This time of year always brings me memories of Thanksgiving. Of course, there are all the memories of gathering with my family through the year but November and Thanksgiving also bring up my memories of Survivor Series.
Survivor Series is special to me because back when I was first becoming a fan, one of the events I saw was renting (Renting a VHS tape how old school is that?) of the 1988 edition of the Survivor Series. Hulk Hogan and Randy Savage captained a team facing down a fivesome captained by The Big Bossman and Akeem, The Ultimate Warrior and Brutus “The Barber” Beefcake captained a team against a team captained by Ron Bass and The Honky Tonk Man, Jake “The Snake” Roberts and “Hacksaw” Jim Duggan captained a team against a team led by Dino Bravo and Andre the Giant, and the big tag teams match with Demolition leading their team against the team captained by the Powers of Pain. All the big names were there beating on each other!
The event was marginally good and the video made it even worse by taking the first and second matches and switching them around and cutting the hell out of the mid-card singles matches, but I didn’t know how much editing was done let alone just how much the show was crap at the time. I loved it then and despite all that, I still love that event. I had an old VHS copy of the show for years until a got the pay per view unedited version on DVD before the WWE released the WWE Network version online. Sure some of the music is dubbed over and different and there is some minor Blurring (The back of Koko B. Ware’s tights being the big example) but those things are minor to me. It is still better than the Coliseum video edits.
It took me years to figure out who Scott Casey actually was but I became a fan of the Conquistadors or Jim Brunzell because of that event. Besides the people, I became a fan of the 5 on 5 Survivor Series matches because if this event. Boy did it break my heart when the next year in 1989 the WWF went to 4 on 4 elimination matches and got rid of that big matches with all the tag teams. Looking back though I get it, they didn’t have enough tag teams to do a match like that in 1989 and looking at all the names that had left the WWF, it was unavoidable that people like The Red Rooster or Koko B Ware were in the main event pf that show. Hulk Hogan had to pin someone during the match.
Nowadays the WWE doesn’t keep things like that strait from year to year. Sometimes the matches and 4 on 4 and sometimes 5 on 5. Teams are formed under a captain and are usually just thrown together by who wins a match to get onto a team. There are a lot more singles and nonelimination matches on the show and honestly, I don’t pay nearly as much attention to those matches as I did for the elimination matches back then. The first five Survivor Series shows were the best ones for me.
But like a lot of things in life, there has been a lot of changes since Thanksgiving night of 1988. While I could sit here and complain that things aren’t like they were then, It is probably better that they are different. I don’t know about any of you but I’m not clamoring for another main event with The Red Rooster and Koko B. Ware.
