Eastern Championship Wrestling broke away from the National Wrestling Alliance in 1994 after Shane Douglas won a tournament to determine the NWA champion. Infamously, Douglas threw down the NWA title, and cut a promo on the august promotion.
Subsequently, the E in ECW became Extreme, as the combined forces of promoters Tod Gordon & Paul Heyman, the latter better known at the time as Paul E. Dangerously, turned wrestling on its ear. The rulebook was essentially tossed out the window, as ECW specialized in hardcore street fights where anything and everything usually went.
Thus, ECW's weekly TV show was renamed, ECW Hardcore TV, and aired in late night on weekends on MSG Cable starting in 1995. ECW introduced viewers to the Dudley Boys, who originally were a dysfunctional clan of half-brothers of odd parentage, but by the time ECW folded in 2001, only to be resurrected by WWE (2006-10), the Dudleys were down to a trio, Bubba Ray, D-Von, and 1/2-brother and on-again, off-again ally Spike. Raven (Scott Levy, formerly Scotty Flamingo, Scotty the Body, and Johnny Polo) resurrected his career in ECW, and used this guise for the rest of his career.
In 1999, ECW added a network berth on TNN (now Spike) as part of the network's short-lived Friday Night Thrill Zone block, coupled with Rollerjam, a roller derby revival. The format was the same except that the violence was slightly toned down for primetime, and language sanitized.
Some veteran wrestlers used ECW as a stopover before moving on to bigger things. For example, in 1995, Steve Austin, who had been released by WCW via phone call, came to ECW, and cut a memorable promo....
Austin would also take out his venom on WCW's Eric Bischoff with a riotous parody of WCW Monday Nitro that demonstrated that he could do comedy with the best of them. Oh, and that spot-on Dusty Rhodes mimic in the above video is classic. It was here that Austin began to develop what would become Stone Cold more than a year later in the then-World Wrestling Federation, and propel him to their Hall of Fame.
Today, the spirit of ECW lives on via Tommy Dreamer's House of Hardcore promotion, which doesn't have a television contract, but wherever Dreamer goes, he promotes House of Hardcore. One wishes HoH could make a stop in the home district, but, well.......
Rating: ECW Hardcore TV gets an A-.
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