Assignment 1-4 Weekly Written Analysis

            Popular culture surrounds everyone every day. In fact one cannot sit down to watch television without being bombarded with image about popular culture. Sitting down to watch television with my dad one night is where I got the idea for this week’s analysis of popular culture. My dad is a big fan of the History Channel and on this particular evening we sat down to watch a show called Stan Lee’s Superhumans. The show is hosted by Stan Lee a popular comic book creator and Daniel Browning Smith “the most flexible man in the world”. The show is about a man searching the world for human beings that have superior abilities. The show features such people as the Rubber Band Man, the Human Calculator, Quick Draw, and Ultra Marathon Man (History.com, 2010).

            Human beings have always been fascinated by oddities in fellow human beings. Thus, why the “Freak Shows” or “Side Shows” of the mid 1900s were so popular. The fascination with those who possess exceptionally unique abilities is what led, in part, to the creation of the Guinness World Records organization. The organization had its own show on FOX starting in 1998 (Guinness World Records, 2010). The Stan Lee’s Superhumans is the next in the line of shows to feature people with exceptional abilities.

            According to Michael Petracca and Madeleine Sorapure, authors of Common Culture: Reading and Writing About American Popular Culture, “television’s greatest benefit is its potential to broaden our experience, to bring us to places we could never visit, to people we could never meet, and to a range of ideas otherwise unavailable to many people” (2007, p.144). The show Stan Lee’s Superhumans covers a unique niche in television programming. The show allows the viewer the opportunity to see people with unique abilities that the viewer would not normally be able to see.

Resources

Guinness World Records. 2010. TV: Bringing record-breaking to life. Retrieved September 30, 2010, from http://corporate.guinnessworldrecords.com/tv_main.aspx

History.com. 2010. Stan Lee’s Superhumans. Retrieved on September 30, 2010, from http://www.history.com/shows/stan-lees-superhumans

Petra cca, M. & Sorapure, M. (2007). Common culture: Reading and writing about American popular culture. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.