30 years of WWE Survivor Series: Ranking each event

4. Survivor Series 1995

After a couple years of largely forgettable Survivor Series events — go back and look at where 1993 and 1994 are on this list — WWE came back strong with a great show in 1995. If you look at the card as a whole, you might not think that this would have any chance of cracking the top four (the show had Barry Horowitz on it) but this was a fun night all the way around.

Look at the first match. It was 1-2-3 Kid, Dr. Tom Prichard, Rad Radford and Skip taking on Barry Horowitz, Marty Jannetty, Hakushi and Bob Holly. There’s a lot of “WHO?” going on right now but these eight guys went out and put on a show. They knew they needed to get the crowd going and that’s what they did. The same happened in the women’s elimination match that came next. Alundra Blayze was the only real recognizable name in that match and it was so much fun to watch as she got all of the eliminations for her team and Aja Kong got all the eliminations for her team. This was likely going to lead somewhere but a month later, Alundra Blayze showed up on Monday Nitro and threw the WWE Women’s Championship in the trash so that obviously didn’t happen.

Goldust and Bam Bam Bigelow should have had a better match than they did with all of their ability but you’re going to get a bad one on just about every card. The Team Michaels vs. Team Yokozuna match had a fun story to it as teams were picked at random so you had some guys that maybe didn’t like each other having to team up against guys they might like. This was a break from the traditional heel vs. face concept, which Vince didn’t stray from that often back then, and it turned into a fun match. It created some interesting storylines and was a different way of doing things. It proved that Vince was willing to try new things from time to time and that’s never a bad thing.

The main event was Bret Hart vs. Diesel for the WWE Championship and this was better than it had any right to be. This was one of the best matches of Kevin Nash’s career and Bret made him look so good that night. They worked the big man vs. little man thing to near perfection and the cradle finish was beautiful. Not every match has to end with a finisher and this worked great and also turned Diesel back into a heel, which worked much better for him.