In May 2006 WWE announced a revival of the ECW brand. In response, .some wrestling fans rejoiced while others groaned. Itd been five years since the original Extreme Championship Wrestling filed for bankruptcy, but the legend of ECW had only grown larger in the interim. A significant part of that momentum was the success WWE's "The Rise and Fall of ECW documentary and subsequent massive interest in the ECW One Night Stand pay-per-view event. However, a new ECW could not be just nostalgia - the true art was not merely copying the original but attempting to reinvent the brand for a modern audience. Did they succeed? And also, from a financial, creative and popularity standpoint - which incarnation was more successful? This article will examine the wrestlenomics of ECW. It's a tale of two extremes.
6. History
The original ECW saga takes many twists and turns. ECW was the spiritual successor to Joel Goodharts Tri-State Wrestling Alliance out of Pennsylvania. ECW morphed from Tod Gordon-owned NWA affiliate Eastern Championship Wrestling to Paul Heyman-owned NWA title defacing Extreme Championship Wrestling. For the purposes of this piece, our focus is on the 1996 to 2001 Original ECW with a added emphasis on the August 1999-December 2000 ECW on TNN cable television deal when Extreme Championship Wrestling truly was a national pro-wrestling company. In 2006, WWE relaunched ECW on the SciFi channel (ECW: Extreme Championship Wrestling) with former owner and creative masterminds Paul Heyman again at the forefront. He wrote the scripts (along with others in the WWE Creative Team) and served as the on-air ECW Representative. The new TV show lasted nearly two hundred episodes on the SciFi (later SyFy) network running weekly from June 13, 2006 until February 16, 2010. However, it was Heyman himself who didnt even a first year. Following the disastrous reception to the new ECW's lone solo PPV "December to Dismember PPV, Heyman was booted off the creative team, removed as an on-air personality, and demoted to a role in the WWE developmental system. He left the company shortly thereafter. It was several years before Paul Heyman again reappeared on WWE television. In May 2012 he emerged as Brock Lesnars Legal Advisor. It's important to emphasize that attempting to compare the two ECW incarnations is quite difficult. The climate of professional wrestling changed so much in the interim. In the late 1990s, WWF and WCW engaged in a weekly ratings war. Raunchy, violent and sexy programming was in accepted and the products reflected that. Each behemoth was looking for the next big thing and lateral talent acquisitions (including signing/stealing wrestlers from ECW) was common. By contrast, by the middle of the 2000s, WWE stood alone as the global professional wrestling force. Most of the key players from the Attitude era (such as Steve Austin or The Rock) werent wrestling any more and it was clear that interest in pro-wrestling had peaked many years prior. UFC was the brand on the rise and WWE was just humming along with only TNA posing as weak competition.
I'm a professional wrestling analyst, an improviser and an avid NES gamer. I live in Saint Paul, Minnesota and I'm working on my first book (#wrestlenomics). You can contact me at chris.harrington@gmail.com or on twitter (@mookieghana)
