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ECW tidbit from the Observer

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I find it baffling that Vince thinks the old ECW is outdated yet he loves Sabu.

He's a maniac. What do you expect?

 

And I'm sure that it was all WWE fans who were just interested in ECW who bought the DVD.

 

I'm sure.

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What are you all talking about? Vince McMahon is a genius who built and made professional wrestling what it is today. Austin would be nothing without Vince's creative vision. His idea for Stone Cold Steve Austin put the business through the roof! Chris Benoit--I mean, he was a nobody midcarder before Vince hired him. And look at Chris Jericho. A cheap Shawn Michaels ripoff! Only after he came to the WWF did Vince turn him into the first ever Undisputed World Heavyweight Champion--and a powerful and successful one at that.

 

Haven't you listened to Steve Lombardi and Gerald Brisco on each one of the WWE DVD's? Wake Up, people!

 

 

 

Really, though--did any of you really expect Vince McMahon Presents ECW® to be anything like the past incarnation? When they decide to do something without any competition, with no other reason to do it except that they can, well, you can't expect much. What's sad is how they are blaming everyone but themselves for the current failure of the "ECW Brand". It's been that way since 2001. The InVasion!11!! failed because, to Vince, WCW was a joke that never had any big stars--and it was booked that way. Now we have ECW 2005 with World Champion Big Show and Kurt Angle and Test as two of it's biggest stars. Yup, just like 1995 all over again!

 

Someome said the instant they put Angle with ECW it was done. They were right. It was immediately apparent that they didn't have faith in the ECW name from the start, so they loaded it up with WWE bred talent (yes, I know Big Show started in WCW--but really, he's a WWE character at this point. Does ANYONE look at him as The Giant?) and made it RAW Version 1.5 with a ECW logo on it.

 

In 6 months, ECW will be dead and buried, just like WCW. Perhaps that's what Vince really wants. Bury the name and kill any buzz or enthusiam that the fans used to have for the old product. I mean, WCW did a good job doing that to themselves with Russo, but can you watch an old tape of Nitro without thinking of the InVasion!!111!!? I can't. The only saving grace is that I hope that ECW 2005 dies very quickly, and we don't have 6-12 months of horrible memories.

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whoa now...let's not get to crazy here...somehow I don't think Vince is purposely trying to bury ECW...after all, it means more money in his pocket to have it around. He's just THAT dellusional to think HIS vision of ECW is what the fans want.

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whoa now...let's not get to crazy here...somehow I don't think Vince is purposely trying to bury ECW...after all, it means more money in his pocket to have it around. He's just THAT dellusional to think HIS vision of ECW is what the fans want.

He may not be trying to purposely bury ECW, but there are people around him that want to do so, so he gets fed ideas tainted from that point of view.

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Well, I don't really think Vince purposely wants ECW 2005 to fail. I think he created the whole thing wanting it to succeed and make money. The problem is that Vince's (and everyone around him) perception of ECW is very different from the fans, especially the hardcores.....all 3000 of them. That's why we have ECW Legend Kurt Angle and Unstoppable World Champion Big Show........and breakout star, **shudders** Test.

 

Vince is a businessman. He isn't intentionally stinking up the product so it can fail. He can, and wants to make millions off of the ECW name. The problem is that he, the so called wrestling genius, has no idea how to really do it. So, in a way, he IS burying ECW, because his vision and idea (and perception that the whole promotion and idea was garbage) will do him, and his version, in.

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Really, though--did any of you really expect Vince McMahon Presents ECW® to be anything like the past incarnation? When they decide to do something without any competition, with no other reason to do it except that they can, well, you can't expect much.

 

Well, this is where I'm out of touch. You see, when I first heard about them bringing ECW back, my initial reaction was it was being done to put TNA in it's place. I thought they were seeing that the competition was doing something (doing it poorly) and they could type into that audience looking for an alternative product by creating their own alternative product. Within two years or so they'd have everyone from TNA and ROH signed to WWE's version of ECW eliminating the little bit of success those two companies are experiencing. Instead of people buying a TNA PPV, they'd buy an ECW PPV. Instead of people getting ROH DVD's, they'd get ECW DVD's. Instead of going to small indie shows to experience wrestling in an intimate setting, they'd go to an ECW show. I actually thought there was some logic and thought put into this.

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Perhaps, but ECW is (and never was) going to become anything big because Vince is behind this current incarnation. One of the big reasons the original ECW worked was that the fanbase hated the WWF "New Generation" shit and wanted something different. When you take the guy everyone hated and put him in charge, well, it's an uphill battle immediately.

 

Also, I don't think anyone at Titan Towers takes TNA seriously yet. Sure, they have intentionally signed TNA prospects to keep them from going there, but I think they feel like TNA isn't threatening--yet--and don't make creative decisions thinking about it.

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Another note from Observer regarding the DVD sales:

 

Where people got mad is some talent was told that the reason the first DVD did so well (more than 200,000 units sold) and the PPV did good numbers last year is because the vast majority of the buys were the regular WWE Raw audience that learned about ECW over the past five years through WWE's marketing of the brand and its encouragement of ECW chants at the tv tapings.

 

Yes... that and Vince Russo never watched the ECW product and it was no inspiration whatsoever to the Attitude WWF era.

 

 

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHA*deep breath*HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

:lol: :lol: :lol:

 

Vince is one major fucking delusional senile old man.

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Well, this is where I'm out of touch. You see, when I first heard about them bringing ECW back, my initial reaction was it was being done to put TNA in it's place. I thought they were seeing that the competition was doing something (doing it poorly) and they could type into that audience looking for an alternative product by creating their own alternative product. Within two years or so they'd have everyone from TNA and ROH signed to WWE's version of ECW eliminating the little bit of success those two companies are experiencing. Instead of people buying a TNA PPV, they'd buy an ECW PPV. Instead of people getting ROH DVD's, they'd get ECW DVD's. Instead of going to small indie shows to experience wrestling in an intimate setting, they'd go to an ECW show. I actually thought there was some logic and thought put into this.

 

 

Precisely.

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but can you watch an old tape of Nitro without thinking of the InVasion!!111!!?

 

Yes. Hell, I've pretty much blocked out of my mind anything that happened after Starrcade 98.

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but can you watch an old tape of Nitro without thinking of the InVasion!!111!!?

 

Yes. Hell, I've pretty much blocked out of my mind anything that happened after Starrcade 98.

 

There was stuff after Starcade 98 involving WCW? Really?

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To me, this whole thing has reminded me of the Invasion angle because of how poorly planned it all is. Vince has no idea what ECW fans want. Hell, he usually doesn't seem to know what fans of his creation want. It's all about how Vince sees things, and that to me is why the new ECW is comparable to the Invasion: it's all through Vince's eyes, and it's not what the fans want.

 

Also, MarvinisaLunatic is right about the lack of competition. Ever since the death of WCW and the original ECW, the product has not only become less interesting, but also increasingly lazier. Sooner or later, fans are going to get tired of the same thing every week (just like in WCW), and they are going to lose more viewers.

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To me, this whole thing has reminded me of the Invasion angle because of how poorly planned it all is. Vince has no idea what ECW fans want. Hell, he usually doesn't seem to know what fans of his creation want. It's all about how Vince sees things, and that to me is why the new ECW is comparable to the Invasion: it's all through Vince's eyes, and it's not what the fans want.

 

Also, MarvinisaLunatic is right about the lack of competition. Ever since the death of WCW and the original ECW, the product has not only become less interesting, but also increasingly lazier. Sooner or later, fans are going to get tired of the same thing every week (just like in WCW), and they are going to lose more viewers.

 

 

I have always been of the belief the Invasion wasn't poorly planned...Vince wanted it to tank. He wanted to kill any possible buzz left from WCW. He bought the corpse so he could take a shit on it and burn it for all to see. I'm torn on ECW and whether it's headed the same way...Vince seems to feel differently about it since ECW was the inspiration for Attitude. He wants it to succeed but I think he has nfi how to run it. For ECW to truly work, it needs to be different from RAW or SD. It needs to be a different product altogether.

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To me, this whole thing has reminded me of the Invasion angle because of how poorly planned it all is. Vince has no idea what ECW fans want. Hell, he usually doesn't seem to know what fans of his creation want. It's all about how Vince sees things, and that to me is why the new ECW is comparable to the Invasion: it's all through Vince's eyes, and it's not what the fans want.

 

Also, MarvinisaLunatic is right about the lack of competition. Ever since the death of WCW and the original ECW, the product has not only become less interesting, but also increasingly lazier. Sooner or later, fans are going to get tired of the same thing every week (just like in WCW), and they are going to lose more viewers.

 

 

I have always been of the belief the Invasion wasn't poorly planned...Vince wanted it to tank. He wanted to kill any possible buzz left from WCW. He bought the corpse so he could take a shit on it and burn it for all to see. I'm torn on ECW and whether it's headed the same way...Vince seems to feel differently about it since ECW was the inspiration for Attitude. He wants it to succeed but I think he has nfi how to run it. For ECW to truly work, it needs to be different from RAW or SD. It needs to be a different product altogether.

Well, with the Invasion, he was basically just stroking his ego, as well as trying (and failing) to look like a sympathetic victim, when even the world's biggest mark could never sympathize with him.

 

With ECW, it just doesn't feel like he's trying.

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Then they can have some sort of Dallas-esque RVD dream sequence where its revealed everything over the last 3 months was just a drug induced hallucination or something.

That would be awesome. The first ever WWE retcon.

 

A minute after ECW ended this past week, I told Rando that if they had any balls they'd have treated the whole show as an episode of the Twilight Zone marathon, and pretend that it never happened. The Heyman turn, the title change, none of it.

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If the ECW relaunch took place in 2005, right after One Night Stand, how much different would it be? Would the addition of Lance Storm, Chris Jericho, Rhino, Mike Awesome, Dudley Boyz, etc. made things better or would the relaunch have become exactly what it is today?

 

I'm just trying to understand is how the formula to ONS 2005, which was a sucess, changed into what is presented on SCI-FI.

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If the ECW relaunch took place in 2005, right after One Night Stand, how much different would it be? Would the addition of Lance Storm, Chris Jericho, Rhino, Mike Awesome, Dudley Boyz, etc. made things better or would the relaunch have become exactly what it is today?

 

I'm just trying to understand is how the formula to ONS 2005, which was a sucess, changed into what is presented on SCI-FI.

 

Absolutely nothing. Wouldn't have made a difference. Vince will never learn from his mistakes because he will never admit them.

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Then they can have some sort of Dallas-esque RVD dream sequence where its revealed everything over the last 3 months was just a drug induced hallucination or something.

That would be awesome. The first ever WWE retcon.

 

 

Ahem...

 

 

 

KAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANE~!

 

 

 

 

WWE is more about simply dropping storylines rather than tying them up in a way that puts everything back to square one. The problem is, the storylines that never deserved airtime to begin with usually end up having more and more time devoted to them, taking time away from the ones that really could use it.

 

Lately, the first category would be:

Kelly Kelly

Sandman's Canings

DX

The Great Khali

Umaga (get him in a real feud that has some actual integrity. it's becoming pointless.)

Orton <3's Brooke

 

And the second category would probably be more centered around the various pushes of people, such as:

London/Kendrick (hell, the tag divisions in general)

Kane? He's not the best character when not in a storyline (though when he IS in a storyline, they tend to suck incredibly hard. He needs a writer or two devoted to him for a while to try to pull him out of the hole he's stuck in)

 

 

You know what's sad, they run so many PPVs a year, but I never really NOTICE very many storylines running, even if they are there and happening, I don't NOTICE them. They get attention for their segments (usually two a show tops, one backstage and one in-ring). WWE needs to learn how to have better time management and give each storyline a better chance to develop, maybe not as much as the main event level ones, but enough so that the matches have some actual meaning when they happen, and I don't just mean in who wins and who loses. There needs to be more EMOTION. Too many people in the WWE are one and two dimensional, because, sad as it is, when they try to go to a third dimension and give character's some life, shit hits the fan in a bad bad way (like with Kane).

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Diary of Violence - 7/8/06

By Tommy Dreamer

July 8, 2006

 

 

To all ECW fans:

 

I take it upon myself to apologize for what happened this week. I cannot truly begin to express my feelings...I am angry, pissed off and totally frustrated about what I have been seeing in ECW.

 

I need to sit back and digest all of this; if I write about what is in my head, my column will probably no longer exist.

 

Sorry.

 

Innovator of Violence

Tommy Dreamer

 

Work or Shoot?

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Work. He'll end up being mad that Heyman sided with Big Show, and that his friend Rob Van Dam got screwed out of the title, yadda yadda yadda.

 

The "column not exisiting" part is going to end up being that Heyman will pull the plug on it because Dreamer bad mouths Big Show or something.

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I find it humerous that most of you actually thought Vince was going to come through with this whole ECW revival thing to begin with. Of course, now, you're all getting pissy over how it's being run. The minute it was announced that Angle was going to be a part of it, you guys shoulda called it a day...no, check that, the minute the rumors of ECW coming back first started, you guys should have called it a day.

 

Well, I never gave it much hope, but you're right about the Kurt Angle thing. Man that was a bad move for everyone involved. It was Vince openly stating that ECW guys sucked and couldn't draw (similar to making Austin the leader of the Alliance) and cut the legs off Angle's entertainment value (can't cut funny promos, wrestle 10-20 minute WWE style matches, etc). Just awful thinking all around, but seeing how the rest of the product has turned out, it's really just a drop in the bucket as far as poor planning goes.

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Lushus is dead on. I can't believe how some people (here and elsewhere) got conned into believing that this ECW would be anything like the old ECW.

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Lushus is dead on. I can't believe how some people (here and elsewhere) got conned into believing that this ECW would be anything like the old ECW.

 

I don't think it was so much being conned into thinking it would be good, I think it's more people getting so pissy about it...like, what the hell did you guys expect?

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Guest Princess Leena

I thought all along ECW was a short-term money maker after seeing how well the ECW DVD's and ONS went, and at best would turn into a Heat/Shotgun C-show after a few months.

 

I figured Vince would put at least more than 3 true ECW wrestlers as important parts of show, though.

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It's not that people expected it to be like the old ECW. Everyone knew that there was going to be a Vince McMahon influence. And I certainly didn't expect the promotion to be centered around ECW names from the past. I wasn't looking for Justin Credible, Al Snow, Danny Doring, Little Guido or Balls Mahoney to headline an ECW PPV. But when the initial reports surfaced it was going to be Paul Heyman and Tommy Dreamer handling creative duties with Dreamer even working in talent relations somewhat. They would be bringing talent over from Smackdown and Raw. It was going to be their version of AAA baseball and that was fine. So I thought Heyman would want to use guys like Super Crazy, Paul London, Spanky, Jamie Noble or maybe revitalize the careers of people like Val Venis, Rob Conway, Dough Basham or Matt Hardy. Use some of the people he used in OVW like CM Punk, Maria and Brent Albright.

 

The above seemed realistic. There were talks about a timeslot on USA, Saturdays at 1am. There were talks about it being an internet broadcast. It wasn't until they got prime time on Sci-Fi with all kind of pressure from Universal and Sci-Fi execs that the project took a turn and Vince became more hands on with it. So I don't think I was necessarily conned into thinking it would be good or be like the old ECW. I just believe that up until the television deal there was potential for it to at least be somewhat in the tradition of the old ECW. Then with the Sci-Fi deal it turned into a major tv project for the company and in came Vince, Kevin Dunn, Johnny Ace and the creative team to inject themselves into something that could have (and should have) been a smaller scale alternative to WWE.

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Personally, I didn't expect it to be like the old ECW, at least not completely. I mean, they don't have a lot of the old ECW main eventers like Raven, the Dudleyz, Shane Douglas, etc. Tazz and Lance Storm are essentially retired, Tommy Dreamer and Sandman are old, Justin Credible has been seen as a jobber for the past five years...you know, I could go on and on, but all that stuff should be obvious as to why this ECW couldn't be like the old ECW. Bringing in guys like Kurt Angle and Big Show made sense as far as giving the new ECW something to work with. I mean, what else were they going to do? Build the promotion around Balls Mahoney and the FBI?

 

However, what I didn't expect, was that this new ECW would be so badly booked and terrible from the get-go. It's natural that a new promotion would take a while to find its ground (look at the early episodes of TNA as a perfect example), but this new ECW has no apparent direction right now, and the TV shows have been generally awful so far. I mean, when the crowd is crapping all over guys like Test and Mike Knox, and cheering for people like Sabu and RVD, it should be obvious what direction they should go in...but Vince won't listen to the fans. He's dead set on having things his way, or no way at all. That means no more all-out hardcore matches ("Extreme rules" will be reserved for title or special matches, it seems). The fact they seem intent on building the shows around Kelly, a character who is completely out of place and terrible (and has no apparent talent to boot), further solidifies this fact.

 

The most frustrating thing is that WWE already has a template for a successful ECW...all they have to do is go back and watch "The Rise and Fall of ECW" on DVD, and that will lay it out for them pretty easily. That should give them an idea of what the crowd wants and expects...but I think again, Vince McMahon is dead set on creating his own vision of ECW, and it's basically an alternate version of Monday Night RAW. The only problem is, we already have that on Friday nights. Vince has the chance to go after TNA's market of hardcore, internet-savvy wrestling fans, but so far they've just totally blown it on all levels.

 

I really do wish some of the old ECW guard would step up and tell Vince or Kevin Dunn or whoever the hell is running this thing about these issues. I mean, listening to Joey Styles and Tazz act as the JR and King of ECW is almost painful, and is really just further ruining the credibility of this "promotion" completely. I don't expect Styles to go renegade and crap all over stuff like the Zombie and Mike Knox, but when the crowd is totally booing someone or chanting stuff at Test, at least have the integrity to acknowledge it to the fans watching at home.

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If the ECW relaunch took place in 2005, right after One Night Stand, how much different would it be? Would the addition of Lance Storm, Chris Jericho, Rhino, Mike Awesome, Dudley Boyz, etc. made things better or would the relaunch have become exactly what it is today?

 

I'm just trying to understand is how the formula to ONS 2005, which was a sucess, changed into what is presented on SCI-FI.

 

The only thing that would have really helped is OVW was a helluva lot stronger talent wise with guys who were close to ready to be called up in September/October of 05.

 

Guys like Ken Kennedy, Estrada, Johnny Jeter, Ken Doane, Mike Mondo, Brent Albright, Lashley, Maria all hadn't been stuck on Raw or Smackdown yet. Punk was on his way in too.

 

Dan Puder would have been around too, so you would have had a built-in feud for Kurt Angle.

 

Not that they're giving Heyman much say in things (if they were, Albright would be in ECW instead of back in OVW) now, but you had a lot more strong talent to right the ship and build around that the ECW fanbase would have accepted.

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Funniest thing about this report to me is the idea of Vince being upset that Heyman built a fanbase that won't accept change. Now ignoring the stupidity running a show build to capitalize on nostalgia and then being surprised when your target fanbase doesn't accept something that differs from the original, you mean to tell me that in ECW they've got fans that are a) loyal to the brand name and b) vocal enough to more or less tell you what you need to do to get their money, and that's a bad thing? Yeah, in order for ECW to have any legs, they're eventually gonna have to do something to separate itself from the original, but for the time being, if they wanna capitalize off the ECW name, wouldn't common sense tell you to at least try to recreate the original as closely as possible? This isn't rocket science.

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