Happy Extreme Saturday Everyone!
I decided to fire off a review of one of my ECW DVDs again, mainly because I haven’t watched this particular show in a while and I wanted to see how it held up. ECW was due to be on pay per view in April of 1997, so this Arena show was mostly used as a way to hype that up.
Happy Saturday Everyone!
Back with another ECW review today, as I fill in the holes in my ECW pay per view review archive. November to Remember 97 was ECW’s third pay per view event, and N2R was generally the equivalent of their WrestleMania. The big storylines coming into this one were Tommy Dreamer feuding with the WWF aligned Rob Van Dam, Sandman looking for revenge on Sabu after the latter had thrown fire in the eyes of the former, and the big Main Event is Shane Douglas trying to regain his ECW World Title from Bam Bam Bigelow.
What’s Up Docs!
Back to ECW again this week, as I haven’t watched this one in a while and it features a pretty famous bout between Bill Alfonso and Beulah McGillicutty. There’s also the debut of a certain more than credible gentleman…
Guten Tag!
We head back to the world of the Extreme today, with ECW’s second ever pay per view event in the form of Hardcore Heaven. ECW’s first pay per view event, Barely Legal, had been a good show for the most part, if a little bit underwhelming due to a couple of the major matches not delivering. Still though, the Main Event was good and there was an excellent Michinoku-Pro match on the undercard, which was more than enough for a thumbs up at the time and the show is still a mostly fun and breezy watch to this day.
For the second pay per view ECW decided to move out of its Philadelphia based home of the ECW Arena and branch out to another territory where they had been having some success in the form of Florida. Going in they decided to throw a cat amongst the pigeons by having Sabu win the ECW World Title at the ECW Arena, thus changing the Main Event to Sabu defending against both Shane Douglas and Terry Funk in a Three Way Dance.
The three men had originally competed with each other in a famous hour long draw back in 1994, which had been one of the earliest ECW matches to catch the attention of the hardcore fan base online. Repeating the match again but now on pay per view didn’t seem like the worst idea, although they could have done a better job hyping up and marketing it.
The main feud on the undercard was ECW Vs WWF/USWA, as Jerry Lawler had invaded ECW and began a rivalry with Tommy Dreamer. Dreamer had actually gone to the trouble of invading the USWA television show and beating a bunch of guys up, in an angle that probably did more to make ECW look cool than it did boost USWA’s falling fortunes.
Would everything come together for another good pay per view effort from the Extreme brigade? Let’s watch on and find out!
