly be chanting it because it is the cool thing to do, rather than having watched it, on PPV, TV, DVD or now even Youtube, and be drawn in by the product. ECW wasn’t just about the violence and the hardcore matches, it was about being a clear alternative to the mainstream wrestling being offered then by WWF and WCW. It had its fair share of hardcore matches and its fair share of shockingly poor matches but it also featured some amazing technical wrestling bouts and some incredible displays of lucha libre wrestling. It just had a feel to it that is tough to explain and impossible to be replicated. That is why the hardcore companies like CZW will never be anywhere near as big as ECW was. Those companies just took the violence and promoted that but as shown time and time again there is no big market for that type of wrestling, it isn’t popular on a large scale at least not in regular doses.

WWE weren’t able to capture the ECW feel as hard as they tried, the closest they came was at the original One Night Stand but still it wasn’t the same, and TNA will never be able to capture what was ECW. The wrestling industry will continue to use the ECW name and wrestlers closely associated with that name in order to make money out of them but myself I wish that they would just stop. ECW had an amazing run in the nineties and its impact in wrestling is everywhere to see but it is just getting a bit old now. Some things are better left in the past rather than trying to milk it for all it is worth. I don’t want to see another attempt at forming an ECW stable I want to see the ECW name and legacy put to rest. Wrestling promoters and indeed fans need to let ECW be what it was rather than trying to bring it out of the closest a couple of times a year trying to recreate what once was. Leave it be.

Think Chicken…

Thanks for reading this which is my first attempt at a column. I look forward to any comments, complaints or suggestions.

Note: This was written in June of this year.
 

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I used to like ECW, it was different and I was becoming a teenager when it started becoming popular, I thought all this testosterone fueled shows were awesome. Now I look back and think it was the worst thing to happen to Pro-Wrestling. Not so much the content, since wrestling should be edgy, but it was the unnecessary risks that were involved in simple matches. It raised the bar of expectations too high and has lead to the deaths of almost half their 1995-2000 roster. Chairshots were done for heat, they did it for a cheap pop. Tables were supposed to take people out for weeks, now they get up almost immediately. People expect blood for everything and people to fall from 20 ft. Looking back at it all, I don't think I would watch it all over again.

And resurrections should stop, it was a different time then. People were looking for something that wasn't so cookie cutter, squeaky clean. Nowadays its all like that. Grunge was dominant because a whole generation was looking to rebel against conformity, now teens are more conformist than ever. Wrestling is like the music industry. You go from Kurt Cobain to Justin Beeber, you go from Steve Austin to John Cena.