10 Things WWE Regrets About Survivor Series
Thanksgiving Turkeys.
Survivor Series is a dead brand - so dead that the most uninteresting and pointless of B-level, late-2000s gimmick pay-per-views is now used as a divisive selling point for it.
The cause of death? One thousand cuts.
Vince McMahon fell sharply out of love with the concept, which was once beautiful in its simplicity. Once that original concept was cast aside, most all revisitations felt like empty gestures. The old Survivor Series bouts married glamorous WWF presentation with exciting in-ring content. The mere sight of a massive ring stuffed with massive megastars used to be an awesome novelty, until the later explosion of multi-man matches - and, in parallel, the steep decline of star power - rendered it a borderline pointless exercise in tokenism.
McMahon, in 2010, even threatened to cancel the "obsolete" tradition - before he realised that the name alone retained a fraction of its currency. In that purely monetary sense, even he must bristle at the mistakes he made to condemn the brand to irrelevance.
Ten of the deepest cuts are presented here for the despair of those with cherished memories of the old VHS tapes - the stars on and their memories of which are literally trapped in amber.
10. The Big Sh*tshow
Steve Austin's broken bump clock stopped ticking a fortnight removed from Survivor Series 1999. The WWF knew, well in advance, that he was in no condition to wrestle - a fact they kept to themselves in order to secure PPV money under false pretences.
This was infuriating carny behaviour, in itself. Fingers penetrated temples yet further when, after a hit and run angle, The Big Show was revealed as Austin's replacement in the would-be classic of a Triple Threat WWF Title main event. It's a miracle brain matter didn't emerge from the cut when Show - out-of-shape, out-of-favour and out-of-the-blue - only went and won the bloody thing.
It's just as well WCW had all but pointed the gun at its own temple in parallel.
The Big Show as WWF Heavyweight Champion was pure, channel-changing sh*t - but the sh*t on the other channel was miles sh*ttier. Viewers tempted to make the switch to Nitro the following Monday were punished with the visual of a Piñata On A Pole match, booked by double agent Vince Russo.