Before becoming WWE’s Japanese version of the Brooklyn Brawler, Yoshihiro Tajiri was a true wrestling god. In the old ECW nobody worked a match, or a crowd, like Tajiri. Paired with Luchador Super Crazy fans were treated to a spectacle unmatched in Hardcore entertainment.

Click the image below to see The Japanese Buzzsaw in action.

Did Tajiri spit into the audience!?! Did the fans still cheer?

If the ECW wants to recapture the spirit that made them great, they’ll need to put on more matches like this, preferably with Tajiri.

Brian “the Blue Meanie” Heffron (and ex-girlfriend Jasmin St.Claire) were both in the 2005 Indy horror shocker Swamp Zombies. It, like Heffron himself, will not be appearing on Sci-Fi.

Fangoria has a blurb on the movie and it gets a 3 out of 5 mugs o’ blood over at the Horror Channel web site.

Check out it’s IMDB listing for extras.

Sci-Fi must really hate the Blue Meanie. Or the movie’s not so good.

The good folks at Pro-Wrestling Insider have a transcript of Douglas on the Monday Night Mayhem show. Fans of “The Franchise” will undoubtedly be disappointed to know he in fact turned down an offer from ECW to stay with TNA wrestling, who pay him more than ECW offered, but will take solace in the fact that his personal life if back on track after kicking an addiction to Oxycontin.

There’s a great synopsis of Douglas’ career at Wikipedia, who have fast become the repository for all the knowledge of western civilization.

All the best to the original franchise player, we’ll miss you.

A glib Matt Lauer announced the inevitable end of the world on Sci-Fi channel’s Countdown to Doomsday, predicting alarmist non-profit groups, hackneyed movie scripts and piss poor special effects would hurdle us to extinction.

Lauer, still glib, takes us through a tour of 10 doomsday scenarios with the help of “experts” who were cast as they passed out their books at Chiller Theatre. Daniel H. Wilson, author of the humorous “How To Survive a Robot Uprising : Tips on Defending Yourself Against the Coming Rebellion“ was one of Lauer’s lab coats. The joke was of course lost on Matt, who seemed to think our coming enslavement to our robot masters was as inevitable as our mass extinction by a coming Global Warming/Super Volcanic Eruption/Bird Flu/Asteroid Collision apocalypse.

Then again, there’s the Alien Invasion.

Yeah, that’s coming too. God-like, unstoppable Stalinist invaders whose superior technology makes resistance futile. It’s odd how no one envisions an Alien world like ours, made up of many nations and creeds competing for resources. I guess that one world/one race theory Nazis love so much has its benefits in that it helps a society advance into space faring conquerers. At least according to Lauer’s “experts”.

Former P.M.R.C. front man Al Gore’s new project, Destroying America to save the World (tentative title), received some glowing reviews from fallacious Lauer and his Misfits of Science.

Truly, this was speculative fiction at its best.

The ECW premiere on Sci-Fi was the highest rated program for the channel among the much sought after 18-49 demographic, according to The Fulton Critic. While Sci-Fi proudly hails the performance of Doctor Who, ECW brought almost 3.4 million viewers to the channel for their 10:00 pm time slot, more than twice what the good Doctor could muster. Adding to the displeasure of rabidly anti-ECW Sci-Fi fans, ECW on Sci-Fi was actually the highest rated show on cable, period.

Of course, next week’s show will likely have similar numbers, with a small drop among 18-49s, due to the somewhat disappointing nature of the premiere. If ECW gets its act together, shows some old school hardcore and goes easy on the sci-fi, they just might have something.

The good news for nerds: these kind of ratings sell a whole lot of advertising, bringing in revenue which means more “quality” Sci-Fi like Immortal. This abysmal cliche fest looked as if it was cobbled together from PC game cut scenes and community college improv classes. The C.G.I. Asian woman was not just absurdly racist, but frank proof the C.G.I. techs have never met an actual woman. But I digress.

The real point is that the purists who are still sobbing at the great Sci-Fi betrayal can look forward to more episodes of Battlestar Galactica, Ghost Hunters, Farscape SG-1 … that is Stargate SG-1, etc.

You can thank us later.