Sports entertainment
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Sports entertainment is a type of spectacle which presents an ostensibly competitive event using a high level of theatrical flourish and extravagant presentation, with the purpose of entertaining an audience. Unlike typical athletics and games, which are conducted for competition, sportsmanship, exercise or personal recreation, the primary product of sports entertainment is performance for an audience's benefit, thus they are never practiced privately. Commonly, but not in all cases, the outcomes are predetermined (such cases are not considered to be fixed, however, as it is an open secret). Events which fall under the classification of sports entertainment are widely considered to be low brow forms of entertainment.[1]
Some sports entertainment events are forms of actual sports, such as exhibition basketball with the Harlem Globetrotters association. Others are modifications of sport for entertainment purposes: many types of professional wrestling, which derived from traditional wrestling, and roller derby, derived from roller skating. Some take activities that are commonplace and make a competition out of them, such as competitive eating.
Some forms of sports entertainment involve taking competitive games which are usually considered minor, such as dodgeball, poker, or rock-paper-scissors, and televising them with trumped-up theatrics, such as celebrity competitors or elaborate audiovisual packages.
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[edit] Perceptions
Although most sports entertainment is seen as having a niche market, even extremely popular television shows such as Strictly Come Dancing/Dancing With the Stars fall into the genre.
Sports entertainment has a stigma of mindless pop culture, and has been criticized as such in popular media. The film Idiocracy portrays a future where sports entertainment permeates the global culture: the president is an active champion professional wrestler and capital punishment consists of a combination demolition derby, monster truck event and gladiator duel, and is a highly popular television broadcast. Fiction with a dystopian future setting often portrays deadly futuristic games as popular sports entertainment, including the movies Rollerball and The Running Man, video games such as Smash TV and the Twisted Metal series, and the roleplaying game Shadowrun, which features Urban Brawl and Combat Biking.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/sport/wrestling/heyman/article1975272.ece The UK Sun 'Hardy plot was bad business for WWE'. Paul Heyman. 26 Nov 2008. quote: "I made the statement that to mainstream advertisers, WWE fits in the category of 'low brow' and that to them, we'll always be served our Thanksgiving turkey out the back door."
