Controversial “Street Man Fighter”, poor results compared to “Street Woman Fighter”… Shabby ending
The “younger brother” is inferior to his “older sister”.
“Street Man Fighter” (SMF), which had been embroiled in various controversies even before the first broadcast, ended with poor results compared to “Street Woman Fighter” (SWF).
On Mnet’s “SMF”, which aired on Nov 8th, JustJerk, WeDemBoyz, MBitious and BankTwoBrothers competed in the final competition.
The final competition was divided into 2 categories: “Cheers!” (Each crew will create a performance that highlights their happy moments) and “Last Dance” (Each crew will create a performance that shows the color and identity representing them). The final winner was decided by 100% live text voting rather than fight judges’ evaluation.
JustJerk won the trophy with 92,321 votes, followed by WeDemBoyz (44,274 votes), MBitious (32,302 votes) and BankTwoBrothers (25,034 votes).
The dancers did their best until the last stage, but received poor attention with less than half of the votes compared to the final episode of “SWF”.
In the final broadcast of “SWF”, which aired in October last year, HolyBang took first place with 234,875 votes, and a total of 645,038 live text votes were counted. This is about 3 times more than the total of 193,931 votes for “SMF”.
Such a slump was predicted from episode 1.
In January, Mnet ambitiously unveiled the first teaser for “SMF”, but many netizens began to show their will to boycott it early. This was because of “SWF” Monika’s “Popping Incident”.
In November last year, Monika’s remark on JTBC’s “Knowing Bros” were criticized on SNS sites and communities for dancers. On the broadcast, Monika said, “All the movements that pop are called Popping, and by erasing ‘g’ it is called Poppin”. Controversy arose when many dancers posted articles targeting Monika, saying “The exact name is ‘popping’, not ‘poppin’”. At that time, the majority of dancers who attacked Monika were ‘male dancers who are on active duty’. For this reason, Internet users expressed their willingness to boycott “Street Man Fighter”
Despite its unfamiliar format, “Street Woman Fighter” was able to create a syndrome thanks to the support from viewers (mainly women). With Monika’s ‘poppin’ controversy, it was unclear whether “Street Man Fighter” would successfully captivate existing fans of this dance series.
Of course, “Street Man Fighter” did attract attention. It firmly maintained its No.1 position in the non-drama category for nearly 2 months and led the trend in the second half of 2022 with the viral “New Thing Challenge”.
However, the remarks of Kang Daniel and CP Kwon Young Chan comparing “Street Man Fighter” and “Street Woman Fighter” once again made the public rage even before the program was aired.
After the broadcast of “Street Man Fighter”, controversies over the judges’ evaluations and suspicions of “New Thing” choreographer plagiarizing the choreography of ATEEZ’s “Say My Name” broke out. Even when the dancers worked hard to present amazing dance performances, the noises around them continued, making it hard for the program to attract new viewers.
Lastly, “Street Man Fighter” was also humiliated as there are still more than 1,000 unbooked concert tickets and it even failed to exceed the highest viewer rating of 1.9% in the final episode.
There are still many jewel-like dancers in Korea who haven’t had a chance to shine. Although “Street Man Fighter” ended in disappointment, many people still hope this survival series for dancers would continue.
Source: nate
