March Madness Bracket Parodies

About

March Madness Bracket Parodies refer to single-elimination tournament-style brackets made in the style of the NCAA College Basketball National Championship Tournament which takes place every March, hence the name "March Madness." Parodies of the tournament will include entrants from other subcultures, such as Disney films or characters from The Wire.

Origin

The NCAA Tournament began in 1939.^[1] The tournament started with eight teams and expanded over the years to its current 68-team format. The tournament takes place in a single-elimination style. One of the earliest known parodies of the format was posted in 2009 by The Onion (shown below).

Spread

In following years, parodies of the brackets began spreading online. In 2012, Mashable^[2] ran a gallery of several different parodies which were not basketball-related. The same year, Grantland^[3] held a tournament to name the best character from The Wire (shown below).

The tradition continued over the following years and saw an influx in 2018. On March 12th, 2018, SBNation blogger Matt Ellentuck posted a bracket of memes that gained over 1,100 retweets and 3,200 likes (shown below). Mashable^[4] compiled a list of various bracket parodies that were posted in 2018. One of the most popular posted by @nick__curci ran a bracket based on Vines (shown below, right).

Disney-Pixar Bracket

Disney-Pixar Bracket refers to a social game spread through Twitter in which people fill out a tournament bracket, modeled after the NCAA college basketball championship tournament bracket, of Disney and Pixar films, declaring which one they like best. On March 22nd, 2018, Twitter user @Yeeitsanthonyy posted a bracket on Twitter pitting various Disney and Pixar films against each other, inviting others to fill out the brackets. The tweet gained over 43,000 retweets (shown below). Additionally, the user created polls on Twitter and conducted a tournament based on user votes.

After the bracket was posted, Twitter users began filling out the bracket to express their taste in Disney and Pixar films. For example, Twitter user @smjxmj posted their bracket and gained over 7,000 retweets and 30,000 likes (shown below, left). User @ashcrosson posted a bracket with Aladdin as the winner, gaining over 310 retweets and 2,200 likes (shown below, right).

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References