I rarely respond to comments, let alone devote a full column to them (once I’ve said my piece, I prefer to leave the discussion or lack thereof up to the reader), but last column “incognito†brought up what I think is a fair point, and I figured I’d take this week’s column to explain at least my thought process behind my feelings on what makes one angle a throwback and another a watered down copy.
Incognito posted this:
“I think its odd that people in the IWC who were wetting themselves over the prospect of Vince vs. Bret suddenly hate for the past to be rehashed because its not their beloved front-running company doing the rehashing.. I don’t know, maybe its me.â€
He went on to elaborate, and I’ll let you hit up the archive and check out the rest of his argument for yourself. Suffice to say, he feels TNA isn’t doing anything with ECW that hasn’t been done by WWE with other angles in the past. And while technically he’s right, the devil is in the details. TNA isn’t rehashing or taking something from the past and doing their own twist on it like WWE is with the Nexus or did with Evolution; TNA is straight out making a copy of a copy, as usual. But this time they aren’t copying an angle or a stable, which is at least arguably only a bad move because of poor execution and over reliance. This time they’re doing a reunion for a now defunct company that is now owned by an entirely different company, which already DID a reunion for said defunct company. And they’re doing it in the exact same way (not to mention that the WWE reunion was done alongside a separate reunion done by the members of ECW on the outs with the WWE). They also aren’t doing it well, in part because they don’t actually own the rights to anything ECW and in part because they’re failing to capture the original’s spirit.
Yes, there have been not one but two ECW reunion shows already (three if you count the second One Night Stand, but since that was intended as the kick off for Vince’s version of ECW, I do not), both of which were sold as being done for the fans at the behest of the ex-ECW crew. Just like TNA’s version. Despite Tommy Dreamer’s promo on Impact about not having a say in the prior reunions, it was widely reported that Dreamer worked hand in hand with Paul Heyman on booking the first One Night Stand (the idea for which came from Rob Van Dam and not Vince McMahon; RVD was in fact quoted by SLAM! Sports as saying that “Some of the WWE writers want to dip their hands into it, but we’re not going to let them ruin the showâ€), and in fact after the show went off the air, the man left standing alone in the ring to thank you chants from the fans (and a “This is all for you†from the Dudleys) was Tommy Dreamer. By his own admission, he had been given closure. Knowing this, and knowing that the WWE kept him employed for so long pretty much for sentimental reasons (and gave him a sendoff that in its own way was every bit as poignant and special as Ric Flair’s when he chose to leave), it’s hard to take his anti-WWE rhetoric and tears on Impact as sincere, and if there’s anything we always wanted to believe about Dreamer and his speeches, it’s that they were sincere. That’s part of what made even the second One Night Stand feel like the original ECW: the sincerity of guys like Dreamer and RVD. I haven’t felt that with TNA’s version.
And how was the original One Night Stand booked, by the by? Did it not include an invasion of Raw and Smackdown by ECW guys? Did the ECW guys not have matches leading up to the PPV where they were pitted against members of the WWE roster? TNA has followed the exact same path: ECW guys invade, ECW guys participate in matches with regular TNA guys leading up to their own PPV. The only differences are that TNA immediately dropped the invasion aspects of the story, and that those incidents happened before the PPV was officially announced (the WWE’s invasion was actually Raw/Smackdown planning to invade One Night Stand; the ECW wrestlers simply responded in kind). TNA has even played off the One Night Stand name, with their ECW reunion being referred to at different times as “One Last Stand†and “One Night Only†(as it stands currently, it’s now THE Last Stand). They’re doing everything the original One Night Stand did, but at a rushed pace and 5 years past the point where there was any real massive outpouring of nostalgia to demand it, in a company where the ECW style isn’t saved for a special occasion the way it is in the WWE.
As for the Bret/Vince example, was the Bret/Vince build to Wrestlemania more of the wrestler versus evil boss angle that’s been beaten into the ground over the years? Sure. But it was building to a match that we had never seen, and that the vast majority had wanted to see for years. In fact, one could argue that the Bret vs. Vince feud predated the rest of the wrestler vs. Vince feuds; we just had to wait over a decade to get the payoff. That in the end the payoff was spectacularly underwhelming is beside the point (and apparently in part because of circumstances beyond the WWE’s control, as Lloyd’s of London reportedly balked at Bret getting physical after the angle had already been put into motion). No one was expecting a 4 star match to carry Wrestlemania, and there was a whole card of announced matches to share the weight. Of the TWO matches announced for TNA’s ECW ppv, both of them are match ups we have already seen multiple times when the participants were in their primes: Tommy Dreamer vs. Raven and Rob Van Dam vs. Jerry Lynn, with the Dreamer/Raven match being a continuation of their original feud… which unlike Bret/Vince, we were given closure on. And while RVD and Lynn can still go and probably will have a stellar match, Dreamer and Raven are visibly deteriorated, with Tommy actually legitimately injured.
I don’t want to knock Dreamer and the rest of the ECW guys. They’ve got every right to a payday, and without a doubt Vince has done some crappy things to the ECW brand name (and to some of them personally) in the name of business. But you can’t instigate a fourth reunion of the wrestling counter culture under the auspices of reclaiming it from the wicked Vince McMahon, and then have that counter culture chugging beers in the ring with Hulk Hogan. This feels like an ECW ppv done for the money, not love. It just shows that TNA missed the entire point of what made ECW popular, just like they do with everything else they try to copy.
Incognito said it himself: TNA is rehashing a rehash. But at least the WWE’s rehash captured the mood and the spirit of the original, for a time. Some of his other examples were WWE’s over use of the evil GM role, and Bret Hart winning the US title. But the vast majority of the IWC have been sick of the evil GM schtick for years, and the general consensus that I recall was that people were o.k. with Bret’s US Title win because most figured it was a token apology from the company for the failure of the Wrestlemania match, and they were ok with that as long as he immediately put it up for a tournament or forfeited the title. Which he did. It was a nostalgia moment courtesy of a squash match in which the Hart Dynasty did all the heavy lifting, which is world’s different from Hulk Hogan getting another legitimate World Title reign or taking out a ring full of guys half his age all on his lonesome (Flair, on the other hand, has been great in TNA, in large because he’s working with young guys in a managerial role that plays to his current strengths: running off at the mouth and taking a beating. Unfortunately, TNA is having him do this for guys doing Flair and Horsemen imitations).
Repetition is part of the professional wrestling’s nature, as it is with all story driven media. But just because the basic stories are the same doesn’t mean the beats aren’t supposed to be be changed up. The WWE knows and does this. Sometimes they lose their step when treading on familiar territory, but they at least try to do more than just step in the previous set of footprints. Dragging ECW out of the WWE’s mothballs is just symptomatic of what I find to be an overwhelming problem with TNA: they repeat the stories without changing up the beats. Like I said last week, they dwell on the successes others had in the past without tweaking them to fit their company, their talent and its future.
I also said I wasn’t gonna touch on TNA and their ECW reunion.
Crap.
