That the Arizona Cardinal’s recent decision to change their logo has met with a tepid reaction (at best) is probably not all their fault. After all, anyone who might take an interest in such a change – football fans, graphic designers and brand managers, fans of the actual bird species, maybe – have seen it all before. As team vice president Michael Bidwill describes the change, “We've made the beak much more predatory and much more aggressive.”
If you hear there’s going to be a new sports mascot announced in your town, see if you can get someone to bet you it won’t be more aggressive. You’ll win the bet. At least over the past few decades (with a few exceptions, some charming, some disturbing) a new mascot, or a new representation of that mascot is going to be more aggressive than whatever preceded it.
The Arizona Cardinals new logo captures two of the main trends in the aggressivification of mascots.
1. Make the mascot look like it’s flying from left to right.
For now, though, shooting from left to right by and large carries the day.
2. More Pointy.
In some cases, as with the Cardinals, this is partly an effect of element 1 above. So great, however, is the value of pointiness that even mere letters can be made more aggressive if it seems like it might hurt to touch them. If an S and U can be more aggressive, it’s not hard to see why the newly aggressive Cardinal might not stir much interest.
Tired though it may be, the incessant push toward more aggressive mascots raises a few questions.
In the wake of the Pacers – Pistons brawl earlier this year, yesterday’s front page Yahoo! News story about a fight at an Alabama high school girls basketball game sounded a note of warning:
Have aggressive mascots contributed to this culture of violence? Are they to blame for a world in which girls lose their cell phones? In which keys get lost –- possibly by some of the girls who have already lost a cell phone? When one considers that the Prattville High Mascot is a pretty non-aggressive Lion that’s not even facing right let alone moving quickly from left to right it’s hard not to feel that the worst is yet to come.
At this moment, then, one might ask: How aggressive can mascots get? Is there a limit beyond which mascots will have become too aggressive? When we reach that limit, will we know when to pull back? The answers to these questions are: Exactly as aggressive as Mandrake the Oregon nightmare Duck, oh my god yes, and (encouragingly) yes, at least in Oregon.
It’s clear that the second-nature inevitability of the “more aggressive” mascot is an amenable companion of the other unfolding inevitabilities of American culture – progress, profit, the march of freedom, etc. in which there could never be too much. It’s a commonplace (if still a fascinating and complicated one, at least to me) that America’s future is conceived as open-ended in these ways, and inasmuch as sports teams are a part of the story Americans tell about themselves, it makes sense that mascot-making is caught up in that structure. Which brings us to the case of the Oregon Duck.
In 2002, the cartoonish Duck mascot
was supplemented by the appearance of “Mandrake” a mascot whose aggression was so great that it became truly frightening not only to opponents, but to the very people who were to be served by the mascot. The Oregon Daily Emerald quoted Junior Ashley Brodie as noting, “I think he's incredibly scary looking, as does half of this campus.”
Was it simply that we prefer our movement toward greater progress and aggression to be gradual, or was it that for one moment a college campus stood up and said, “No, I think we’re aggressive enough for now”? Perhaps the ultimately aggressive mascot eluded us then, but no matter – tomorrow we will make our mascot shoot faster to the right, make the edges more pointy . . . and one fine morning --
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