Another idle Saturday night, so I decided to watch another ECW dvd before listing the DVD on eBay. This time, it was "Crossing the Line Again". An event from February of 1997, that took place at the legendary ECW arena, In Philadelphia. Things were a little more rough and ready back then, even more so than they would be a year or two later, but oddly the DVD release is much more restrained - I'll come back to that.
The card is as follows. Lance Storm vs Balls Mahoney, Big Stevie Cool with the B. W. O vs Ricky Morton, Axl Rotten vs Dr Death Steve Williams, Raven vs Dr Death Steve Williams, D-Von Dudley vs The Sandman, Rob Van Dam and Sabu vs The Eliminators (John Kronus and Perry Saturn), Terry Funk vs Tommy Rich and The Triple Threat (Shane Douglas, Brian Lee and Chris Candido) vs The Pitbulls and Tommy Dreamer.
So as you can see, most of the ECW originals are there, Taz also appears on the show, as does a masked but painfully obvious Rick Rude. There are a few old school legends out there too, with the Funk and Rich match becoming a bloodbath, but with a slightly disappointing finish, and with a very unpopular Ricky Morton facing off with Stevie Richards. The event was also Lance Storms ECW debut and the establishment of the Dudley Boyz, as a tag time that would then last for the best part of two decades.
If the event was fine, the DVD release was disappointing. It's one of the ones where, to avoid copywrite issues, the unlicensed music is over played with horrible generic free tunes, which really start to grate on a long entrance, like The Sandman's or weirdly over much of the main event match. Most of the entrances aren't present, and some of the key bits of communication, such as why Dr Death gets a title match with Raven aren't there either. It's a very jumpy dvd, leaping from match to match. The swearing is beeped in the early moments of the DVD, but then Shane Douglas swears multiple times and it's not touched.
The event is decent enough, though most of the matches run a little short and none, bar perhaps the tag team titles match, could be considered truly great. The DVD release is poor though and, though I haven't got the Network, I can't imagine it's dealt with much better on there.
