I'm just re watching EF 4 again now. Mas, don't waste your time watching EF 2, it's a bunch of squash matches, though it is noteworthy for featuring Carlos Newton's pro debut in a freak show fight.
Do you guys remember the story behind EF 2? It was an event that almost didn't come off but the fact that it did had enormous negative consequences for mma in Canada, It was originally booked for a location in New York state but by early '96 politicians and media had honed in on nhb/mma as an easy target for consequence free political grandstanding and moralizing and state after state was moving to ban the events. The furor surrounding the event in NY, Buffalo I believe was the site, saw this event shut down at the last moment and scrambling to find a venue.
In stepped the Kahnawake Mohawk tribal council in Quebec to save the day, or so it seemed. Quebec authorities were threatening to send in the provincial police to shut the event down if they went ahead with it, it became a native sovereignty issue with one of Canada's most militant tribes overtop of the whole mma controversy and media freaked out across the country.
Well, the event was disastrous on a couple fronts. Fighters were detained at the border or spooked by the media storm and the threats by the Quebec authorities and didn't arrive to fight, forcing matchmaker John Peretti to cobble together a skeleton card of non competitive matches at the last minute, making for an awful event. Secondly, the Quebec police moved in and arrested people involved in the event, including Peretti, his broadcast partner Dave Bontempo, and the fighters that competed that night.
Finally, the national frenzy of moral posturing by politicians and media, the fake outrage and virtue signaling we're all accustomed to here in Canada, led to an outright ban of live mma broadcasts in Canada accross all platforms from early 1996 until late 1998. Unlike the US ban, which came later and lasted until 2001, the Canadian ban affected both cable and satellite ppv delivery systems, total censorship of live mma events, whereas the US ban was the death by a thousand cuts of the cable companies opting under political pressure to drop the events, while the satellite services continued to carry the live ppv broadcasts. This resulted in vastly shrunken ppv revenue for the events and led to UFC being unable to maintain it's stable of fighters into the early 2000s as Pride scooped just about everyone up.
As for myself, I found a way around the ban by hooking Dish Network up at a family cottage in Birch Bay Washington, just across the border from Vancouver and was able to watch most of the events live with my buddies in the heyday when mma mattered to me. A few times I ducked across and watched events in Point Roberts or Blaine in bars. Six months to year later the events would finally appear in vhs format in Canadian video stores. Ah. those were the days eh