The 1968 Winter Games in Grenoble, France, opened the floodgates for Olympic mascots by giving the world Schuss, a cartoon character that became known as the “Skiing Sperm”. All manner of misshapen creatures followed, from Waldi the multicolored Dachshund (Munich, 1972) to Magique the star-shaped snow imp (Albertville, France, 1992).
However strange, those mascots were released in simpler times. In contrast, consider what has happened to Wenlock and Mandeville, the Cyclopean mascots for this summer’s London Olympics. The two, which purportedly represent drops of steel from a girder of Olympic Stadium, entered the modern-day wilds of photo-editing software and a flourishing culture of online snark. They have been turned into Queen Victoria. They emerge from the eyes of Gordon Brown, the former prime minister of Britain. They are drooping objects in a Salvador Dalí painting. Often, they are not appropriate for a family newspaper.
“We’ve put millions into them(the mascots) and they’re on a pedestal,” says Tyler Davis, 21, a teacher in Pennsylvania who created an animation in which Wenlock shoots flames out of its eye onto Buckingham Palace and Big Ben. The pedestal was constructed by the International Olympic Committee which says: “The mascot has the job of giving concrete form to the Olympic spirit. Spreading the values highlighted at each edition of the Games; promoting the history and culture of the host city; and giving the event a festive atmosphere.”
From more than 1,000 submissions, the London Olympics organising committee selected the work of the design agency Iris Worldwide. The process of creating the mascots took 18 months, according to Grant Hunter, Iris’s regional creative director for Asia. Wenlock’s name is derived from Much Wenlock, the town in England where the Wenlock Olympian Society held its first Olympian Games in 1850 —considered an inspiration for the modern Olympics. Mandeville’s name comes from Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Aylesbury, England, which held the Stoke Mandeville Games, a precursor to the Paralympics. The organisers did not say how much they paid the firm for its services.
Olympic organisers are going to face increasingly difficult challenges in designing logos and mascots, says David Placek, the founder and president of Lexicon Branding. The firm coined product names like BlackBerry, Swiffer and PowerBook. “People can manipulate things easier today,” he adds. “BlackBerry became CrackBerry.”
The sports blog Deadspin invited readers to submit parodies of Wenlock and Mandeville. In came a Gene Kelly mascot from Singin' in the Rain. In another entry, two mascots were seen strolling across the street alongside the Beatles in their album cover for Abbey Road.
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The unofficial recreations, however clever or tasteless, may be irrelevant to the core audience that a host city is trying to attract, says Peter McGraw, a marketing and psychology professor who runs the Humor Research Lab HuRL at the University of Colorado. “Most people fail to realise that the mascots aren’t designed for them,” he says. “They’re designed for children. It’s the same reason some adults had problems with the Star Wars prequels.”
Hunter, who was involved with the development of Wenlock and Mandeville for Iris, says the firm anticipated such worldwide manipulation of the mascots. “Digital tools have democratised creativity in many ways. Customisation lies at the heart of our idea. We wanted the world to make them their own.”
David Hodgson, a web designer from England substituted them into stills from The Shining (1980), with Wenlock throwing an axe into a door and Mandeville on the other side, leaning back in terror. “I think it’s very difficult to make a mascot,” believes Hodgson . “But I didn’t see anything particularly British in those images.”
©2012 The New York Times