Trivia / ECW

• Acclaimed Flop: Simply put, while the promotion was famously praised for being innovative, they literally never made money. There isn't a single year when they turned a profit. It was so illiquid by 2001 that Paul Heyman needed the PPV money to put on the next show.^note ECW was such a money pit that Smoky Mountain Wrestling owner Jim Cornette claims that even if he had not made a single dime in revenue running SMW he still wouldn't have come close to losing as much money as Heyman and ECW did. When SMW closed their debts totaled around $30,000, nearly all to their TV production company. ECW? Around $8 million
• Breakup Breakout:
  • Regarding WWECW, its most successful alumnus is CM Punk, who became a star comparable to John Cena. Arguments can be made for The Miz, Sheamus, John Morrison, and Bobby Lashley for second place. Christian and Matt Hardy don't count, as they were long-established stars well prior to WWECW and both were only sent there to carry the show for the sake of the younger talent that were getting experience there, though in WWECW it was the first time both Christian and Matt were treated as solo main-eventers in WWE,^note Although Christian had already been a main-eventer before in another company having previously been known as tag team specialists and solo mid-carders.
  • A stable-wide example would be WWECW's New Breed, which Punk was a member of for all of two weeks. Within those two weeks, it became blatantly obvious to everyone watching that Punk was the only one who had any real future in WWE. Everyone else was released from the company within a year besides Matt Striker, who transitioned into a backstage/announcer role before being being released in 2013. Elijah Burke did manage to find some success as "The Pope" D'Angelo Dinero in TNA, but never came close to reaching the heights Punk did.
• Creator Backlash:
  • ECW honchos revolted when the Sandman was "crucified", among them Joey Styles — the long-suffering NewsCorp employee who sat through this, the "kiss my ASS!" shoot, the fire incident, and the ghastly TNN show — and Francine, both Catholics, as are Stevie Richards and The Blue Meanie, which Stevie pointed out on the Rise & Fall of ECW DVD. Raven still insists that it was "the right heat", while everybody else agrees that it was not.
    Joey Styles: Eighty percent of this country is Christian. It's the religion that changed the world. Probably not the best choice. And Kurt Angle—who I guess is Christian—standing right next to me, starts screaming at ME! And I'm screaming back! 'I don't know! I didn't book this thing!'
  • Terry Taylor briefly wrestled in ECW in 1992 back when it was Eastern Championship Wrestling, and was actually an unlikely fan of its later hardcore content, but reached his limit with the Danbury Fall; the logical end point of the super-high dives perfomed during New Jack's matches.^note It is noteworthy that the Danbury Fall was due to a botch, however, not an unavoidable consequence of the dive; Grimes tried to hold on to the scaffold in spite of New Jack trying to synchronize their jump properly, causing New Jack to fall first and Grimes to fall in a very unfortunate position for New Jack.
    Terry Taylor: New Jack and Vic Grimes fell 20 feet! They aren't stuntmen! They're on concrete, it should've killed them! And what would've happened if they would've died? They'd have moved 'em over and kept goin'.
• Doing It for the Art: It's well-known that the majority of the wrestlers in ECW performed in the promotion for the sake of it, rather than for profit. (Though it's also known that during its final years, the financial dire straits were too much for many wrestlers, who eventually ended up leaving.) In one of the periodic documentaries put out by WWE, Dreamer is said to have told Heyman, "I will die for this company." The adrenaline / head injuries probably were not helping, and Tommy's always been a bit crazy; but it's no secret that Paul Heyman was the Jim Jones of pro wrestling for a little while.
• Fake Nationality:
  • Pablo Marquez was from Ecuador but billed as a Puerto Rican.
  • The Rottens were not British.
  • Sabu was not Indian^note He's actually of Lebanese descent, but he's from New York City.
• Follow the Leader: A few things that are copied from ECW to this day include submissions symbolized by tapping out, three-way matches (till then only found in even smaller promotions), saying "WOO" when using Ric Flair's moves, lucha libre and Japanese-influenced lightweight wrestling, fans bringing weapons and of course, hardcore wrestling.
• Follow-Up Failure:
  • WWECW, a shell of its former self. Vince McMahon and Sci-Fi Channel meddled in it so much as to result in a half-baked PG product, until the miserable failure which was the December 2 December to Dismember made Heyman quit. Vince made himself ECW World Champion at one point.
  • TNA's Hardcore Justice 2010. Since WWE owns ECW lock, stock, and barrel, no footage of ECW could be shown, and no entrance music could be played. Tommy Dreamer didn't book any of the great cruiserweights and, due to various contractual obligations, could not book many of the best ECW alumni, leaving the card full of past-their-prime brawlers. Only two matches were announced prior to the PPV, and one was changed when one of the wrestlers involved (Jerry Lynn) hurt himself while training. Tommy bladed for his match with Raven, a match whose premise was built on contrivances and retcons. (Tommy's children were also in the front row, and they had to be escorted out.) For those reasons and more, Hardcore Justice was inducted into WrestleCrap.
• Franchise Zombie: Between WWE's ECW brand, the Extreme Revolution (an ECW stable in early TNA), Hardcore Homecoming's tours and EV2.0, a lot of people seem to have trouble letting go.
• Friday Night Death Slot: When ECW on TNN aired. It was basically a one hour block with 45 minutes of commercials.
• Hostility on the Set:
  • Francine and Beulah were enemies, and not just in kayfabe. In the FAQ section of her now-defunct website,^note http://forevertbozsguy.simplenet.com/francine/, presently on Internet Archive. The version of the site archived from 1998 is from right before the FAQ was added so this has not been archived. when asked what she really thought of Beulah and Kimona, her only response was "..........................", with the webmaster noting that he took it to mean "no comment."
  • Miss Patricia, a valet in Raven's Nest, is an interesting example of this, since apparently the rest of the roster weren't sad when she left.
• No Budget: ECW had a bit of an unlucky streak with live PPVs.
  • Barely Legal 1997 has audio issues with the ring microphone right at the start of the show, and you can hear the truck crew talking and scrambling to deal with that, plus the power blows out mere moments after they go off the air that night.
  • Living Dangerously 2000 (which seems to be an event known for being rather poor consistently) is a bit of a mess in general. A weird goof causes part of Lou E. Dangerously's pretaped promo audio to play during Steve Corino's promo.
  • Hardcore Heaven 2000 has production issues despite starting strong. During the customary intro with Styles & Gertner in the ring, the guys do their shtick and then they walk up to the broadcast booth. The camera follows as if something else will happen in there, but apparently the production team didn't know when to cut away. During the three-way between Guido, Mikey Whipwreck, and Simon Diamond, issues arise with the lighting rig above the ring and it cuts out, so most of the match is only lit by spotlight,
• Real Song Theme Tune:
  • ECW were notable for using real songs for wrestlers' entrance music, like Sandman's "Enter Sandman", Raven's "Come Out and Play" and Justin Credible's "Snap Your Fingers", being the ECW's theme one of the few original tunes.
  • Inverted with WWECW, which have original tunes for wrestlers, but the main theme was "Bodies".
• Screwed by the Network: TNN would air ECW on TNN in the Friday Night Death Slot, and would only show commercials for ECW during the actual show, meaning there was virtually no way to pick up new viewers. Then, TNN opened up public negotiations with Vince McMahon to put WWF Monday Night Raw on the channel, meaning ECW would eventually get axed. ECW, however, couldn't shop for another network until TNN officially cancelled them. By the time they did, ECW was flat broke. Heyman feels this is the reason ECW doesn't exist today.
• What Could Have Been:
  • ECW was actually evolving into the Ring of Honor technical/high-flying style in the late 90s thanks to amazing international stars like Masato Tanaka, Tajiri, and Super Crazy (and because they became aware that while hardcore wrestling worked as a niche product which won't necessarily fail, it doesn't have room for growth either) until they got raided and had to go back to their violent roots with Sandman, Dreamer, Raven, Rhino, Justin Credible and others in their final year.
  • Paul Heyman's original concept for the revived series was a more serious and down-to-Earth promotion with worked shoot-style fights, not unlike Ring of Honor, but with a bigger budget. Syfy, on the other hand, wanted to go in the opposite direction: a cartoony, highly-gimmicked promotion full of literal wrestling monsters. Think Chikara or Kaiju Big Battel, but, again, with a WWE budget and production values.
• You Look Familiar: Scotty Anton was formerly WCW's Scotty Riggs.