10 Fascinating WWE Survivor Series 1991 Facts
The "Gravest Challenge" was a Hulkamania funeral.
In order: 1987 was an all-time classic, 1988 was pretty friggin' great, and 1989 and 1990 were enjoyable in a quaint and basic way. Then we get to 1991, and you can hear the thud from miles away. To call the 1991 Survivor Series a lifelessly bad show would be like calling a corpse dead: you're really just stating the obvious.
The Survivor Series in which The Undertaker defeated Hulk Hogan to become WWE Champion was marred by other factors. For one thing, the entire show felt like a three-hour commercial for an experimental venture called This Tuesday in Texas, which would air six nights after Survivor Series. Most of the show was spent building toward that pay-per-view, as though Survivor Series were merely a go-home episode of Raw.
In conjunction with that, the opportunity to insert a reinstated Randy Savage into injured Sid Justice's place opposite Jake Roberts and his team went unrealized. Instead of completing the obvious dots, Savage's showdown with Roberts was held off until the Tuesday pay-per-view. Rather than fight each other that night, the two mortal enemies each cut promos hyping up their eventual clash. Gripping stuff, yeah.
Survivor Series 1991 could've been so much better, but was instead victimized by a ham-handed attempt at doubling the cash-grab.
Here are ten facts about Survivor Series 1991 you may not have known.
10. It Was The First To Move To Thanksgiving Eve
The 1991 Survivor Series emanated from the Joe Louis Arena in Detroit, MI, and had the distinction of being the first Survivor Series to not take place on Thanksgiving night. Instead, the event took place one evening earlier, on the eve of turkey day.
It's not exactly clear why WWE made the decision to move the event away from Thanksgiving night. It's not like all of the wrestlers got to fly home for the holiday - the roster was split in half, and worked house shows in Canada on Thanksgiving Day. The only three wrestlers that appeared at Survivor Series that didn't wrestle on those shows were Hulk Hogan, Sgt. Slaughter, and Colonel Mustafa (Iron Sheik).
Whatever the case, WWE liked the idea of Thanksgiving Eve Survivor Series so much that they scheduled it as such up through the 1994 edition. As an elementary school kid of the time, lemme tell you just how weird it was to go to school that day, knowing that a big WWE pay-per-view was going to take place that very night.