As we prepared for the dawn of the new millennium in the late 90s, we knew we had to kick it up a notch. We couldn’t just have regular products, they had to be edgy! Cool! Hardcore! And most of all, extreme! In fact, our stuff was so awesome that we were too cool to spell “extreme” like normal users of the English language. Instead, we often reverted to the alternative spelling “X-TREME” because nothing says hardcore like a hyphen.
The overuse of “X-TREME” extended from food:
to personal hygiene products:
to food again:
but if your product is popular in retirement homes,
it’ll never be extreme.
to games:
You’re better than that.
and back to food yet again:
I don’t know how anyone else felt, but I felt like advertisers were constantly screaming at me. In the 90s, I had glasses and wanted to read all the time–there was nothing “X-TREME” about. To be fair, that statement is probably still true now.
In retrospect, I think all the X-TREME marketing was just preparing me for the godawful bloodbath of political fights that now happen on social media since I’m already desensitized to the screaming. However, there’s a lot less candy these days.
Happy X-TREME Throwback Thursday!
Emily Regan 