Horrible Mascots

Naturally I love my readers with all my heart and I wanted to present a spooky Halloween treat to you for today’s post. I started out by writing an essay about the nature of reality, but it was filled with cubicles, creditors, skin cancer, and dead oceans.  To be honest, the dystopian sci-fi novel which is waking life was way too scary to be any fun (since it turns out that reality is completely horrifying).  As a back-up plan, I have returned to my old stand-by: strange creepy mascots.  Because of capitalism, nationalism, and the savage tribalism at the heart of humanity, our world is filled with weirdos and sad actors who are paid to don rubber costumes and act like bears, pelicans, and sundry bobble-headed freaks. Or, alternately, mascots can be animated or digitally created characters which are deeply wrong on an existential level.  Here are some of these mascots and these are their stories:

Let’s start with a punch from the past. I remember being appalled the first time I saw a Kool-Aid commercial.  I mean Kool-Aid man is a being who is a fragile glass pitcher who crashes through a brick wall.  He then pours himself out into delighted children who drink his very essence like the Eucharist and go into a sugar high.  What the hell? How did marketers come up with this and how is it a thing we all immediately understand?

The New Orleans Saints’ primary mascot is Gumbo, a McGruff-style weeping hound with a blood-red tongue who is actually fairly lovable (as such things go).  However, Gumbo has recently been teamed with Sir Saint, a gruff football villain with elephantitis of the chin.  Sir Saint was one of the original Saints mascots during their first seasons of loss and misery and, for some reason he has been brought out of retirement to cast a shadow over this halcyon era.

Long ago, a wandering mage/bar-owner cast a curse upon the Chicago Cubs when they ejected him from the stadium for bringing his beloved pet goat to a game. Yet even before the curse, the cubs walked in darkness–as demonstrated by this image from 1908 which shows them with a nightmare bear.  Bears are scary enough, but this one looks like a rabid muskrat or a bear shaman who got trapped in a hell dimension.

Past posts have touched on the subject of how bizarre Olympics mascots are.  Yet even Wenlock and Mandeville cannot compete with Shpitzik, a sentient fire-wielding cactus who was meant to represent the Israeli Olympics team.  Not only was Shpitzik a walking atrocity which should not exist, he was also a blatant rip-off of a character from a children’s show popular in Israel in the 1970s.  The cactus mascot was soon at the center of a giant expensive law suit.  The website theclassical.org told the harrowing story here and described the lawsuit’s conclusion (which also was the end of Shpitzik). In the final judgment, the presiding magistrate determined that Shpitzik was “’far more than a ‘humanization of a cactus” but was also a copyright infringement. He then ordered Shpitzik’s “permanent destruction and erasure from memory.”

Boltman of the San Diego chargers does nothing to help alleviate the rumors that steroids are rampant in professional football.

The Chiquita Banana was created by a famous cartoonist,  Dik Browne, who also created “Hagar the Horrible”.   The talking over-sexed banana was introduced to America as an animated character in 1944 (because apparently that year was not traumatic enough).

You don’t have to be a sports mascot created by committee to be completely horrible, as demonstrated by these two mascots for a drug store in Kyoto.  Apparently they are renowned for making generations of children cry.

This is “Boomer”, a (possibly retired) mascot of the Columbus Blue Jackets.  I think he is supposed to be a geriatric cannon pointed directly up, but he looks like a reject from a movie about steampunk sorcerers.

I don’t want to seem like I’m picking on new Orleans but the newly renamed basketball team “the pelicans” just unveiled their new pelican mascot and it is widely being heralded as a creature of nightmares.  This mascot is so atrocious it made the front page of CNN and has already inspired the internet’s underemployed digital artists to create an entire history for it.

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