Chapter 2 Response

Reading chapter 2 of Spreadable Media, I was reminded of the way that one of my best friends from high school collects baseball memorabilia. He and I used to travel to swap-meets and other functions to find autographed cards or bats. His entire basement is filled, wall-to-wall, with the products of our journeys. The way that collectors ascribe value to items is really interesting when you think of the actual market value of the raw materials used to produce these items. For example, the billet from which a maple bat is spun costs less than a dollar. A machine-spun Louisville Slugger maple baseball bat cost about $80. If I, or any other average person for that matter, were to write on that bat, the value plummets. However, my friend has an autographed Joey Votto bat that has been appraised at about $400. I would go as far as to say that emotional connection and investment determines value more than even market trends do. I have an entertaining anecdote for this point. My grandmother keeps every Kentucky edition quarter that she gets. She won’t spend them, they just sit in recycled pill bottles in her closet. To anybody else, the quarter is worth twenty-five cents, but to my grandmother, the pride she has in being from Kentucky outweighs the cumulative value of every quarter she has collected.

With regard to the reading, I don’t watch wrestling and never have, so I am not familiar with, nor can I relate to the information in the book. However, Scooby-Doo is something I can relate to a great deal. For most of my childhood, I wanted to build myself a mystery machine. In terms of how they repackage the characters, I would have to say the live-action movies were the most extreme. Watching as a child, I did not recognize the sexual innuendos in the movie, but today I can spot them easily. I think it was necessary for Warner Brothers to do to keep people interested.

I also watched the Yogi Bear parody clip that was referenced, and it made me both laugh and cry.