Tuesday, July 10, 2007
2010 Vancouver Olympic Mascots
:: Posted by Bryan @ 7/10/2007 06:02:00 AM 
When other countries play host to the Olympics, they hire great cartoonists to create a mascot --some sort of fun symbol to entertain the kiddies and brand the event. For instance, for the Barcelona Games, master cartoonist Mariscal created Cobi, the loveably prankish dog-thingy. So, for the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver, what have the organizers prepared by way of mascots? Did they turn to great Canadian cartoonist designers like, say, Jay Stephens or Seth? No, they shopped around at a few local design companies and then went to focus groups, according to this article in the Victoria Times-Colonist. How soulless is that? They could have something created by an artistic genius but instead went for what could turn out to be a corporate product. To be fair, Mariscal is the head of his own design firm, but I seriously doubt that the Vancouver committee ended up using anyone of his calibre, even though he gives advice on the Vancouver games website (there's even a video of Mariscal speaking). The last winter Olympics in Torino, Italy, featured a snowball and icebube couple created by Portuguese designer Pedro Albuquerque. As the article above notes, many pranksters had fun with the characters and altered sexualized versions of them even turned up in serious Canadian news stories.
(the image above is of the seriously lame mascot from the 1976 Montreal Games)
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more ideas?Labels: mascots, Quebec, Vancouver
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