The 2024 Olympic mascots are Phrygian Caps that look like gnome hats…the ones you’d see if I suddenly said “Hey! Look up! Are those GNOMES across the street?” and you looked out your window and indeed saw mythical creatures only about a foot tall with little hats on. These would be the hats they were wearing.
As mascots, these hats are fully self-ambulatory, with eyes and mouths and so forth. They are triangular. I thought they were samosa.
We took a house vote as to whether they were disturbing: “…yes.” was the nearly unanimous answer.
I was the dissenting vote for two reasons. One, they are a symbol of French freedom and have been well designed to represent both the Olympic and Paralympic games. And two, they are better than the previous Olympic mascots, a rogue’s gallery of illustrated nightmare fuel.
https://olympics.com/en/olympic-games/olympic-mascots
I grew up in a world surrounded by mascots, but the animal-based ones ruled the day. There was no way to move through life without crossing into their domain.
NBC had a peacock. RCA/Magnavox an attentive dog. Sinclair’s dinosaur and Mobil’s pegasus loomed above us at gas stations, the Schlitz Malt Liquor bull and Budweiser horses lurked in our coolers, and the Energizer bunny was in everyone’s Walkman™.
There were some icons who seemed to carry tragic backstories which had set up their current situations:
Charlie was a “pick me” tuna, trying again and again to be chosen by Starkist for processing -
The Vlasic stork’s career had devolved to delivering pickles rather than babies -
The Nestle Quik bunny had an unhealthy relationship with chocolate milk (“You can’t drink it slow if it’s Quik!”) which he deeply craved, but never found true satisfaction from -
The Tootsie Roll owl exhibited a sadistic arrogance when asked how many licks it took to get the center of the pop (he finally bit it) -
This was not capitalism… these were animated cautionary nuggets every Saturday morning; creatures who, like Marketing Pokemon, were always in plain sight, sharing our world.
But there was one specific category of life that absolutely belonged to them.
While animal mascots were well represented in the food category - from the Taco Bell chihuahua to the Icee Bear - no meal was as well covered as breakfast. Most incredible was the range of species -
birds represented by Toucan Sam’s Fruit Loops and Sonny the Cuckoo Bird from Cocoa Puffs,
bears by Super Sugar Crisp’s Sugar Bear (get that “Golden Crisp” outta here),
amphibians had the Sugar Smacks (which I still think is a total rip off of Sugar Crisp) frog,
and the King of The Breakfast Jungle, the big cat, was Tony the Tiger and his Frosted Flakes.
Combined with ice cold Borden’s milk from Elsie the Cow, you were all set. By the way, Elsie was married (I am not making this up) to Elmer the cow, who did not sell milk, but GLUE. Look at a bottle of Elmer’s Glue, even today, and there he is. That’s Elmer. That’s his glue. He MAKES it, apparently… I did not ask how because I didn’t want to know.
There are local favorites. Ours was a seal named Smaky who repped a regional hamburger chain named SMAKS. He was their “seal of approval”.
Maybe we’re all too sophisticated for this kind of thing now. Maybe we don’t need convincing by a bear to not set the forest on fire, or an owl to recycle (“Give a hoot! Don’t pollute!). Perhaps we as a species have grown and no longer require a hand-drawn kawaii menagerie to draw our attention.
Oh, wait. I forgot the elephant and the donkey. Yeah. Well.
At least they don’t talk.
Spirit Animals.