Monday, November 10, 2014

In the book, "Steel Chair to the Head," Henry Jenkins excellently depicts wrestling's changes as  his generation has grown up. He says that when he was younger, it was obvious that wrestling was intended for children. He said he had Hulk Hogan vitamins and wrestling figurines and other wrestling franchised merchandise that you would expect for children to have. He then explained that as he grew up, so did wrestling. In his late teens, wrestling became more about sexual references and women in bikinis. It's obvious that MccMahon saw that his large group of loyal followers' interests were changing. Therefore, he changed wrestling with them. This obviously suited Jenkins well because he stayed a fan of wrestling. I think that this type of "growth" can be seen in all of media. When I was young, I remember everyone watching superhero's such as Spider-Man and Superman. Now, there are a lot of movies coming out about the two...and I can't forget Batman!! The Marvel series are at an all time high and these type of movies usually sell out for the premiers. The same principle is used in both scenarios. There's a loyal group of followers who are kids. As they grow up, people change the media that they loved as kids into more adult-aged entertainment. I think they missed out with Pokémon, though. If they could have figured out a way to make Pokémon more entertaining for adults, it would have killed. As a child, everyone around me played Pokémon. Plenty of them still do...

1 comment:

Sam Ford said...

You can certainly see a lot of parallels between pro wrestling and comic book culture. Both are considered outside the cultural mainstream (traditionally) yet are also very popular. Both presume their audiences as young men, despite the fact that their fan base is much more diversified than that. The WWE and the Marvel and DC story worlds also don't have an off-season; go on indefinitely; have a wide range of larger-than-life characters who filter in an out of the "universe;" rely on fans to help piece together the continuity and the history of the characters and play often on that history and mythology; etc. WWE even calls their fans the "WWE universe." So I think there's a whole lot to this particular analogy, Marshall.