Early ECW

I’ve been watching the early episodes of ECW on the network, and I was wondering if you could shed some light on how the shows were produced at the time. I’ve watched approximately the first 6 months of the program, and I’ve only heard them advertise a "TV taping" once. So where is all the wrestling coming from? I know they have a monthly "We wish this was a PPV" show, but they only ever show one or two matches from these "specials", and frequently they’re edited down as well (I assume to protect these shows and make people feel like if they don’t see them live, they miss important stuff).

And actually, even the matches that aren’t from the big shows are frequently edited, and there’s very little coherency to them outside of making sure the correct person is seen holding the heavyweight belt. It almost feels like they’ve got an existing library of wrestling footage, and they’re slowing doling it out trying to make it look like a show they’re taping in a weekly basis. So how often were they actually filming new wrestling matches?

On a side note, whatever you think of ECW overall, the first two episodes after Paul E. was put in charge are amazing. He took over a show that was about as boring and uninspired as humanly possible, and had to produce two full episodes without the benefit of of a TV taping (other than just filming announcers in the basement). And yet he not only managed to create two reasonably entertaining shows, but also immediately rebrand the product recognizably as what we now think of as "ECW", and make it seem like the show had been this way all along. His idea to take the footage of Rebel’s generic chairshot on Sal Bellomo, add a "censored" bar on top and have Joey Stiles record commentary describing the most bloody, brutal attack in wrestling history was particularly brilliant. These two shows are a master class in kafabe.

​Paul was an incredibly talented booker and editor, and it’s just too bad Eddie Gilbert died before he could help take the workload off Heyman a bit because they would have had an amazing run together, I think.

They used to run shows at the bingo hall about every 2-3 weeks if I’m remembering correctly from RSPW at the time. And then yeah, you take a 3.5 hour show, chop it up into 45 minute pieces, and boom, you’ve got a TV show. Then the complete show could be released later by RF Video as whatever wacky themed show (like "Cyberslam" or whatnot) that they wanted to call it. That was also supplemented by having the guys do a shitload of random promos in the production space that could be mixed-and-matched. As a TV production, it was very effective. ​