Assignment 1-4-5

Extreme Sports and Formulas

Josh Dusenbery

Popular Culture HUMN 240

Professor Hamlin

October 28, 2011

Extreme Sports and Formulas

            When you I think of a formula I either think of a math problem or something that a baby drinks. I recently found that it has another definition. The Merriam-Webster online dictionary has a definition that closely matches the one we learned in this lesson; “customary or set form or method allowing little room for originality”. The example in that I keep seeing is with movies and after thinking about it, it makes sense. It seems that almost all movies of similar genre follow the same pattern. I tried to apply the term formula to the pop culture artifact that I chose, extreme sports, and was not able to do it very easily.

            The closest that I could come to using formulas with extreme sports would have to be with the X Games that ESPN puts on every year. It seems that every year the same people try to out do each other with some crazy trick. This happens in most of the freestyle competitions. The X Games started in 1995 and since then the tricks have become insane especially with the motocross freestyle. Back when they first started a back flip was unheard of and then in 2002 Mike Metzger lands the first every back flip in the competition and everyone when crazy. About four years later Travis Pastrana lands the first double back flip.

            Extreme sports gains popularity mainly due to the extreme adjective. The more crazy the stunt or trick, the more people tune in to watch. It seems like just as I start to get bored watching the tricks they start to promote a new, unseen trick that catches my attention and pulls me back in. So I guess the formula here would be that every year they use a new unseen trick to hype the X Games so that everyone will tune in to watch. This doesn’t quite meet the definition of formula that we are talking about but it’s the best that I could come up with.

Reference

“formula.” 2011. In Merriam-Webster.com.

            Retrieved October 28, 2011, from http://www.merriam-           webster.com/dictionary/formula

X Games. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved October 28, 2011, from       http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Games