SLL Gets Drunk and Watches Even More ECW Fancams

Kronus vs Shane Douglas (5/5/96)

This was about nine hours long and really sorta died in the opening minutes. Kronus eats armdrags like he's doing a cartwheel. I know he is a guy who likes to do handsprings, but that's not really how you eat an armdrag. Still, Kronus comes across as the better worker in the match. He had a nice clothesline charging out of the corner, and his shoulderbreakers looked good. Also, being retarded, he at least has an excuse for his flaws. Shane Douglas' excuse is that he kinda sucked. Shane does really quick takedowns and "evasive guy" spots like taking him down from behind and running across Kronus' back to get over the speed advantage he has over the larger, lumbering Kronus. This story has a few flaws. For one thing, immediately after running over Kronus' back, he taunts him, and quick, evasive Douglas gets charged in the corner by slow, lumbering Kronus. Not like he was looking away, or that Kronus' charge was particularly sudden. Douglas stood in the corner with a fair amount of distance between himself and Kronus, locked his eyes on Kronus, and stood perfectly still as he watched him get up and charge towards him. No distraction, nothing that would suggest that he wouldn't be able to dodge the attack. Quick, evasive Shane Douglas knowingly and of his own free will allowed himself to be charged by Kronus.

Then there's the second obvious problem - while Kronus is bigger than Douglas, he doesn't seem drastically bigger to the point that you can really do a "quick evasive small guy vs. slow lumbering big guy" storyline. This is compounded by the fact that, for a big guy, Kronus wasn't ever really known to be slow or lumbering. On the contrary, Kronus was a big guy known to do handspring elbows and Sasuke Specials. If anything, he's better known for his speed and agility than Douglas is. Yeah, you can have agile big guys work as comparitively slow and lumbering guys trying to keep up with quick evasive guys, but then you need a bigger size difference than this. Douglas busts out a bunch of headscissor takedowns that I never saw him do before, I guess because that's something quick, evasive guys do, but he's not really convincing me that he's Iceman King Parsons and that Kronus is One Man Gang. I mean, I might be reading too much into this. This may not have been meant to be the story of the entire match. It's still how it opens, though, and that's still stupid. There is also a really egregiously bad ref bump here, as the ref just sort of chooses to stand between Douglas and Kronus, when Kronus is going for a handspring elbow. I guess maybe Douglas pulled him in the way, but it's not like it happened at the last second, and Kronus' handspring elbow is a move that takes a little while to get to it's destination. What's even the point of a ref bump in an ECW match, anyway? Maybe if you wanted a visual pin, but that doesn't happen here. Instead, Saturn runs in, and Shane takes apart "The World's Greatest Tag Team" by himself years before Triple H made it fashionable. OK, that's a little unfair. Saturn was bandaged up and bleeding pretty bad. Still, it stood out to me. But again, did the ref need to be out for this? It's ECW! It wasn't Fonzie in there. What was the point? And well, "what was the point" is really the theme of this entire match, anyway.

Mikey Whipwreck vs Chris Jericho (5/10/96)

That's more like it. I am digging stiff ECW Jericho, although I'm disappointed that he wasn't as stiff here as he was against Damien. I mean, who is going to eat a bigger beatdown in this company than Whipreck? Well, apparently, it's Jericho himself. Mikey doesn't really take any truly Whipreckian bumps, but he does duck a Stinger Splash from Jericho that sends him tumbling over the top turnbuckle to the floor. Crowd chants "you fucked up", I guess because pulling off a spot exactly as planned constitutes "fucking up". Shortly thereafter, Whipreck baseball slides between Jericho's legs while Jericho is on the apron, and sweeps them out, leaving Jericho to faceplant on the apron. Mikey looks fine here, but this was basically The Jericho Show, which I would not have expected.

Sabu vs Damien (5/10/96)

This was kinda amusing, just because the only thing the audience seemed to care about at all was calling out requests for Damien's impressions. Damien once again largely ignored them, though he did give in to a Misawa request. He also did Jinsei Shinzaki on his own accord, and after a false start, the resulting armdrag was nifty. Still, this was pretty bad overall, with a lot of awkward, mistimed, overly cooperative looking shit from Sabu that Damien didn't really play along with well. When Damien was in charge, it wasn't so bad, but he definitely struggled as a base for Sabu, whose best stuff in this match was kept fairly simple (out of nowhere dives and quickly executed table spots). Not as interminably bad as Douglas/Kronus, but it was down there.

Rob Van Dam vs Shane Douglas (5/10/96)

Hey, this was actually really good. So I have watched a shit-ton of World Class the last few years, and in that time, I really came to hate Magic Dragon. He had this finisher where he would throw his opponent in the corner, climb to the top rope, superfluously backflip off, and do a superkick. I joked that RVD would shake his head at it, but at least he would do it gracefully. Well, guess what? He does do it gracefully. Gracefully, and more logically, as Douglas was chasing him into the corner, and RVD was backflipping over him. RVD looked really good here. He wasn't really into the meaningless flippy shit yet, and all his fancy highspots were restrained by his standards, which made them look a lot better and more credible. Worst thing he did was the Van Daminator. I can work with that. Even his strikes looked OK. I totally dug the one-inch punch early in the match. His crowd brawling was good, too. Douglas threw some big dropkicks and basically held up his end of the bargain. It kinda falls apart near the end, and you don't need to go out of your way to see it, but this didn't suck nearly as much as I expected it to.