Survivor Series 1987: Fifty Wrestlers, Four Matches, and a Gimmick Worth Keeping

Booking Verdict Grade: A. The first Survivor Series is a seminar in getting useful outcomes without overexposing the people WWF most wants to protect. The opener gives Randy Savage, Jake Roberts and Ricky Steamboat a shared victory while allowing Intercontinental Champion Honky Tonk Man to escape by count-out rather than take the decisive fall. The women's match removes Fabulous Moolah and Sensational Sherri before the finish so the Jumping Bomb Angels can become the final revelation. The twenty-man tag match uses elimination order to create novelty survivors in the Killer Bees and Young Stallions, while established teams such as Strike Force, the Hart Foundation, British Bulldogs and Demolition can all be eliminated without requiring an entire separate feud-ending match.

The main event is even smarter. Hulk Hogan is eliminated by count-out, which is shocking enough to matter and safe enough to preserve him. That leaves Bam Bam Bigelow alone against Bundy, One Man Gang and Andre. Bigelow then eliminates Bundy and Gang, transforming what could have been a predictable Hogan showcase into the biggest individual elevation on the show. Andre finally beats Bigelow and becomes the sole survivor, immediately restoring him as a credible threat after losing to Hogan at WrestleMania III. John Canton correctly identifies the logic: Hogan is protected, Bigelow is made, and Andre leaves strong.

There are smaller blemishes. Honky running away is thematically appropriate but not especially satisfying. The Killer Bees' masked switch in the tag match is babyface cheating presented as cleverness. Hogan returning after the main event to attack Andre with the championship belt gives the crowd its hero pose but also makes Jesse Ventura's complaint difficult to refute: Hogan lost, then came back to assault the winner and reclaim the spotlight. Still, the overall booking is excellent because almost every elimination either pays off a feud, protects a star, creates a future challenger or changes the numbers in a way that makes the next five minutes more interesting.

Crowd & Presentation Grade: B+. The Richfield Coliseum audience is hot enough to make the elimination format understandable even before viewers fully learn the rules. Howard Finkel announces the survivors, Gorilla Monsoon and Jesse Ventura constantly restate the numerical situation, and the camera direction generally understands that the important visual is not just who is wrestling but who remains on each apron. That matters enormously in matches with ten or twenty participants. Without that scoreboard-like clarity, the show could have become three hours of people tagging in and out until somebody found the exit.

Monsoon and Ventura are especially useful in the main event. Hogan's count-out creates real confusion and anger in the arena, and Ventura immediately frames Hogan's post-match return as sore-loser behavior while Monsoon continues defending the champion. Their disagreement adds a second layer to the finish without preventing the audience from understanding the official result. The show also benefits from the novelty of the format. Every elimination receives a reaction because the crowd has not yet watched decades of Survivor Series teams slowly dissolve on Thanksgiving weekend.

The pacing is the obvious challenge. A four-match card sounds compact until one match runs twenty-three minutes, another twenty, the tag-team match lasts more than thirty-seven, and the main event goes another twenty-four. There are stretches where the elimination concept becomes less urgent, particularly in the women's bout before the Jumping Bomb Angels take over and in the center of the twenty-man tag. Yet the production rarely feels confused, which is an accomplishment given the number of wrestlers, managers and simultaneous feuds sharing the screen. The visual presentation cannot match WrestleMania III's scale, but Survivor Series does something more practical: it makes a brand-new rule set easy to follow on the first attempt.

Historical Significance Grade: A. The inaugural Survivor Series is one of WWF's foundational expansion events. It created a November tentpole that became an annual institution and eventually one of the company's traditional major events alongside WrestleMania, Royal Rumble and SummerSlam. WWE itself continues to treat 1987 as the origin of the Survivor Series tradition, and the basic elimination concept introduced here remained the event's defining identity for decades even as the surrounding card structure changed.

The event also matters because it demonstrates how WWF converted WrestleMania's success into market leverage. ESPN's historical account describes McMahon threatening cable systems with loss of WrestleMania IV if they carried Starrcade instead of Survivor Series. That move is part of the larger story of WWF's national expansion and the increasingly aggressive competition between McMahon and the NWA/Crockett system. The first Survivor Series is therefore not merely a successful new gimmick. It is evidence of a promotion learning that a blockbuster event could be used to strengthen the distribution of the next one.

Creatively, several threads matter beyond the night itself. Andre's sole-survivor win keeps the Hogan rivalry alive and feeds toward their February 1988 championship rematch. Savage's popularity is obvious months before his WWF Championship victory at WrestleMania IV. Bam Bam Bigelow receives perhaps the best showcase of his early WWF run. The Jumping Bomb Angels expose a mainstream WWF audience to a faster women's style that feels years ahead of much of the division around them. And the tag-team elimination match provides a blueprint for one of Survivor Series' best recurring pleasures: putting an absurd amount of talent into one match and letting the numbers create stories that ordinary tag wrestling cannot.