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stro

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Hardcore Heaven 1999

:skip:
The main angles heading into this show: Taz broke the returning Candido's neck, apparently on accident, then stomped him as he was being strechered out anyway. Again, this has happened 4 or 5 times with Taz, it's always played off like a heel turn, but it's never followed up on and the next time you see Taz he's joking around like his Smackdown commentator persona. So Candido comes out in a halo, Taz doesn't give a shyt, of course it was a SWERVE and Skip attacked him, leading to the PPV match that was...the opening match, and a 90 second squash. :dwillhuh: But Skip had paid off the Dudleys to take Taz out, and they hit him with the 3D after the match (and the crowd chanted for another one:pachaha:). This, plus a fired up Joel Gertner after getting hit with a fire ball, leads to a show long series of angles of the Dudleys beating people up for money. Again, this is PPV, and probably a quarter of the run time is devoted to the Dudleys doing promos or angles, just like the last 5 PPVs. D-Von breaks his hand on Chris Chetti's head and the real main event becomes a falls count anywhere title match with Bubba and Taz, both doing double duty, and yet another shytty ECW PPV main event. The "highlight" I guess is Taz having a gusher to the point where he'd wipe his face off with his singlet and seconds later his whole head was covered again. Let me tell you, Sunny is looking ROUGH. Gaining wait, bad skin, grey skin tone, hair always a mess. :picard:

The Dreamer/Douglas vs Impact Players angle had a monkey wrench thrown into the plans, as Shane Douglas (who btw was already injured again :mjlol:) got into a fight with Paul E. and left the company for good. I'm sure he's said exactly why he left in 20 shoots, but I'm going to assume it was over Paul wanting him to work hurt and probably do the job. So Dreamer/Lance have a decent enough bunkhouse brawl, Justin Credible ends up doing a promo taking credit for running off Sandman, Sabu, and Shane, and Sid comes out. Lance and Justin double team him until the banned by athletic commissions Sabu pops up and accidentally puts Sid through a table. I don't think that goes anywhere because Sid is in WCW in a few weeks.

This show also featured the most celebrated of the RVD/Jerry Lynn matches, the one where Jerry breaks his fukking face. The undercard had a good Tajiri/Guido match where Guido got to show off his shootstyle training, and Super Crazy vs Taka Michinoku, who for whatever reason was on loan from the WWF for a few months. Actually looking at Taka's 1999, he worked ECW/Toryumon/AAA/Michinoku Pro/Battlearts...while under WWF contract. The fukk? There's definitely an effort to rebrand a bit into a workrate promotion as much or more as a hardcore promotion, something that worked well for them in 1994-1995, but they'd lost sight of that completely over the past 2 years. Good timing considering WWF was going out of their way to avoid good workrate and WCW had put on their last great PPV (Spring Stampede 1999) and was heading into the free fall of garbage for the rest of the year. In ring wise, the PPVs and TV shows this year is way up, but creatively there's just nothing going on at all. Any given show is the Dudleys cutting the same cheap heat promo for 15 minutes. :sadcam:

I guess I'll have to say I prefer getting good matches on PPV than creative angles that lead to shyt matches.
 
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R=G

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Hahahaha..all that fukking heat when Rusev put Summer Rae in front of him as a shield to the super kick from Ziggler.
 

stro

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So ECW gets the TNN deal, and the next PPV Heat Wave (which is the same weekend) is the most offensive and hardcore show they've done in years, a show that had next to no build and the title match (Taz vs Tajiri) wasn't made until the weekend of, with a random heel turn from Tajiri and it being the continuation of Steve Corino's comedy angle with Taz. :mjlol: It's also not even the main event :russ:. It also starts with a 6 minute Pulp Fiction promo, then an in ring intro from Joey, THEN a Danny Doring promo where he introduced and proposed to Lita with a condom that was in Roadkill's hat as Joey called her a hoe for...literally no reason at all. Then a shytty tag match. THEN Jason vs Jazz. The Dudleys have their most infamous promo where Bubba is telling moms they taught their daughters how to suck dikk, spitting in teenage girls faces, talking about D-Von's BBC fukking white bytches up the ass, calling people fakkits, etc, which leads into a tag match with quadruple blood, cheese graters, and flaming tables. Taz/Tajiri has barbed wire and is played up like Taz doesn't give a fukk if it ruins the TNN deal. Of course, this is yet another PPV with a long angle, this time Tommy Dreamer coming out to hype up the history of ECW and how they got to TNN and Steve Corino interrupting him. This is already after multiple promos eating up PPV time. Due to Shane leaving and Dreamer being hurt, the Impact Players angle was dropped entirely and they moved on to feuding partner angle with Jerry Lynn and RVD teaming up to face them in the main event, which really shows how that TV title is the important title in this company. And for some reason even they couldn't escape the disappointing ECW PPV main event curse.

Also there are two YOUNG kids in the front row who are mortified most of the show, whose parents are :merchant: the whole show. :mjlol: The fukk were they expecting?
 

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@stro That Taz/Tajiri match pissed me off back in the day. I was hyped to see it, and then they pulled the "we have to shoot this at a wide angle to avoid the gruesome barbwire" crap :pacspit:
 

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@stro That Taz/Tajiri match pissed me off back in the day. I was hyped to see it, and then they pulled the "we have to shoot this at a wide angle to avoid the gruesome barbwire" crap :pacspit:

Even before that the whole thing was pretty dumb. For 2 months Steve Corino was doing this comedy mocking of Taz and Cyrus would stooge him off and he'd get the beats, so he would pay off guys to go after Taz. First it was Skip, who got demolished on PPV and the rematch then was gone. Then it was the Dudleys, and Taz beat both of them up, too. Then he debuted Rhino as his new heavy, who immediately got squashed. So then he pays off Tajiri, who turns heel despite having gotten really over as a hot new face ready to shoot up the card, and Taz pretty much demolishes him at the PPV as well. Taz's whole title reign is just making everyone around him look like shyt and having bad matches.
 

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I'd say yeah, but he booked all of his tag and world champs in a way that hurt all of the challengers and didn't elevate anyone. And this goes back to like...1994. Only the TV title helps anyone. And it's very clear that RVD is the real star of the promotion: His tag match main events a PPV, he's the first guy shown on the intro, and when they get their TNN deal and the first taping was a disaster, the match they use to introduce a new audience to the promotion is RVD vs Jerry Lynn.

The TV title has more prestige, much better matches, and RVD was a guy that WWF and WCW had no one like.
 
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stro

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Lol the amount of shyt that goes down between Heat Wave and Anarchy Rules.

First off, ECW gets the TNN deal. Their first taping is absolute trash so Paul E. scraps it, uses a couple of matches for the syndicated show, and instead airs a best of for the debut show. The Dudleys sign with the WWF and it's made into an angle about them taking the tag titles to Vince, and in that month they win and lose the titles two more times, including on the first real TNN show, which happens to be their last show. They goad Dreamer into a handicap match, only for Raven, Dreamer's arch nemesis who quit WCW that very day, runs in to win the tag titles with him. Two weeks before the PPV, Taz announces the returning Masato Tanaka as his challenger at the PPV. There's no angle and Tanaka hadn't been in the promotion since December of 1998. Of course, that's turned into a 3 way dance at the show, with a returning Mike Awesome being added. He also hadn't been in the promotion since sometime in 1998, but his absence was due to injury instead of contract reasons like Tanaka. Of course, Taz had also signed or had made it clear he was going to sign with the WWF as well. This despite how many promos he cut over the years about guys leaving and him staying with the company for better or for worse until the end. The Dudleys also cut a few of those promos as well, btw and now all 3 are gone within 3 months of each other :mjlol:

So, two weeks into their national TV deal, they lose 2 of their 3 biggest acts, one of them right away, the other having some time left to be jobbed out, both requiring new champions to immediately be made and pushed. They now have two sets of TV and angles to be running and taping, they've added 4 PPVs to the schedule when they weren't even doing a good job building for PPVs 6 months apart, they have a magazine and merch catalog they're hyping all the time, and work on a video game is going on during this time. It's pretty obvious ECW is expanding too much too fast, as that's basically 3 years of growth in 3 months. In addition, the TNN show has different requirements, like constant replays, toned down content, Joel Gertner on color, and so on. All this lasts about a month before the two shows are being cannibalized for the other, not really a surprise but probably a bit of kick in the dikk to TNN execs who thought they'd be getting exclusive content, and to the fans who have been watching Hardcore TV for years that are getting second run content. Some weeks, both shows get the same matches, and both shows have been guilty (as charged :skip:) of showing excessive amounts of vault footage to fill time and catch people up on stuff, including multiple full length PPV matches being aired more than once, all of the Tanaka/Awesome matches being aired in full (one of which had new commentary that made it sound recent instead of a year + old :beli:), seemingly endless Raven/Dreamer video packages recapping 2 1/2 years of shyt each time.

On the plus side, having a national platform has forced them to actually announce PPV cards ahead of time instead of doing work for 2 matches and the rest of the card being a mystery until the show goes down. I swear Anarchy Rules is the first PPV they've had since Barley Legal to have more than 3 matches announced ahead of time, even if they were announced a week or two before the show. Shame that most of the matches had been done to death this year (another Lynn/Storm match, another Tajiri/Guido/Super Crazy match, another Balls/RVD match). Simon Diamond :camby::camby::camby: Doring and Roadkill :camby::camby::camby: Chris Chetti :camby::camby::camby: Nova :camby::camby::camby: House of Hardcore graduates :camby::camby::camby::camby::camby::camby::camby::camby::camby:
 

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This TNN ep where they had Sunny go on and talk about drug usage in the industry, including details on Louie Spiccoli's death and the prevalence of somas as Paul is off camera telling her to give more details with her bloated drug face. She actually might be high while doing this interview. Zooming in on her tears while she talks about her 16 year old niece dying and how she wanted to be dead, too.

"There were some nights that I was hoping I wouldn't wake up the next morning."

"Tell me about that. Describe that for me."

:martin:

There's literally nothing to this except shameless exploitation. The whole show was built around this interview, while they replay PPV matches, which they've done almost every week of the show, and Hardcore TV as well. The entire Anarchy Rulez PPV is shown on TV, both shows, over the next 2-3 weeks, just to fill time because they seem to have no idea how to be doing 2 sets of tapings. It seems like they quickly started taping both shows 2-3 weeks at a time on the same night, but not enough to actual fill for that amount of time, so they'd just plug in tons of replays and previously aired segments/matches on BOTH shows. Paul E. was scamming TNN from the jump :pachaha:
 

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So ECW gets the TNN deal, and the next PPV Heat Wave (which is the same weekend) is the most offensive and hardcore show they've done in years, a show that had next to no build and the title match (Taz vs Tajiri) wasn't made until the weekend of, with a random heel turn from Tajiri and it being the continuation of Steve Corino's comedy angle with Taz. :mjlol: It's also not even the main event :russ:. It also starts with a 6 minute Pulp Fiction promo, then an in ring intro from Joey, THEN a Danny Doring promo where he introduced and proposed to Lita with a condom that was in Roadkill's hat as Joey called her a hoe for...literally no reason at all. Then a shytty tag match. THEN Jason vs Jazz. The Dudleys have their most infamous promo where Bubba is telling moms they taught their daughters how to suck dikk, spitting in teenage girls faces, talking about D-Von's BBC fukking white bytches up the ass, calling people fakkits, etc, which leads into a tag match with quadruple blood, cheese graters, and flaming tables. Taz/Tajiri has barbed wire and is played up like Taz doesn't give a fukk if it ruins the TNN deal. Of course, this is yet another PPV with a long angle, this time Tommy Dreamer coming out to hype up the history of ECW and how they got to TNN and Steve Corino interrupting him. This is already after multiple promos eating up PPV time. Due to Shane leaving and Dreamer being hurt, the Impact Players angle was dropped entirely and they moved on to feuding partner angle with Jerry Lynn and RVD teaming up to face them in the main event, which really shows how that TV title is the important title in this company. And for some reason even they couldn't escape the disappointing ECW PPV main event curse.

Also there are two YOUNG kids in the front row who are mortified most of the show, whose parents are :merchant: the whole show. :mjlol: The fukk were they expecting?

So, I was axactual at this show. I legit thought Buh Buh and D Von might get murdered that night. I couldn't believe these dumbasses decided it would be a good idea to brawl in the crowd after all that shyt they talked.

While they were in the crowd, some random breh throws a full cup at D Von from what sounded like point blank range. shyt was hilarious.
 

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ECW heat check after November to Remember 1999

So, after getting the TNN deal, they lost the Dudleys and Taz is on the way out (it was known by early September he was leaving, N2R is his final show, and in between those, all he did was put over Sabu, Awesome, and RVD), but saw the return of Raven, Sandman, and Mikey Whipwreck. I wouldn't call it a fair trade considering Raven seems wasted 100% of the time he's on screen, they had done next to nothing with Mikey since he was a big focus of TV in 1995 and he returned to the company getting squashed by Mike Awesome and then not used on TV for another 2 months, and Sandman is Sandman, even if he was in much better shape this time around after his WCW stint. Losing the Dudleys was a bigger blow than Taz, since they Dudleys were used as a utility act that could fill time and get heat against anyone on any show at any time on any position on the card and probably had more TV and mic time than anyone in the company. Taz...well his best days were already behind him and his title reign was a lot of bad matches and making guys look bad while he repeated his catchphrase so....oh well. :yeshrug:

Raven immediately resumes the feud with Dreamer by winning the tag titles with him and then complaining about having to be Dreamer' partner and literally doing nothing but popping in at the end of the match to hit a DDT and get the pin. The Impact Players, unable to wrest the TV title from RVD, instead head for the tag titles, and this leads to Raven/Dreamer/Sandman vs Impact Players/Rhino in an old guard vs new guard type match. Raven of course turns on Dreamer, Justin pins Sandman (he now has wins over Dreamer, Sabu, Sandman, and Shane Douglas, and got the credit for running Sandman/Shane out of ECW, and Sabu getting suspended by the state athletic commissions ) and resumes their feud that was starting before Sandman went to make some money. Taz does the J-O-B brotha for RVD, in what is probably Taz's best match of the year, but one of RVD's worst, and it's made more than clear that RVD is the top star of ECW and the TV title is more important than the World Title. This is Taz's last match before his WWF debut at the Royal Rumble in January, idk what he did in those almost 3 months, but it definitely wasn't hitting the gym. :hhh:

Jerry Lynn, after most of the year stealing the show with RVD, is now firmly back in the midcard, now in three way dance hell that Super Crazy/Guido/Tajiri had found themselves in. Speaking of those three, some combination of those three happens on all six of the PPVs in 1999. And on TV, they each had probably 5 matches against each other a piece, plus a few triple threats on TV. Paul E. discovered the cheat code to mid card booking and just started booking them every other week for a while. This will continue into 2000. Tajiri seemed like he was going to be elevated, but he was just a mid card filler feud for Taz. The heel turn worked out fine for his career, but I still think it was dumb when he was so over as a face and ready to jump up the card. In a similar vein, not having Jerry finally beat RVD, then move RVD up to the world title seemed like a dumb idea to me, but building your world title and national TV program around 2 (1 that doesn't speak English) guys that have very little exposure to American audiences with an impromptu unadvertised triple threat at a PPV seems more logical. :skip:


The two things I'm most baffled about: Why Paul E. was so intent on pushing Justin Credible so hard when Lance Storm was better at literally everything (workrate, high flying, brawling, PROMOS, aesthetics, literally everything). I have to assume it was a personal project for him because he tried to push Justin straight to the top from the start, having him feud with Dreamer like 2 months into his run, but fans weren't buying it and he backed off a bit before going even harder. Second: Why they had a national product with a million+ viewers and never plug their live dates. When they were at their hottest creatively, every episode of TV was hyping up the next month of shows. Now they don't even hype up dates on Hardcore TV unless something is at the ECW arena. They don't tell people when or where TNN tapings are, they don't mention house shows at all anymore unless something happened at one that they can show "fan cam" footage of. Get a national show, start touring nationally, but don't use your platform to promote your dates, brehs. :upsetfavre:


EDIT: A few shows later they finally start advertising their dates :gladbron:
 
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R=G

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I'm watching Jazz vs Trish vs Victoria at wm 19..fast pace but Jazz kicked their asses all match long. Lol. Practically had the match won if not for Stevie interfering outright.
 
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