It was perhaps the defining feud of Extreme Championship Wrestling’s history, a pair of wrestlers that represented what ECW was all about, and one of Paul Heyman’s longest-tenured projects. For over two years Tommy Dreamer and Raven went to war in the ring and on the microphone, trading words, punches and DDTs, playing mind games and trying to destroy each other. Now every single moment of this epic rivalry is available in one 6-disc DVD set.
I’m very glad that this DVD exists. Raven is one of my favourite wrestlers of all time, and I always had a soft-spot for the Innovator of Violence too. I never really watched ECW, it was just an abstract concept in my head, something I read about and saw the odd clip of here and there. But the idea of a two-year feud in which the babyface never once pinned the heel seemed insane to me and I always wondered how they pulled it off without descending into repetitive boring territory. So when I came across this DVD it seemed a no-brainer to pick up a copy, despite it being a little pricey. But then again, SIX DISCS!
Am I going to review all the matches? Absolutely not, there are… (hold on, counting them)… 29 of them if you don’t count the 6 fan-cam matches included at the end of each disc as a ‘bonus feature’. Instead I’m going to review this as a product.
Overview
The first thing to note is that this is not a documentary, it’s an anthology. There are no cutaways to Dreamer, Raven, Paul Heyman or anyone else involved discussing their memories of the feud. There is no host in a studio introducing each segment. There aren’t even menus or captions to tell us the name of the event in which a particular segment took place or the date. The latter is a pretty big detriment in my opinion because with so many segments I could really have gone for some kind of a chapter selection menu.
Instead, when you put a disc in it autoplays. Joey Styles does a good job of giving back-story during the segments, so he fills in some of the blanks, but still, a little extra production wouldn’t have gone a miss. Even the back cover of the box just gives names to the segments without prefacing them with a dates (except for some reason Disc 3), so there’s multiple “Tommy Dreamer Promo”s and “Raven vs Tommy Dreamer”s. A little hard to tell them apart to say the least, so if you want to see a specific match or promo… good luck finding it. Oh, and there’s a couple of typos on the back cover as well.
Disc One
Things get started with Stevie Richards using three of Raven’s former ring-names to shadow the arrival of the man himself, and right from his debut you could tell he was going to be special. Dressed like he was, with that theme music, cutting that promo… there had been NOTHING like that character before. From there Raven cuts a lot of promos, brings out Beulah, and makes Dreamer run a gauntlet for the right to face him one on one for the first time, and thanks to a Beulah double-cross and a DDT on the floor, it ends very quickly. From there we get three more solo matches, each featuring a controversial ending with Raven winning, a couple of promos, and an insanely stiff brawl in the Hard Rock Cafe, as well as some Piledrivers for Beulah and the debut of Luna Vachon as Dreamer’s play-thing… nice choice there bro. Everything on this disc was pretty good and gets the set rolling along quite nicely by making things intense right from the word go. It’s pretty incredible to compare what was being done here with what was going on in the WWF and WCW in 1994.
Disc 2
To give things a theme, you could call this the Luna Vachon disc. She cuts a few promos in an extremely grating demon-voice and wrestles a few matches, most notably facing Beulah in a match that doesn’t go down exactly how you might think. Raven and Richards also won the ECW Tag Team Titles, pushing them even further up the card. After beating the hell out of both Dreamer and Luna on multiple occasions, things took a turn when the Pittbulls, previously allies of Raven, turned on him to join forces with Dreamer, not approving of the violence towards Luna. In retaliation, Raven recruited the Dudleys (the original ones, not the good ones) and faction warfare ran rampant with many a chaotic brawl. Finally, ‘The Chairshot Heard Round the World’, one of the sickest unprotected chair shots of all time. I’m not an advocate of those, but… you do kind of need to see it at least once. I’m really not a fan of Luna, the Pitbulls or the original Dudleys, so this disc was kind of a downer for me after the strong first one. I’d recommend checking your email or something while this one is playing.
Disc 3
To further advance the gang warfare, Tommy Dreamer recruited Cactus Jack to battle Raven, Richards and the Dudleys. Unfortunately, Raven’s mastery of mind-games allowed him to corrupt Cactus with a fantastic pre-match promo, causing him to turn on Dreamer just as he seemed to finally have Raven defeated. Mick Foley’s contributions on the microphone were quite frankly sublime, and this disc features one of the best promos of all time as Foley waxes lyrical on hardcore wrestling, fickle fans and his desire to go to WCW. Not to be outdone, Dreamer brought in Terry Funk to back him up based on his long history with Foley. Even at 53, Funk was still pretty capable in the ring and on the mic, engaging in a wild brawl and scoring a pin over Raven in a tag match. He also put Dreamer over like nobody’s business, making Tommy tear up as Funk promised not to forget him after he left ECW. The stuff with Cactus and Funk was pretty good, as you’d expect, but a few of the moments here and there dragged.
Disc 4
We start off with the first Dreamer vs Raven match since disc one, and despite some shenanigans at the start and finish, it was their best so far, with Raven once again getting the W and a shot at the Sandman’s ECW World Title to boot. Next came the infamous pregnancy angle, with Beulah announcing she was with child and that it was in fact Tommy’s baby, leading to the two reconciling as she left Raven for the man that later became her real-life husband. Nothing like this had really been done before in wrestling, ironic considering how frequently the WWF was called a soap-opera for men in the 90s. Yet this angle didn’t come across as ridiculous fluff (despite Beulah’s frankly high-school-drama-class level delivery of her lines), but rather legitimate and creative drama that furthered the feud. Raven bounced back though, defeating Sandman to win the title, confirming what we already knew: he was the man in ECW. He also separated Dreamer’s shoulder and got The Bruise Brothers to turn on him, exposing one of the major flaws in this set. We had no idea who the Bruise Brothers were, why they were with Dreamer, why they turned or what happened to them afterwards, as all the footage focuses on the immediate feud and not enough is done to explain the peripheral factors. While not an action-packed disc in terms of matches, the storylines were top-notch here, demonstrating Heyman’s creativity pretty well.
Disc 5
So you’ve just gotten your nemesis’ girlfriend pregnant and stolen her away from him, where do you go from there? Why you steal his new girlfriend, Kimona, to create a weird three-person relationship of course! Yes folks, this was the Lesbian Kiss angle, another first for wrestling, and something that apparently got them in a lot of trouble for a few weeks. We also got to see the Brian Lee/Tommy Dreamer mini-feud that saw Lee chokeslam Dreamer off a balcony through multiple tables on two occasions and culminated in the very dangerous scaffold match.
We also got to see what was in my opinion the best match Dreamer and Raven had against each other, which took place in Japan of all places. I don’t know if it was the motivation of trying to impress a foreign audience or if both men just happened to be on point that night, but the match was leaps and bounds better than the few they had early on. Also, Raven was pretty much untouchable as the champion in terms of mic and character work. You can feel his aura even now fifteen years later. Unfortunately he would lose the belt without being pinned after leaving the company for a little while to go into rehab. But thanks to the wonders of editing he was back right away, beating the Sandman for the belt again.
The disc closes with an interesting angle involving Brian Lee repeatedly smashing Terry Funk’s head in with a garbage can as the Funker is determined to get to Raven, who he was desperate to beat for the world title. Dreamer admonished the pair for going too far and the ring-crew finally managed to drag Funk away to receive medical attention. In fact, Raven went so far that Stevie Richards, who had broken out as the leader of the Blue World Order in Raven’s absence, turned his back on his former mentor. It all ends happily in the end though as the Sandman stands tall and is reunited with his son at long last (whole other 6-disc set available for that feud by the way). This disc was probably my favourite because it was a blend of the creative storylines from disc 3, had some really good matches, particularly the encounter in Japan, and the involvement of Brian Lee and Terry Funk was refreshing.
Disc 6
Here it is, the grand finale. The focus of the first half of the disc was the build towards ECW’s first ever Pay-Per-View and Terry Funk’s desire to gain a world title match against Raven in the main event. Sure enough, Funk ended up in that spot, wrestling his second match of the evening, already bleeding, in no condition to fight a fresh Raven. Where was Dreamer? Well, sitting on a balcony doing commentary. He would find his way into the finish anyway, and Funk ultimately won the world title in what was a genuinely wonderful moment that the crowd erupted for.
Furious, Raven beat the hell out of Stevie Richards, and demanded he be his partner in an upcoming tag match. Their uneasy alliance made for a pretty entertaining tag match, with Richards reluctant to help Raven and Raven frequently heckling Richards in pretty hilarious fashion. All of this led up to the Loser Leaves ECW match at Wrestlepalooza 97. Yes, everybody knew that Raven was going to WCW, even in the days before the IWC was so rampant. Yet the match was still pretty dramatic, with the crowd still not entirely sure Dreamer would win. There were far too many shenanigans in my opinion, with lots of interference, two ref bumps, and several false finishes, but Dreamer finally getting his hand raised was great closure on the feud. This was the shortest disc of the set, but what it lacked in length it more than made up for in quality.
Final Thoughts
So there you have it, nearly three years of matches, promos and more. Their allies and girlfriends turned on them and they nearly killed each other multiple times. It might not have been the best feud in the history of wrestling, but it was one of the best of the modern era, and certainly the best in ECW. If only the WWE knew how to get so much life out of a program these days.
I also want to say I found a new appreciation for Stevie Richards, given my first exposure to him was in the Right to Censor, I didn’t think he was anything special, but he played his role in ECW pretty perfectly and he was a much better wrestler than I gave him credit for. If not for him acting as a foil and flunky this feud may not have worked so well. Mick Foley cuts some of the best promos you’ll ever see and Terry Funk’s crusade was far more touching than I imagined.
I was pretty shocked how compelling I found most of the matches considering how few moves each man does. Seriously, they had the same finisher, both used piledrivers and relied on punches and weapons to fill the rest of their matches. And yet, somehow, I was entertained most of the time, especially when the two were fighting each other instead of their respective allies.
Letting the content speak for itself is good on the one hand, but there are some moments where a host is sorely lacking as we jump undetermined lengths of time and a few story threads are left unresolved. Oh! And get used to hearing Come Out and Play by Offspring and Man In A Box by Alice in Chains, because they get played a LOT. Like a whole lot. Like it’s the reason I used one in a recent podcast because both are stuck in my head.