One week prior to the 1995 Halloween Havoc was In Your House 4 on October 22. This event, which was fairly indicative of WWF pay-per-views, had the classic In Your House porch set, with no ramp and no Titantron. It was quite a modest set in comparison to WWE’s Raw sets only a year later, and far from the smoke filled sets and rooftop stunt shows going on in Detroit the next week. But this was the difference seen by fans in 1995: match-based PPV’s with colorful characters and silly “family-friendly” storylines, but little major eye-grabbing spectacle. Vince’s pockets did not run nearly as deep as Ted Turner’s at this time, and it showed. This In Your House was co-headlined by matches between Diesel versus British Bulldog and Razor Ramon against Dean Douglas. Thinking that only 7 months later, on the May 27th, 1996 episode of Nitro, Scott Hall would walk into the ring and ostensibly begin the New World Order, forever changing the wrestling landscape both in front of, and behind the cameras, makes these matches seem insignificant. And that Hulk Hogan would join the Outsiders and become Hollywood Hogan on July 7, only 9 months removed from the sumo match, perhaps is why this event is often forgotten as the “Once In a Lifetime” event it was said to be at the time.

It would be three and half years until the WWF would respond in kind to having a monster truck play center stage in a main event storyline. Monster trucks, however, were being used as advertisement for WWF and WCW in the intervening years. Trucks with wrestler themed bodies were widespread and seemed to be quite popular during both the “New Generation” and “Attitude” eras. Trucks featured Shawn Michaels, the Undertaker, Bret Hart, and later D-Generation X, The Rock, The Brothers of Destruction, and there was even an ECW truck! But none would become as memorable as the Austin 3:16 truck, driven by Stone Cold Steve Austin on the April 19, 1999 episode of Monday Night Raw.

The wrestling world that the Raw segment from April '99 took place in was quite different from the one of Havoc '95. We’re fully entrenched in the Monday Night War. Nitro had been beating Raw in the ratings battle which saw an average of 10 millions fans watching wrestling each Monday night. Prior to this episode of Raw, on January 4, Tony Schiavone would give away the results to Raw proclaiming, “That’ll put some butts in the seats,” in reference to Mankind winning the WWF Championship from The Rock, thus shifting the focus away from Nitro and back to Raw. What Vince and the WWF would do with the bigger spotlight would come to dominate the way Raw did business: huge “TV moments” that would get fans salivating to see the culmination of feuds on PPV’s. The most indelible of those moments featured Stone Cold Steve Austin driving any and all large vehicles and causing general mayhem. In April, we would see Austin driving an Austin 3:16 monster truck, and unlike during Havoc, the WWF played to the truck’s strengths. Instead of having a big budget stunt show on a roof with no audience in sight, that night’s Raw audience would be front and center in seeing Stone Cold flatten not only the Rock’s new Lincoln Town Car in the parking lot in a pre-taped segment on the Titantron, but then Austin would drive the truck live into the arena and flatten the hearse that Rock had set up for the “Steve Austin funeral” segment taking place in the ring and near the stage.