WWE Hall of Famer Rob Van Dam (RVD) recently appeared on an episode of his “1 Of A Kind” podcast, where he discussed a number of topics including WWE making changes to the ECW brand prior to its relaunch and the ECW originals needing to comply.
RVD said, “What made ECW so special was the very magic that they were taking away by adding rules. So first they used to say every show ‘ECW means anything goes!’ And so that’s why it would have been really cool if that would have been like the court to settle disputes. And when I first found out that they were — and it’s, you know, like you mentioned Bob Holly, and some of those guys were great ECW wrestlers. They weren’t in the original, but Paul [Heyman] knew that they would be very good and have what it took. And so there’s those guys and it was cool. But what bothered me though was the guys that weren’t even on ECW wrestling on ECW shows. Like, that was nothing but poison in my mind, because all it was was confusing. And I know like Matt Hardy and Kane, and I don’t know who else… People started hearing those guys were on. That’s what I was thinking was, ‘That’d be cool if you send guys to ECW, make an angle out of it. And then you got something special.’”
On the goofy gimmicks in the early days of the ECW relaunch and the ECW Zombie:
“I knew it was supposed to be a Martian, and they changed it to a zombie. I didn’t hear anything about lasers. I heard this through Paul [Heyman] when we were having daily conversations about, ‘They want to do seven really stupid things.’ He’s like, ‘I’m gonna get them to cave on four of them, three of them we have to let go.’ It was like what happened every day like that, and one of them was, ‘They want to have this Martian come out, but we got it so Sandman can cane them and then that way it won’t be that bad.’ ‘Okay. Why Martian?’ ‘Because it’s the Sci Fi Channel.’ And then it ended up being a zombie.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.
(H/T to 411Mania.com for transcribing the above quotes)
