That Was Then 11.14.07: Looking Back At Survivor Series 1999 & 2000

With the excitement of the Montreal Incident in 1997 and the big WWF Title Tournament in 1998 behind them, it was back to business as usual with the 1999 and 2000 editions of the Survivor Series.

Survivor Series 1999

The final Survivor Series of the 20th century was one of the few from that point on that really stayed at all faithful to the elimination match format, but even as it was a lot of the drama and storyline build that had gone into these matches in previous years was absent. That said, the singles matches they ran with in between the elimination matches were mostly pretty intriguing and all had a fair amount of storyline build behind them.

The show opened with the Acolytes and the Dudley Boyz teaming against the Godfather, D’Lo Brown, and the Headbangers. To show their team unity, the Godfather’s team all came out in pimp outfits, and contrary to that, the Acolytes and Dudleyz were not at all on the same page. The angle there was that the Acolytes had run Public Enemy out of the WWF a year or so earlier (when Public Enemy legit had bad backstage heat and were cut almost immediately), and now they had this other team from ECW stinking up the place. In the end, it was that lack of unity that led to the team’s downfall, as they would fight one another and the brawl between the two teams would go back to the locker room until Bubba was left all by himself and was defeated by Godfather and D’Lo. Godfather and D’Lo would go on to form a team over the next few months as a kind of Pimp and Pimp Jr deal.

The second match featured Kurt Angle’s TV debut as he faced Shawn Stasiak. It’s pretty funny to go back and see that Angle had almost no heat here. He picked up the win with the as yet unnamed Angle slam, and then we got another elimination match with Val Venis, Gangrel, Mark Henry, and Steve Blackman taking on Davey Boy Smith and the Mean Street Posse. These teams were both really weird and there was absolutely zero explanation as to how either of them came together, especially since Venis’s team mixed faces and heels. Anyway, the Mean Street Posse got eliminated one by one until Davey Boy was left 4-on-1, and he came back and eliminated Gangrel and Blackman, but ended up falling to the Money Shot, giving Val and Mark Henry the win. Following that, we got a completely useless match featuring Mae Young, the recently deceased Fabulous Moolah, Tori, and Debra against Ivory, Terri, Luna Vachon, and Jackie. Though it was 4-on-4, it was not an elimination match, presumably because most of the people in this match didn’t know how to wrestle, and some of the ones who did were too old to go very long. The match went all of about three minutes, tops, before Moolah pinned Ivory to win the match for her team.

Back to something halfway sensical as X-Pac took on Kane. These two had been teaming for much of 1999, with X-Pac being the only one who was willing to show friendship to the horribly scarred Kane, who was too paranoid to trust anyone. Finally they made friends and won the WWF Tag Team Title, and then X-Pac turned on him. There’s your Vince Russo storytelling. On top of that, X-Pac stole Kane’s girlfriend Tori and revealed to the world that Kane was impotent thanks to the fire he had been in as a child. Tori apparently is a lot more satisfied with X-Pac’s unit, and I know there’s a joke about One Night In China in there somewhere, but I just can’t (or won’t) make it right now. Anyway, the match didn’t last long before the rest of DX ran in for the DQ. Remember when the big four PPVs were when feuds were blown off?

Up next, the Big Show goes 4-on-1 against the Big Boss Man, Mideon, Viscera, and Albert. He actually had partners, but kicked their ass before the show for some reason I forgot and ended up going it alone. Anyway, he ran right through Boss Man’s entire team until Boss Man just ran off instead of facing Show. The story here was that Boss Man decided to be the most cruel person in the world to the Big Show, first by getting somebody to dress up as a cop and tell Show his dad died, and then when his dad really did die (in storylines) like a week later, Boss Man crashed the funeral, chained the casket to the back of his car and drove off with it. the Big Show ran after him and jumped on the casket and was dragged away with the casket by Boss Man’s car. Then the week after that, he wrote a poem for Big Show and smashed his father’s watch on an anvil. I swear to god I am not making any of this up. To top things off, Boss Man stopped over Big Show’s mother’s house for lunch and was able to get her to admit that Big Show’s father wasn’t really his father, and then he spent weeks tormenting the Big Show for being a bastard. This was ridiculously over the top, and somehow Boss Man got booked in some really stupid storylines in 1999. Remember when he killed Al Snow’s dog and fed him to Al? It’s really funny to look back on, but at the time everybody was wondering what the fuck Russo was smoking.

The fun continues in our next segment as somebody hits Steve Austin with their car in the parking garage. Seriously, Austin’s neck was acting up on him and he’d need neck fusion surgery and would be out for a year, so in order to write him out of storylines, they decided to have him disappear by having him get hit by a car, the injuries from which would take a year to heal up. Problem was, he was scheduled to work that evening’s main event match for the WWF Title, so since there was no way he’d be able to compete, who would fill in for him?

Instead of getting the answer to that question right away, we next got Chris Jericho challenging Chyna for the IC Title. This was during Chyna’s insane, nonsensical, and totally unwarranted megapush, and even the crowd was totally turning on her through the whole match. Chyna ended up beating Jericho in this match to completely blow the mind of everyone watching who wanted Jericho to beat and fucking humiliate her en route to taking the title, but instead he was made to put her over, though he did do a great job of carrrying her in the process. The next elimination match saw Too Cool and the Hollys taking on the Hardy Boyz, Edge, and Christian. Too Cool and the Hollys won the match when Hardcore Holly pinned Christian, and I guess that seemed okay back then, even though looking back and thinking of any of those guys even being competitive with the Hardyz, Edge, or Christian seems ridiculous today. In the semi-main, the New Age Outlaws successfully defended the WWF World Tag Team Title against Mankind and Al Snow.

Now it’s main event time, as Triple H was scheduled to defend in a triple threat match against Steve Austin and the Rock. However, if you’ve been paying attention you’ll know that Austin was taken out via vehicular assault earlier in the show, so his announcement is replaced here and it is…the Big Show. This comes as a big surprise to Triple H, and not a pleasant one. The story here was that Triple H was at odds with Vince McMahon, and McMahon vowed that just like the previous two years, somebody was going to get screwed at the Survivor Series. Sure enough, that’s exactly what happened when Vince storms the ring with a chair and wallops Triple H with it, setting him up for a chokeslam from the Big Show for the win and the WWF Title.

Survivor Series 2000

A lot had changed in the WWF by the time Survivor Series 200 rolled around. Most of it revolved around the reasonably large crop of new talent that came on board, including Chris Benoit, Dean Malenko, Eddy Guerrero, Perry Saturn, K-Kwik (Ron Killings), and William Regal. Kurt Angle had won the WWF World Title in his rookie year and was defending here against the Undertaker, and Steve Austin had returned from the injury suffered the previous year and was out for revenge on those responsible.

First, the undercard. The show opened with a six person tag which saw Steve Blackman team with Molly and Crash Holly to defeat Trish Stratus and T&A, and then we got our first elimination match with the Radicalz (Benoit, Guerrero, Malenko, and Saturn) taking on a sort of DX reunion team of Billy Gunn, Road Dogg, Chyna, and K-Kwik. Unfortunately, the “other” DX guys weren’t terribly successful that night, and Billy Gunn wound up 3-on-1 against Benoit, Malenko, and Saturn. He was able to come back and eliminate Malenko with the Fameasser, but Benoit and Saturn ended up putting him away. Chris Jericho took on Kane next in a match that, I kid you not, was signed because Jericho accidentally spilled coffee on Kane. This was played as your typical “big man vs little man” match, and just like 80% of their matches, Kane came out victorious after hitting Jericho with a chokeslam. After that, William Regal successfully defended the European Title against Hardcore Holly when Holly lost it and went after Regal with the belt, drawing the DQ.

Up next was one of the feature matches as the Rock took on Rikishi. This match stemmed from the Steve Austin Car Incident from the previous year’s Survivor Series as Rikishi, who had been playing the part of the cool fat guy with a big ass who dances and everybody loves him, was exposed by Mick Foley as the man who was driving the car who hit Austin. Though it turns out that he wasn’t the mastermind (more on that later), his motive was that Austin got the title because he was a white guy and Rikishi’s Samoan family had always been held down. This, of course, flatly contradicted the fact that two of his cousins, Yokozuna and the Rock, both won the WWF Title, and in fact it was Rock who eventually told Rikishi that he was full of shit. Rikishi gave him the standard “with me or against me” warning, but Rock wouldn’t go along with Rikishi, so Rikishi stomped out Rock and led to this match. Rock won with the People’s Elbow, but Rikishi attacked him after the match and hit four Banzai Drops.

Up next, we saw Ivory defeat Lita to retain the WWF Women’s Title, and then Jericho attacked Kane backstage to add more fuel to that feud, and then we got Kurt Angle’s first major WWF Title defense after winning the title the month before, as he defended against the Undertaker. Though he was in no way portrayed as a jobber, this was well before Angle was somebody who was taken seriously as somebody who could legitimately hang with guys like the Undertaker, and in fact he was sort of seen as being lucky to even have the title, and pretty much everyone knew he was only holding it until either Rock or Austin got it back. But first was this match with the Undertaker, who had defeated him on PPV the previous July and was ready to win his fourth World Title here. They recycled the Doink angle here when Angle headed under the ring, and Undertaker pulled him out and threw him back in the ring and gave him the Last Ride, only it turned out that it wasn’t actually Angle but his brother Eric. The real Kurt Angle snuck back in the ring and rolled Undertaker up for the win, and for the fourth year in a row now, somebody had been screwed in the WWF Title match. Eric did end up getting signed to a developmental contract, but he never was called up except for redoing this angle yet again with Brock Lesnar in 2003, and eventually was dropped and I don’t believe he ever resurfaced in pro wrestling since.

Back to the elimination matches, as the neverending Dudleyz-Hardyz-Edge & Christian feud continued here with the Dudleyz and Hardyz teaming up to face Edge, Christian, and RTC members Bull Buchanan and the Goodfather. This was really just the latest in a long-running series, and was won by Jeff Hardy when he beat both Christian and the Goodfather by himself to win. After that, it’s time for the main event as Steve Austin took on Triple H in a no DQ match. So to finish up our little Rikishi story from earlier, it turns out that even though Rikishi was driving the car that hit Austin, he wasn’t the mastermind, that turned out to be Triple H after all, which everybody pretty much suspected from the start, and that led to this match. Standard Attitude Era Steve Austin brawl all over the arena and into the back where the Radicalz jumped Austin while Triple H tried to get in his car and get out of Dodge. Austin went through all the Radicalz and got his revenge on Triple H by getting in a forklift, picking up Triple H’s car with Triple H inside, and dropping it from about 15 feet. End of show. Obviously this would cause quite a lot of harm to your average human being, but in true Wile E Coyote fashion, Triple H was back with nary a scratch the following night on Raw.

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I have to be honest, both of these shows felt kind of slapped together with no real build or anything, and both shows felt more like an afterthought than anything, as if they realized they had to put something together since they had a PPV that month. It’s like it is now except we felt like they cared back then. Anyway, I just realized that there’s like days left before Survivor Series, so expect the rest of these columns to come at a somewhat rapid pace. See you soon and thanks for reading.