Saturday 14 June 2014

My Message to WWE After First Broadcast of New ECW - June 14th, 2006 - Sledge's Wrestling Journal


By: Chris "Sledge" Douglas

A few things you need to know before reading this.

Are you ready?

Number 1:  In 2005, I saw One Night Stand and LOVED it.  As an old-school ECW-ite, I really appreciated WWE going out and making an ECW-dedicated pay per view.  I got together with some friends and enjoyed the hell out of the show.

Number 2: In 2006, I saw the second One Night Stand, and enjoyed that as well, though perhaps on a slightly lower level.  I think the novelty had worn off somewhat, but the matches were still all really good and still captured the FEEL of ECW.

Number 3: When WWE's relaunch of ECW was announced, I was stoked.  While before I would have thought something would have been amiss, with the past two ONS' being so great, all of that cynicism was completely absent.  The WWE had my trust.

And this happened:


And my hopes fell through the floor.

Don't get me wrong, I was happy that guys that I liked to watch were employed and making good money. But I... well, let's just let the me of 2006, still snugly living in Japan, explain it:


What did I just see?  Was that a joke? What the hell was that on Sci-Fi???  That was NOT ECW. Words cannot describe my utter disappointment in this show.

I've been watching ECW since 1995 and everything I thought could possibly go wrong with this show has. After the PPV, I thought that I was getting the old ECW back.  I was really hoping that at least this new ECW would at least be better than Velocity, but I was wrong. This is a second rate version of the regular WWE product.  The Sandman drinking beer amongst ten year olds is just utterly retarded.  Don't get me wrong I love Sandman but with this generic/cheesy entrance music it's just really boring. The crowd was WWE through and through.  Families?  ECW is NOT supposed to be for famillies.  WHat the hell is up with all those damn kids???? You pushed WWE guys at every point, burying those that actually have ECW roots.  

Vampires and Zombies, I'm aware of what channel I'm watching already, thanks! All the little things were done wrong and this had no "ECW" feel to it at all. 

ECW is dead before it even got a chance to be reborn. They did it all wrong from the beginning. I thought it was supposed to be shot differently and have a different feel from Raw and Smackdown? What happened to that plan? It looked just like Raw, only much worse. They should have had it in a more fitting ECW type arena. They should have used different cameras and camera angles. It needed the grittier feel of the old ECW. John Cena should have gotten booed out of the building like he did on Sunday. There was barely any reaction to him or even RVD. I wish they would just call this whole thing off immediately. I will never understand why you guys did this...

If you keep this up for very long, I won't be watching past the end of June. 

Thank you for reading.



I know that I should have been happy that they tried SOMETHING.  And, needless to say, I'm A LOT more forgiving now.  And I know that they DID try to do something slightly different at first, even though I couldn't see it at the time.  But I felt like a bit of who I was was being encroached upon.  And whether or not that was reasonable or not, that's how I felt.

Thank you for reading.

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