WWE’s Survivor Series used to look very different from the event that we know this year. Granted, it always took place around Thanksgiving, which is a tradition that they’ve upheld throughout the years, but the annual event was a trademark for the WWE in the same ways as the Royal Rumble and Wrestlemania, while offering a very different twist. With so many events being released on The Network for the WWE, we think it’s time that the Survivor Series swung back to what made it stand out and begin once again diving into the world of giant tag team matches that resulted in a final titanic elimination tournament.
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The Original Survivor Series
The early 1990s saw the Survivor Series taking a format that saw every wrestler, or pretty much every wrestler, being split into teams of four wherein each team would only lose when all of their wrestlers had been submitted or pinned. What made this unique was that if the winning team lost wrestlers, they would continue on without those wrestlers, making for the pay per view to be that much more exciting when you would have underdogs of two taking on a potential team of four.
The Survivor Series that have taken place as of late have had triple tag team matches and even five on five elimination matches, but tailoring the entire night to giant tag team battles with each team having their own unique rosters would be worth revisiting in the future!
More Innovation
This somewhat goes back to a previous article that I had written, “Make Wrestling Weird Again”, where I stressed how originality was necessary to give wrestling a fresh edge for the future. While bringing Survivor Series back to an earlier time might seem like regression, there are currently no events within World Wrestling Entertainment that have a similar structure as it stands. The entirety of Survivor Series, at one point, revolved around the elimination four man tag team battles, with maybe one or two other fights sprinkled in for good measure. Needless to say, the more mixing it up for pay per view events to make them stand apart, the better! Speaking of which…
Set Itself Apart From The Crowd
Wrestlemania is the biggest event of the WWE on a regular basis, the Royal Rumble has thirty men and women battling for supremacy for a shot at the World Championship, and Money In The Bank. With the success of against the grain matches such as Firefly Funhouse and Boneyard Battle, the Survivor Series could be a true unique event in the roster of the many monthly events that make up the entirety of World Wrestling Entertainment.
Bizarre Team Ups
Survivor Series had some WEIRD teams that they brought to the table and I loved every minute of it. The Ultimate Warriors was an insane mixture of the Ultimate Warrior, Jimmy Neidhart, Shawn Michaels, and Marty Jannetty that featured the Warrior literally duct taping them all together in their promo. Nothing will be as insane in wrestling as the Ultimate Warrior, but seeing a mixture of wrestlers that you’ve never seen in a team setting before, fighting against four other wrestlers that are in the same situation would make for a killer event that the WWE could revisit.
The Goobledy Gooker
“So Evan,” you may ask, “Was this article a way for you to just sneak in a Goobledy Gooker reference?” Weeeelllll no, I really do want to see the Survivor Series of yesteryear come back and be incorporated back into the format of the annual pay per view event but I just couldn’t let this article pass by without diving into the absolute insantiy of the Gobbledy Gooker. Mean Gene Oakerland and the other announcers at the WWF at the time had to boost this giant egg for nearly the entirety of that year’s event, only for a monstrous chicken to burst forth.
Everyone starts immediately boo-ing when the Gobbledy Gooker comes out of his egg and while this moment in time isn’t exactly the high point of the WWE, I’ll be damned if you don’t remember the sheer terror of this moment for the rest of your lives.
