he single most influential piece of motocross media ever produced was On Any Sunday, Bruce Brown’s real-time ode to the American motorcycling explosion of the late sixties and early seventies. It followed the riding exploits of, among others, Hollywood movie star Steve McQueen and friends, and introduced and inspired the next generation of motorcyclists. It was even nominated for an Academy Award in 1972 in the category of Best Film Documentary.

The sequel On Any Sunday II, on the other hand, was a disappointment. It followed a decade later with a different director who tried to follow the same script and, in some cases, even the same scenes. It’s since been thrown on that large stack of cringeworthy VHS and DVD motocross movies that not even Blockbuster wanted on their shelves.

Such is the challenge of any dirt-bike-related media: it’s got to be authentic enough for us true enthusiasts but not so niche as to fail to draw enough of a mainstream audience to be successful at the box office. The campy Winners Take All was pure gold for us motocross fans—our designer David Langran likes to say that it literally changed his life—even if the action and dialogue between lead characters Rick Melon and “Bad” Billy Robinson was laughable at times. However, for much of the general public, Winners Take All was mostly a box-office clunker about guys with puffy hair riding strange-looking and stranger-sounding dirt bikes.

A friend of mine who writes scripts in Hollywood once told me that the hardest part about making a good motocross movie is making it relatable to non-enthusiasts. Same goes for our race coverage on television: the faithful want to see every second of the race, but the less-involved would rather see human interest pieces that take them behind the scenes. That conundrum has created a challenge for TV directors going back to the days when only one race per year aired on TV—the 500cc U.S. Grand Prix at Carlsbad—and it having to resonate with viewers who would just as soon be watching figure skating or cliff-diving from Acapulco. Even now, when every single lap of SX and MX can be seen live on television or online, the moment the director cuts away from live action to show a pre-packaged featurette, someone goes on the Vital MX forum and lets the TV crew have it.

For every decent take on motocross, like Disney’s Motocrossed, there’s a whole slew of rather embarrassing Hollywood offerings that we true enthusiasts would rather forget. They either have awful scripts, terrible riding segments, or a sound editor who doesn’t know the difference between a Yamaha YZ250 and a Harley-Davidson Fat Boy. Maybe that’s why, all these years later, On Any Sunday, made by true riders, remains our gold standard.

The latest feature film to try to navigate this difficult equation is Bennett’s War, the production of which we feature beginning on page 82. Produced by Forrest Films (a sister company of Lucas Oil), the movie features a whole bunch of racing that hardcore fans will likely love, as well as a tear-jerking family story involving the military, a mortgage, and one man’s redemption. It has all the elements of a great family movie, but it’s also hoping that motocross purists will see it as authentic. Personally, I have yet to see Bennett’s War, but I’m looking forward to it and hope it’s enough of a success for Forrest Films to make more moto-related movies. But if Bennett’s bike ends up sounding more like a Kia Sorento than a KTM 450 SX-F, I’m going straight to the message boards.