Brian Fritz of AOL FanHouse has a new interview online with former ECW Champion Shane Douglas. In it, Fritz asks Douglas if he's surprised about Vince McMahon's decision to ditch ECW. Below is Shane's response:
No, not surprised at all. In fact, I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did. My personally opinion – and I think the opinion of a lot of fans – is that Vince McMahon simply wanted to stop fans from chanting "ECW" when they saw someone they either didn't like or they did like and one of the most difficult things to sanitize on tape is crowd sound. So if you see the crowd chanting "ECW" and their fist is pounding three times and they try to sanitize that with crowd cheers, it's very obvious. So, from a production standpoint, I think Vince McMahon thought he had an agenda that he had to adhere to.
What never made sense to me was with the brand that was so strongly identifiable by its fans and the fans were so loyal to, why not utilize that to the company's advantage? Why start a Florida Championship Wrestling or whatever their quote-on-quote minor league or feeder system and have it become ECW? And they had the vast majority of the key talent necessary to work it and could have probably got the most of the rest of us as we have had no problem passing the torch to the guys and teaching them to make it a very viable ECW. I think in the end it shows Vince's lack of being able to see beyond his periscope. I mean, he's made a lot of money with what he's done but as his market share dwindles further and further downward, I think a strong ECW would have been very valuable to him. It didn't surprise me but I do think that it was a really bad move on his part.
Fritz talks to Douglas much more about WWE's version of ECW as well as Douglas' thoughts on what made the original ECW so special. Click here to read the full interview.
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