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Ten Years Later: The Story Of TornadoVision

Posted: Jul 2nd 2012 By: CMBurnham

In 2004 SRPW (our rival fed) was putting on a Saturday morning TV show. Most indy wrestling shows aren?t good. This one was awful. I think they just grabbed random people to be their camera men because half the time the camera was not zoomed in on the action or was shaking. They added the commentary in after the live show. Sarah (the owner) and Luc Lapointe did the commentary and neither of them was really cut out to do that sort of thing. It?s hard to talk up a terrible indy wrestling match and sound interesting, especially when you are just watching it on a screen after the event and you aren?t feeling the energy of the building or excitement of watching it live. This abortion of a tv show really upset me. Mostly because Rocco Valentino and I used to host a TV show on the local UPN affiliate years earlier for OCW. He and I had a blast and people started tuning into the show to see Rocco and I interact just as much as they were to see wrestling. We came up with sight gags and skits to make the in between wrestling segments even funnier. It also didn?t hurt that we were almost always intoxicated during this filming. I didn?t like the fact that SPRW had a TV show and we didn?t. It hurt my ego. But I also knew that TV shows are a waste of money and time. Only your hardcore fans are going to watch, and most of them already saw the show live.

When I was in high school, I had a friend named Jewish Josh. Jewish Josh wanted to be filmmaker someday and actually studied film techniques and listed to director commentaries and things like that. He would write scripts and film them. He ended up going to OU and being a film student. He had taught me a thing or two about filming stuff and putting it on the internet. This was before YouTube was really big so people weren?t doing a lot of that. You mostly had to upload videos to your own website. Well I just happened to run the TPW website. So I approached Rocco with idea of filming our TV show again, only putting it on the internet instead of Saturday morning public access channels that no one was going to watch. Rocco was hesitant. He didn?t want it to look cheap. I assured him that I had the skills to make it look okay. This is how TornadoVision was born.

TornadoVision began as a somewhat serious wrestling show. I would edit the best matches from that month into either music videos or clips and Rocco and I would provide commentary and update people on the story lines. We filmed it in Rocco?s garage and even built a studio back drop to film in front of. In episode one we slipped in a little bit of funny stuff, but stayed mostly serious.

By episode three the show was barely about the wrestling anymore. We had Rocco accidentally kill me during the broadcast and bury me in his flower bed along with the light heavyweight title (This was a reference to the time years earlier when Rocco hooked up with light heavyweight champion Joey Casanova's girlfriend. Joey secretly followed her to Rocco?s and when he saw her car, he threw the belt at Rocco?s house and it landed in the flower bed). I then came back as my cousin Jackson Lee (who wore glasses). Then Rocco accidentally killed him too. Then I came back as my female cousin Sarah Lee. Rocco could not stop hitting on Sarah Lee. Then Jackson and Justin came back as zombies and ate Sarah Lee?s brains while Rocco hid on the roof.

We also had two characters known as the naked luchadores (also Rocco and me wearing only lucha masks and nothing else). We filmed from the waste up and spoke in Spanish and claimed it was the Spanish broadcast of our show. Any excuse we could find we had Russ show up on the show and somehow get shirtless. One time we had a poorly explained infestation of ninjas in the compound. Every segment had a ninja sneaking up and killing someone in the background. One group of ninjas was about to kill C. M. Burnham until eventually Kitty the Hellcat (TPW ring announcer) fought all the ninjas in a slow motion Mortal Kombat-esque fight and saved his life. And we made fun of SRPW as much as we could. If they put any kind of video on their site we immediately stole it and used it on our show somehow. They filmed a segment with Kenny ?Outcast? Campbell where he was on his cell phone calling a trophy shop to have them make a trophy case for the belt he planned on winning the next week. He ended the segment by meating out on the guy on the other end of the phone. So we of course edited the segment by pretending he had called our tornado vision telephone line and we were trying to explain this wasn?t a trophy shop.

One of my favorite segments had Rocco getting a letter from the IRS saying he owed back taxes. He needed to make money fast. In real life at that time Rocco was being sued by Pete Maguire, his former business partner from OPW. Pete lived in a fantasy world where OPW still existed and as soon as the lawsuit was over, the OPW brand was going to live again. He even made a website and sold his officially licensed OPW pictures and videos. This was hilarious because why would anyone want to buy pictures of an indy fed that hadn?t been in existence in over 4 years and that didn't produce anyone famous? So Rocco and I filmed an infomercial where Rocco did his best used car salesman?s pitch to sell his own OPW pictures and videos for outrageous prices.

Another running gag had us ordering pizza all the time. We knew Dexter Hardaway (an SRPW wrestler) was a pizza delivery guy and I did a pretty decent Dexter impression. So we would always film Rocco talking to the Pizza guy without showing the pizza guy's face. It would be me doing my Dexter impression and Rocco saying that I looked familiar.

Some of our stuff was really out there. Rocco had rented a giant chicken suit costume and the chicken (played by Mike Two) randomly showed up to the compound cook out. We partied with the chicken and even did the chicken dance. Then I told Rocco what a great idea he had to hire a giant chicken. He then looked at me and said he didn?t invite the chicken. He thought I did. We then spent all episode trying to chase down this chicken in ?Benny Hill show? fashion. The show ended with a slow motion fight set to dramatic music between Rocco and the chicken. Just as Rocco was down and out during the fight, I inserted a clip of Mickey from Rocky telling him to get up. In slow motion his started to get up as Eye of the Tiger played. He then knocked the chicken down and put him in a chicken wing submission.

The TV show actually outlasted TPW. We still put wrestling clips in the show, but we no longer called the matches or talked about them during the in between segments. We had cameos from everyone in TPW who wanted to show up. Rocco and I always talk about bringing the show back and we have even filmed some stuff that is just sitting on my computer waiting to be edited. I have even put some of the old episodes up on YouTube somewhere.

Editor's note: You can view a newly created "trailer" for a TornadoVision movie, which contains many of the clips Justin references in this column, here