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Survivor Series 1999, which took place in Detroit, Michigan, was deep into the Attitude Era, and you can see a lot of evidence in this show that the WWF was slowly but surely moving away from wrestling and more into an entertainment product.
The Undercard
The show opened with the team of the Dudley Boyz and the Acolytes taking on the Godfather and his team of junior pimps, D-Lo Brown and the Headbangers. One of the stories being focused on here was that the Acolytes had run Public Enemy out of the WWF earlier in the year (Public Enemy legitimately made a bad impression backstage and were shown the door very quickly), and now they were stuck teaming with another team from ECW, which they weren’t too happy about. Anyway, the Headbangers got brushed out pretty quickly, but then the heel team blew up because Bradshaw came in and started swinging a chair to get himself disqualified, then turned around and laid Bubba out with the chair. This led to D-Von and Faarooq brawling with each other and getting counted out, leaving Bubba all by himself. He fought valiantly, but ended up going down in defeat. This led to Godfather and D-Lo having a run as a pimpin’ tag team, and for the record, Tim White had the best gig in the company at that point because he would have a bunch of hot chicks come start grinding up on him after every Godfather match. How did he get that gig?
Up next, Kurt Angle made his WWF debut against Shawn Stasiak, who was in his post-Meat, pre-backstage espionage period. It’s so funny to see Angle with hair and carrying a lot more muscle mass than he is now. The crowd was just not into this one at all, and they even started chanting for the Red Wings. Kurt tried to get them lit up by getting on the mic and telling them not to boo an Olympic gold medalist, but even that got nothing. Fortunately things would improve quite a bit for Angle in the months to come, but nobody cared about him here. Angle put him away with the Angle Slam.
Up next was the British Bulldog teaming with the Mean Street Posse against the completely mismatched team of Val Venis, Mark Henry, Gangrel, and Steve Blackman. The Bulldog had recently returned to the WWF after spending quite a bit of time out of action due to injury and being fired by the WWF as a result. This WWF run wouldn’t last more than a few months, but while it lasted he had a short feud with the Rock and also held both the Hardcore Title and European Title. The Mean Street Posse, in the meantime, were legit childhood friends of Shane McMahon who decided to give wrestling a try. Joey Abs was actually a real worker who was brought in to give the group someone who knew how to work, but as I heard from someone who actually knew them back in the day, there was a real Joey Abs who got a bit annoyed when they copped his name for Jason Ahrndt. The Posse didn’t actually look that bad here considering how inexperienced they were, and I thought they had some potential if their careers didn’t end up being so short.
As for the match itself, it was okay, Venis’ team went through the Posse and left the Bulldog 4-on-1. Davey Boy took a really nasty bump off a backdrop, but toughed it out and came back to eliminate Gangrel and Blackman, but ended up taking a splash from Mark Henry and Venis finished him with the Money Shot for the win. Another one of those classic Survivor Series matches where they take eight guys they have nothing else to do with and throw them together to fill time.
After Michael Cole walks into the women’s locker room and has Ivory offer to let him oil her up, we get an eight women, non-elimination tag match with the Fabulous Moolah, Mae Young, Tori (not Torrie Wilson, this Tori was the one that stalked Sable and dated Kane), and Debra “The Leech†Marshall/McMichael/Williams/Jagger/Reznor/Bon Jovi taking on Jacqueline, Luna, Terri (who had zero wrestling experience or skill), and WWF Women’s Champion Ivory. With names like this, I can assure you that the less said about this match the better, but the highlight was the crowd chanting “we want puppiesâ€, which pretty much tells you all you need to know about how women were portrayed in the WWF at this point. Anyway, to cut to the chase, Moolah pinned Ivory after less than two minutes, then a catfight broke out where Terri got her top ripped off, which didn’t appear to bother her at all. I have no idea why Dusty wouldn’t like the poor girl.
Up next was Kane vs X-Pac, as we get the next step in the “X-Pac turned on Kane because he was a retard, and by the way his penis was burnt off†angle. Another nothing match that only lasted a few minutes before DX ran in for the DQ, but after the match we get storyline advancement when Tori came in to stop the beating and grabbed X-Pac from behind, and X-Pac responded by spin kicking her head off. In case you’re interested in how this angle turned out, Tori ended up leaving Kane for X-Pac because Kane’s penis was nonfunctional due to the fire damage (which flatly contradicts what we’d find out years later when Kane turned out not to be burned at all…I really need to do a column or hotline on Kane’s ridiculous history), and she stayed with DX until getting injured about a year later, and though she briefly returned as a ninja, she ended up getting let got because the WWF now had a hotter girl named Torrie.
Before the next match, Triple H picked a fight with the Rock, which will become important later, but after that we got the Big Show going it alone against the Big Boss Man, Albert, Viscera, and Mideon. Where do I start with this one…okay, so Big Boss Man basically decides out of nowhere to start screwing with Big Show’s mind, and gets a fake cop to tell him that his father died. Turns out he didn’t, but he really did (in storylines) a couple of weeks later, and at the funeral the Big Boss Man showed up in an old style, Dukes of Hazzard-esque cop car, yelling over the loudspeaker about how much he hated Big Show and his dead daddy, then he hit Show with the car (which I’ll get back to again later), then hooked up daddy’s casket to the back of the car with a chain and dragged it away, but not before Big Show recovered from the vehicular assault, chased Boss Man’s car, and jumped onto the casket and surfed away on it in much the same way kids will tie a string to the back of their bike so they can pull their friends around while they sit on a skateboard. After Big Show’s dad gets a decent burial, Boss Man reads Big Show a poem on Monday Night Raw (If I had a son/as stupid as you/I’d have wished for cancer/so I would die too) and then smashed his father’s antique watch that had been passed through the family for generations with a hammer and anvil. From there, Boss Man catches up with Big Show’s mother, who he gets to reveal that Big Show was born out of wedlock, therefore making him a bastard. Boss Man then went around saying bastard on TV more times over the two month course of this angle than I think it’s ever been said in the entire rest of TV history combined.
So all this leads us to Survivor Series where Big Show beat the crap out of his entire team in a rage backstage and came out to face Boss Man’s team by himself. Being lonely apparently wasn’t an issue, because he went through Mideon, Albert, and Viscera (including bodyslamming him in convincing fashion) in under a minute, chokeslamming them all, and then the Boss Man decided that discretion was the better part of valor and hightailed it to the locker room and got counted out. If it seems like Big Show had too easy a night…well, we’ll see him again later.
The last of this year’s elimination matches pitted Edge, Christian, and the Hardy Boyz against the Holly Cousins and Too Cool. This was very early on in Too Cool’s run, and they had actually started out as goofball heels, almost like a Saturday morning cartoon version of Public Enemy’s white hoodie gimmick. Crash Holly had also just recently come to the WWF and started doing the feuding cousins gimmick with Hardcore. As for Edge & Christian and the Hardyz, this was one month after the infamous ladder match that put both teams on the map, and had led to a mutual respect between the four men, which then led to this match. Edge is way skinnier here than he is now, and it was a gradual growth so you don’t really notice it as much as time goes by, but when you compare Edge now to Edge then you really notice the difference. Not much story to this match, so I’ll just quickly recap: miscommunication led to both Edge and Matt being eliminated in quick succession, and Jeff came back to eliminate Scotty 2 Hotty, but then was eliminated himself by Grandmaster Sexay, leaving Christian 3-on-1 against Sexay and the Hollys. Christian was able to get through Sexay and then Crash, but when he went for a victory roll on Hardcore, Hardcore did the Owen Hart reversal for the win.
Next up is a Tag Team Title match, as defending champions the New Age Outlaws take on Mankind and Al Snow. The Outlaws and Mankind & Snow had recently swapped the title back and forth, so this was the blowoff to that mini-feud. It’s amazing how crazy over Foley was at this point, especially in the wake of the release of his first book, which had been out for about a month by this point. Prior to that, nobody really did wrestling books because nobody thought wrestling fans read, but it ended up selling like hotcakes and led to every wrestler from the Rock down to Chyna getting a book. Sadly, Foley’s popularity has steadily declined since then until he turned into the parody of himself you see on TNA today. Foley’s a lot like that guy we all know from high school who never went on to do anything with his life and ended up stuck in the same town and spending a lot of time hanging around at his old high school. It’s fine for the first few years while there were still people there that he knew, but eventually they all graduate too and then he becomes this weird, pathetic old guy who’s just hanging around creeping the other kids out, telling them stories about people they don’t know, and desperately trying to cling to a time when he meant something instead of being forced to face up to the fact that he’s now older and getting to an age he never thought he’d reach.
Also around this time was the Al Snow/Walmart/action figure incident which, for those who don’t know, there was an action figure around this time of Al Snow and Head came as an accessory. Some bored housewife somewhere saw this and somehow construed it as promoting violence against women, and she called up the head corporate office for the entire company to complain about it, and she ended up getting Walmart to yank the action figure from the shelves of every Walmart in the country. Remember this, kids, what you say doesn’t even need to have any basis in reality, if you look sound pissed off enough when you make up problems, you can get any corporation in the country to do your bidding. Sadly, the match itself wasn’t as interesting as the exploits of its participants, and the Outlaws picked up the clean win after only a few minutes with a spike piledriver.
The Highlights
The first of the two key matches on this show was Chris Jericho challenging Chyna for the Intercontinental Title. Chyna had won the title from Jeff Jarrett a month earlier when she beat Jarrett in the infamous Housekeeping Match that marked the last time anyone will probably ever see Jeff Jarrett in a WWE ring. Jericho, in the meantime, had just recently jumped to the WWF from WCW in what was considered a pretty big deal at the time, and this would be his first major test on a PPV. Jericho was so confident of victory that he vowed he would get a sex change if he lost to Chyna. Chyna, in the meantime was seconded by her Mini-Me, aka Miss Kitty, who you might remember as being briefly married to Jerry Lawler before she was fired and nearly killed Lawler’s career when he followed her out the door, only to have her file for divorce like a week later. Sensing a pattern with some of these on-screen wrestling wives on this show?
Just as a personal aside, it’s one thing if you insist on giving Chyna a push with a men’s title. I personally think somebody like Awesome Kong would be more believable in a role like that, but if that’s what you want to do, then fine. But I never understood why they continued insisting on trying to push her as some kind of hottie that all the male wrestlers were horny for. You think the wrestlers have to swallow their pride a lot these days? Okay, now imagine being Mark Henry and having to talk about what a fine piece she is, or worse, being Eddy Guerrero and being booked to do a love and marriage angle with her. You wanna talk about paying your dues?
Anyway, as for the match itself, Chyna remarkably kept up with Jericho pretty well. Jericho did at one point kick out of the Pedigree (which is surely what prompted his years of burials at the hands of Triple H), but Chyna then finished him with a top rope Pedigree. Again, reality check time: you think WWE humbling their new guys by making them look at the lights to far less worthy opponents is a new thing? Oh young Jedi, how little you know. And for anyone who was wondering, Chris Jericho never did go through with the sex change idea, which I find quite surprising as I would have expected weeks of vignettes about it. Poor Chris.
Finally, we get to the big angle and main event of the evening, which was originally scheduled to be WWF Champion Triple H defending in a triple threat match against Steve Austin and the Rock. Unfortunately, Steve Austin’s neck, which had been broken in a match with Owen Hart a couple of years earlier, was really starting to cause him major problems, and it was discovered that there were bone spurs poking against his spinal cord, and the decision was immediately made to take him out of action. Austin would have to go in for neck fusion surgery, which would unfortunately become pretty popular over the next few years, and would not be able to wrestle at Survivor Series even though he was advertised as wrestling leading up to the show and even as the PPV began, the audience at large assumed that Austin would be wrestling.
Unfortunately, he wouldn’t be, and they had to come up with some way to explain why he not only wouldn’t be able to wrestle that night, but would be out of action for most of the next year. What ended up happening was they had Triple H attack Austin during a backstage interview as he had done with the Rock earlier in the night, but this time Triple H took off running and Austin chased him all through the backstage area. Austin ended up chasing Triple H into a parking garage, but instead of finding Triple H in there, he found somebody waiting in a running car who proceeded to ram the car into a stuntman dressed like Austin. The car sped away, and Austin felt so bad for the stuntman that he ended up collapsing as well, and soon the McMahon family and Jim Ross were all back in the garage attending to him. Triple H showed up with DX and claimed that DX was going to attack Austin, but he had no part in this.
After Austin was taken out in an ambulance, Triple H found Shane McMahon backstage and asked if this meant it would now just be a one-on-one match with the Rock, but Shane said no, it would still be a triple threat and the third participant would be announced at match time, and that third participant eventually was revealed to be none other than…the Big Show. This was a strange pick because Big Show had not been anywhere near the title picture for as long as he’d been in the company, and the fans didn’t really react to him. I think also lost on much of the audience was that Austin was hit by a car and would be out for almost a full year, while in the meantime Big Show was hit by the Boss Man’s Bluesmobile at his father’s funeral and was up and casket surfing by the end of the segment. This goes right up there with him falling off the roof of Cobo Hall at Halloween Havoc and coming back 15 minutes later to wrestle Hogan. Le sigh.
Anyway, the fans may not have reacted much to Big Show, but they were definitely solidly behind the Rock. Right away they went to the standard ten minute brawl on the outside of the ring that happened in the main event of every WWF PPV back in those days. Rock and Triple H did get one cool spot when they double suplexed the Big Show through a table at ringside. The ref ended up getting bumped, bringing out Shane McMahon to referee, but Triple H put him out with the Pedigree. DX ran out to attack Rock and the Big Show, but Big Show fought them all off, and then Vince McMahon came out and hit Triple H with the WWF Title belt, allowing Big Show to chokeslam him for the win and the WWF Title, becoming only the seventh man to hold both the WWF and NWA/WCW World Titles.
Final Analysis
As goofy as a lot of this stuff sounds when you read it, and even though the wrestling wasn’t that great, and even though they did a bait and switch in the main event, I really didn’t care because this was a really fun show to watch. In fact, the WWF in general was just fun to watch back then and that’s why so many people watched it, and that’s a major difference between then and now, because they did just as many dumb things back then, but there was a lot of fun and personality thrown in, and today’s shows just aren’t as much fun to watch, in large part because nobody’s allowed to have any personality, and it’s that fun factor that’s the difference.
Anyway, that’s Survivor Series 1999, I’ll be back soon with the millennium edition: Survivor Series 2000. Until then, thanks for reading and as always, feedback can be sent to stupwinsider@yahoo.com. Take care, everybody!
