Don’t (or Do) believe the hype

As WordPress continues to recycle old prompts, I pulled another prompt from The Coffee Monsterz Co to respond to today

What has been worth the hype, and what has been overhyped?

What do you call it hype, or buzz, or in digital media terms, going viral, hype has been an important marketing tool and pretty much every walk of life.

Movie studios release “teaser trailers“ to get audience is excited about an upcoming movie. In professional wrestling, the WWF used to be very good at producing multiple vignettes in introducing a new wrestler, so that the fans would be excited the moment the first appeared on television.

In my opinion, too much hype can be a bad thing. . And when somebody comes in to a situation with too much hype, it’s very difficult to live up to those expectations. For me, LeBron James’s professional, basketball career is something that has been overhyped.

The King of Hype

I know I’m gonna get crucified for that. LeBron James is a great basketball player. He’s probably the best player of this generation. But the height for machine for LeBron James started before he even graduated from high school. I don’t know if some of you were old enough to remember, but his last few high school basketball games were being broadcast on ESPN. People were calling him, King James before he even set foot on an NBA court. People were calling him the next Michael Jordan or the “heir apparent“.

But I don’t blame LeBron James personally. Given all of his business endeavors outside of basketball, he seems like a pretty good guy. And the truth is, anybody who comes into a situation with that much hype surrounding them ends up it very, very difficult to live up to it. At this point, LeBron could win 10 straight NBA Championships, and he will never live up to the hype that surrounded hos arrival in the NBA.

A New Beginning

Personally, there’s nothing I like more than when something completely exceeds my expectations.

Back in 2005 when the movie Batman Begins was about to premiere, the Batman movie franchise was essentially dead. While the movie was a box off his head, 1997 Batman and Robin left a bad taste in the mouth of a lot of fans of the Batman franchise. I know for me personally, it was the closest I’d come to walking out of a movie theater in 20 years. In fact, years later on the subsequent DVD and blu ray releases of the movie, both star George Clooney, and director Joel Schumacher would apologize for “killing the franchise“

So when Batman Begins premiered with a decent amount of marketing, but not a lot of buzz behind it, expectations were kept admittedly low. Personally, I was completely blown away by Christian Bales, portrayal of the Dark Knight and Director Christopher Nolan’s vision of Gotham city.

Nolan sent out to create an incredibly grounded in reality comic book movie. Gone worthy nightmare city scapes of Gotham City that looked like something straight out of a comic book. Real world cities stood in for Nolan‘s version of Gotham. And as a movie unfolds, we see the methods in which Bruce Wayne built up both himself and Batman’s arsenal. Watching that movie you would think to yourself “OK, maybe somebody could do this with enough money and enough motivation”. This was a far cry from the oversized cod pieces in bat nipples that we saw in both 1995’s Batman Forever and Batman and Robin. And for the record, …Forever sucked just as much as B&R did. But most people still aren’t ready for that conversation .

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