10 Things You Didn't Know About WWE Saturday Night's Main Event
7. Early Main Events
Ask a wrestling fan which match on a card is the main event and they invariably will answer that it’s the last match of the night, naturally.
However, that’s not how Saturday Night’s Main Event was structured. While WrestleMania and other WWF PPVs in the 80s closed out with a Hulk Hogan WWF Championship defense or other major match, SNME’s biggest match often was the first or second bout to air during the program. Hogan wrestled at each of the first 10 Saturday Night’s Main Events and competed in the first or second match in nine of them.
In many cases, SNME consisted of two high-profile matches to open the show, and then the card ramped down in match strength and significance. In some cases, you could see the audience thinning out as the show wound down.
After all, if fans (in attendance or watching on television) just watched a Hogan title defense and a Randy Savage match, why would they stick around for “main events” like Junkyard Dog versus Pete Doherty (SNME 1), Kamala versus Leaping Lanny Poffo (SNME 7) or Blackjack Mulligan versus Jimmy Jack Funk (SNME 9)?
This likely was tied to the airtime of Saturday Night’s Main Event, which broadcast at 11:30pm on the East Coast. Forcing fans to wait until well after midnight for a Hogan match might not have been the best strategy for audience retention. Even Saturday Night Live famously front-loads its more popular sketches in the first 45 minutes, with the quality typically dropping off as the show reaches the end of its 90 minutes.