Chances are you’ve never heard of Mr. Moon.
Which is a shame, because
Mr. Moon is a golden god – in the realm of sports mascots, anyway,
which is a group as eclectic as the contestants in a Miss America
pageant. The difference is that, being a generally higher-I.Q. bunch,
the mascots would likely be able to cobble together more coherent
proposals for world peace.
The Asheville Tourists, a single-A baseball team in North Carolina, are
lucky enough to call Mr. Moon their own. His head looks more or less
the way you would expect it to – it’s a giant moon, of course – with a
vaguely creepy sexual predator-type smile, and a blue cap cocked
jauntily askew somewhere atop the Sea of Tranquility. That a team called
the Tourists boasts a giant moon-headed freak for a mascot doesn’t make
a whole lot of sense; the moon has never been a tourist, and if it ever
becomes one, then humanity’s days are probably numbered. In that event,
you can be assured of three things: Families will embrace each other
sorrowfully on their front lawns as they gather to watch the collision;
kooky religious groups will drink lots of Kool-Aid while wearing funny
hats; and those who would otherwise avoid LSD will ingest it by the
pound. I’d join this last group, only because I’ve never had a
conversation with a blue-and-yellow garden gnome riding a talking
hippopotamus.
This naturally begs the question: Why a moon? Luckily, the answer
doesn’t matter. Whatever connection there might be between tourists and
moons is irrelevant, because a mascot’s randomness is often the very
thing that makes it a giddy pleasure.
Take Wally, for example. If you’ve ever caught a Red Sox game at Fenway,
you’ve likely seen this endearing little creature. In Wally’s case, the
connection to his team is a little more clear – Fenway Park is known
for an outfield wall called the Green Monster, and Wally is, well, a
green monster. But when the braintrust over in Soxville sat down to
sketch out what Wally would look like, all they had to go by was that
nebulous description. Wally could’ve looked like anything. He could have
been green with an elephant snout and antennae; he could have been
green and looked like a young Larry King. As it turns out, he conjures
images of an illicit lovechild between Oscar the Grouch and Pat Sajak.
See what I mean? Random.
Of all the major sports, none top baseball when it comes to boasting a
wealth of ludicrous characters. Look no further than our own Portland Sea Dogs, a team with brochures and merchandise besmattered with the
lovable Slugger, a weird looking fish-dog that could have ruled the seas
in any Greek myth. In its most common usage, “sea dog” is a slang term
for seaman, and was presumably coined so that middle schoolers could
avoid a term that causes uncontrollable giggling during sex-ed
flashbacks. In a stroke of artistic reinterpretation pulled from the
dreams of hopeless psychiatric patients, the Sea Dogs brass simply took a
gray-colored dog and slapped fins on it – thereby birthing a creature
that would have given Darwin fits of apoplexy. In statue form, Slugger
towers over visitors to Hadlock Field like an angry mutant chasing a
terrified throng of black-and-white Japanese people.
This weirdness is a selling point. Every time the Sea Dogs play a home
game, the stretches of time between innings – when pitchers warm up
their arms, and the sound of palms on buttocks echo throughout the land –
are filled with bizarre Slugger antics. In the most common one, a lucky
boy or girl from the audience, usually no older than five, is chosen to
engage the oddball animal in a footrace around the diamond; first one
back to home plate wins. Invariably, Slugger trips over the third-base
bag marking the final stretch, highlighting the evolutionary
disadvantages of being a bipedal aquatic mutt. It’s a surreal moment,
watching a fish-dog lose a footrace to an uncoordinated toddler. But
that’s what makes it so oddly entertaining. For all his offbeat
strangeness, Slugger adds a dimension that would otherwise leave us
wanting, somehow. He takes the serious business of baseball and makes it
silly and self-depracating.
That’s what the best mascots do. Heck, that’s what the worst mascots do. And there are some
stinkers out there. Xavier University in Cincinnati is represented by a
curious beanbag of a creation called the Blue Blob, which looks like a
dinosaur turd wrapped in a frayed Snuggie. Southern Illinois University
is home to Saluki, an ancient Egyptian hunting dog, which seems as
out-of-place as a Maine black bear in Thailand; and Delta State
University in Cleveland features the Fighting Okra. Okra, for the
uninitiated, is a flowering plant used in various delicacies. It’s
delicious. It’s also a stupid mascot.
But I bet he makes people smile, which is the point. Sports are meant to
be a diversion from the seriousness of real life, and these wacky
mutant weirdos are a natural extension of that. Part of the fun of
building a sports franchise, I would imagine, would be inventing the
next great google-eyed misfit. It’s enough to make a guy break out his
sketch pad and start working out designs.
Mr. Moon? Meet Mr. Sun.
No comments:
Post a Comment