SLL Resumes Drinking and Watching ECW Fancams

2 Cold Scorpio vs Chris Jericho (5/17/96)

Man, I was not expecting Jericho to be the MVP of these things, but that has been the case so far. This is his best match yet, which shouldn't be surprising considering who's on the other side of the ring. This is wrestled in front of a really shitty crowd even by ECW standards, who chants "boring" after even a second of inactivity, calls for tables in your designated workrate match, and chants "you fucked up" at what would otherwise come off as a really dramatic nearfall. Still this is Jericho and Scorpio. They don't give me a whole lot to complain about. Jericho continues to work stiff, and Scorpio follows suit with some eye-popping lariats that would make Iceman King Parsons proud. I also liked him taking it to the mat early on. Didn't last long, but for some reason, working on the Texas set has made me a conisseur of drop toe holds, and Scorpio is a guy with a really nice looking drop toe hold. He has a lot of other things that look nice, of course - his standing Harlem Hangover, his handspring bicycle kick, and the always astounding Drop Da Bomb for the win. He plays to the handheld after the match. "Kid held his own...I gotta give it to him...Kid is good." Yeah, he is, but this time he had an opponent who was right up there with him. Best match of the fancams so far.

Mikey Whipwreck vs Kronus (6/21/96)

Holy fuck, I think I spoke too soon, as this may have been even better than the last match. This is Kronus against an actual quick evasive guy (well he dodges a spin kick...and he moves really fast when Kronus sends him flying across the ring) who is noticably smaller than him and can make all his offense look devastating. Kronus holds up his end of the bargain by having devastating offense and giving one of his better career performances. This is structured the way most of your better Mikey Whipreck matches are - Mikey eats a ton of offense, bumps like a freak, but hangs tough and gets in brief runs of offense here and there where you can see him actually pulling it out. There's a really choice one near the end where Mikey eats a nasty rail ride, but when Kronus comes over to deal out further damage, Mikey kicks him low and starts clobbering him with every foreign object within reach. Kronus sells nicely for Mikey's offense without killing his own aura. This is how the motherfuckin' professional wrestling works right here.

Chris Jericho vs Rob Van Dam (6/21/96)

Well, we have our first bad Jericho match, and guess whose fault it was. I had forgotten how much fun RVD's old heel shtick could be. Unfortunately, while he opens the match as a heel, he ends up tweaking his knee after eating a missile dropkick to the floor from Jericho that looked more like Jericho was just jumping on top of RVD's head like he was Super Mario, and then the heel spends the rest of the match gutting it out in spite of an injured body part that the face goes after. Cause that's how the face/heel dynamic works, right? And how does he manage to gut it out? Why through shitty "My leg is breaking/Now I am running at top speed across the ring to perform my high-flying offense/Now my knee really hurts again" psuedo-selling, of course! Fuck this match.

Sabu vs Shane Douglas (6/21/96)

Filmed in tallscreen! This was frustrating. So the bulk of the action in this match was fine - really good, actually - but hinges on the story of Sabu coming into the match with an injured neck. So injured, in fact, that he's wearing a brace. I don't know how a guy in a neckbrace gets cleared to wrestle, but it is ECW, so I guess I can buy that much. What I can't buy is that Sabu has a seriously injured neck, has his neckbrace ripped off early on, has his neck targetted throughout the match, and basically continues to wrestle as normal. Yes, Sabu is crazy as all fuck, and he would probably try to gut this one out, but a braced neck is not taped ribs. You can't come into a match with a neckbrace, have it torn off, eat multiple piledrivers, neckbreakers, kneedrops to the neck, and suspended neckbreaker holds, and continue to wrestle your normal match. You don't get to kick out after a super brainbuster. My suspension of disbelief only allows for so much. If the match's premise didn't kill it, the finish would have. Sabu bumps the ref when he runs into him trying to do a triple jump something onto Douglas, who's on a table suspended between the apron and the guardrail. Sabu loses his balance on the top rope the first time, falls backwards, does it again, loses his balance again, falls forward onto the table, breaking it and missing Douglas completely. The crowd chants "ECW". Of course. Rob Van Dam runs in, and since the ref has been bumped, RVD gets away with his completely legal interference, which included the aforementioned super brainbuster resulting in a nearfall. Douglas continues to beat on Sabu, and after all this, Paul Heyman comes out, begging him to stop because "you're going to break his neck!" Yeah, he spent the entire match destroying that thing, but only now does Paul get concerned. He calls for the bell, Douglas gets pulled off of Sabu, and I just don't get it.