The SmarK Rant for A&E Biography – ECW Birth of Hardcore

The SmarK Rant for WWE Biography Legends – ECW Birth of Hardcore

Well since we’re milking the WCW documentary these days, might as well give equal time to the other story already told a million times, with A&E’s Biography of ECW.

Hosted by Paul Heyman, who is apparently bitter about ECW nostalgia taking over Philly on Wrestlemania weekend.

We go back to 1987 to start, with a very young Paul E. Dangerously as an up and coming manager. Paul explains about how WWE and WCW were stuck in the 80s by the time he was leaving WCW and was looking for a new way to implement his vision. Paul took over creative for Eastern Championship Wrestling, while Tod Gordon handled the financials.

So we discuss the “Extreme” revolution of the 90s, when everyone was going grungy and extreme, and ECW was rebranded Extreme Championship Wrestling. So instead of pyro and glitz and glamor, they were doing Fight Club. Lita talks about how the company was on MSG Network at 1am and had to be spread through tape trading and the baby internet instead of TV. Mick Foley discusses branding irons and barbed wire and we get a montage of violent clips.

Undertaker pops in to talk about watching from the WWE point of view, and Bubba Dudley shows us some behind the scenes, revealing that “backstage” was a table in the locker room.

Next up, we meet The Sandman, and Joey Styles sums him as “not a good wrestler” and in fact he’s not even sure if Sandman was ever trained. Sandman was literally just playing himself after a lifetime of getting arrested for bar brawls.

Steve Austin shows his brief but memorable run in ECW, with the Steve-A-Mania promo and a couple of others.

Next up, we discuss the ECW Arena and what a dump it was. Sandman stops by the current building to reminisce, and we get more comments from regular guy Undertaker. Onto the fans, and we get clips of the crowd breaking the ring and Spike getting tossed into the audience. Mick Foley sets up the “give me a chair” clip. Joey acknowledges they probably shouldn’t have done that. Bubba claims that they worked hurt all the time and there was no “time off”, which is complete carny nonsense.

Speaking of nonsense, Jim Cornette stops by to bury the promotion, complaining about all the ridiculous violent spots ruining the business. Paul talks about the problems getting into PPV in 1995, as they got lumped in with Extreme Fighting and kept off. Well there was certainly more to it than that. Paul talks about how sponsors were dropping them left and right, so he took over ownership of the company in 1996 and started a partnership with Vince McMahon. Vince saw them as a talent-creation shop.

We get clips of the ECW invasion episode of RAW in 1997, which then leads to Barely Legal debuting on PPV in April. We get clips from that and Heyman’s backstage speech beforehand, and Joey Styles notes that they got 100,000 buys for it. And then the national TV deal finally happened and everything went downhill.

We discuss the Attitude Era in the WWF, as they took a bunch of influence from ECW and did gigantic numbers. And then ECW themselves sign a deal with TNN to put their show on national TV. RVD thought that they’d automatically be the #1 show on the network, which isn’t how it worked out. Joey notes that they never made money from TNN as far as he knew and it was just a deal for exposure. The network wanted a slicker presentation like the WWF and Paul Heyman was too stubborn to change the product. And then the PPV companies started withholding their money and they were screwed.

By September 2000, Monday Night RAW moves to TNN and ECW is cancelled. Vince asks Paul what he can do to help, so Paul asks for $500,000 to get them to the next PPV and make paydays for the talent. So Vince did just that.

Next, talent from ECW starts jumping ship, like the Dudley Boyz and Taz, and the end was nearing. RVD talks about working the final PPV in exchange for a cash payment up front (“You mean CASH cash?”) and Paul explains the vicious circle of not getting paid by PPV companies, which meant that they couldn’t do PPV to get money. So they filed for bankruptcy and Vince bought them in 2001. Bubba compares them to Napster, because they also went bankrupt, but changed the business forever. We get some clips of Paul Heyman’s Hall of Fame speech and a montage of modern day wrestlers doing stuff influenced by ECW.

And the talking heads wrap it up with the clips from earlier and we’re done.

Yeah this was pretty fluffy stuff. Obviously this is just a light-hearted surface look at a pretty complex topic, produced for very mainstream audiences, and they left out a TON of details and explanations. You can’t have any kind of serious look at the downfall of the company without even MENTIONING New Jack or Mass Transit or drugs in any form. Like, it’s a fine distraction on a Sunday night, but this is stuff that any wrestling fan could recite from memory. Ironic that a company so “dangerous” and rebellious would reduced to a family friendly 40 minute summation by Sam Roberts and cool dad HBK, but here we are.