The Rise and Fall of ECW part duex
So as a few of the posts I have done before might suggest, I’m somewhat of a fan of ECW. Now, I have covered the ‘Rise and Fall of ECW’ before in the book form, but I recently picked up the DVD version of the same.
As I said in the book review, the DVD works better because wrestling is a visual medium, and the whole documentary works really well as a talking heads example of history. Now plently of the history and things that happened there are covered, though you can’t help but feel that the lack of Raven, Sabu and Shane Douglas harms the production somewhat (many wrestlers who weren’t under contract to WWE at the time were not involved in the DVD). In some ways, its an advertisement for the ‘Forever Hardcore’ documentary that Douglas did afterwards. Yet, despite the fact that it is a ‘WWE produced’ dvd, it seems to cover most of the bases pretty honestly. Many of the individuals involved are quite critical of each other, and so on, but to be honest, until I see ‘Forever Hardcore’ and see what that says about things, I won’t really know how to feel. Basically, its 3-odd hours of solid documentary and well worth a look.
There are one or two serious complaints though, both of which appear in my other reviews of ECW material produced by WWE. Firstly, as I said in the review of the ‘Rise and Fall book’ the whole ECW seccedding from NWA isn’t covered, while it’s mentioned in the book, it has no real role in the DVD. Secondly, I’m fairly sure they have the same ‘Bam Bam Bigelow VS Taz’ match on both the ‘Rise and Fall’ and ‘extreme’ dvds. Seriously! If your going to put out these dvds, try minimise overlap! ECW ran long enough that there should surely be enough good material to go around. Still though, the matches available on the DVD are quite enjoyable, with plenty ‘holy shit!’ moments so….