Joseph and Colette Discuss Raven/Richards vs. The Pitbulls

Also: It's Big Egg Month at BIG EGG, and news of a new paid tier feature!

ECW

If you saw this match on the schedule and thought Joseph and I were going to give it high marks, you were dreaming like Tommy Dreamer. That’s okay though — for all of Extreme Championship Wrestling’s posturing about having great wrestling, angles like this are big, dumb fun, the sort of thing that exists as weird proof that ECW’s vaunted audience was just like any other hot crowd in wrestling history, primed to be captivated by something as inexplicable as the 90210-meets-skinemax-meets-studio-wrestling vibe of Raven/Dreamer, which admittedly sounds pretty awesome until you hear Tommy talk or see him wrestle.

Here I am doing what Joseph and I do for much of the following conversation, which is talk about everything surrounding the match and not the match itself. Which is, I think, what the match was supposed to inspire. Good work, Paul Heyman; you really were the mad scientist of extreme.

Up Next: BIG EGG spends the next couple of weeks inside the Big Egg as we hit our 50th match. Joseph and I talk about that a little below, along with a new paid-tier feature, so let’s get right to it.

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Colette Arrand
Before we get started with this classic bit of ECW, I figured we should remind people that the BIG EGG MASTERLIST project will be kicking off soon as after this upcoming run of matches, we'll finally hit 50. To get us there, we're spending a month inside the Big Egg itself, the Tokyo Dome, watching some truly violent heavyweight clashes in one of wrestling's most hallowed halls.

We should also mention that, when we were talking about new BIG EGG features, we left one out, specifically one that we're going to add to the rotation when we hit 100 paid subscribers: a monthly reader Q&A! Pretty self-explanatory, I imagine, but given the places where our tastes and interests clash, I imagine a monthly Q&A is going to lead to some spirited debate between the two of us, as will the proper order at which all four Hunter Month matches will enter the record as the worst of BIG EGG.

Joseph Montecillo
There will be such glorious violence incoming, and also the matches too!

Colette Arrand
Speaking of violence, ECW. Ho boy. I have a long like/dislike relationship with this one, Joseph. For all of Paul E. Dangerously's Kool-aid that I've drank over the years, something I frequently find myself thinking is that it isn't so much that his ideas were stolen by WCW and WWE, but that a lot of the prime talent from ECW was frankly better on TNT or USA than they were in the crucible of the ECW Arena. Raven is absolutely one of those guys for me, as his feud against Tommy Dreamer is one of the goofiest, overly long, melodramatic, and largely terrible angles I've ever experienced most of, but when you import that into WCW, give Raven a crew of heaters that includes legitimately talented guys like Kidman and Saturn, and swap out Tommy Dreamer for DDP, you get one of my favorite storylines of an era replete with hot storylines, with much better matches. That's not to say that this match sucked, because it's extremely charming, I just didn't find myself buying into the ECW mythos as much this time around.

Joseph Montecillo
ECW is a weird one. I've definitely seen enough of the big hits over its history and even done some dipping my toes into weekly Hardcore TV runs. There is very clearly a lot of cleverness involved here in terms of how it all comes together as a product. We talked last week about how deeply embedded Onita's vision is to FMW and the same is true for Heyman and ECW. It's not hard to see why it grabbed the wrestling fan's imagination in the 90s.

Colette Arrand
For the record, I do love ECW, but my trainwreck storyline guy has been and always will be The Sandman, and that's as a face and a heel, so Raven and Tommy can take their teen drama horseshit and scram for the most part. The real big evil of ECW is Bill Alfonso, daddy.

Joseph Montecillo
Fonzy is something else, man. Incredibly, deeply annoying and I can't even say that he's especially "good" at being a wrestling figure either. Just look at him in his appearance for this match where he clearly only has two points he's capable of hitting: "You're dreaming, Dreamer!" and that the pinfall doesn't count. One might die of alcohol poisoning taking a shot for every "dreaming" pun he unleashes in maybe a two or three minute span.