The Strange World of Olympic Mascots

I can't even begin to describe the train of thought that brought me to this place, but I've been fascinated by Olympic mascots recently. It started when I first discovered Sam the Eagle, who was designed by Disney artist Bob Moore (not to be confused with another famous Robert "Freddy" Moore, who also worked at Disney). Sam is charming, very Disney-y, and a good fit for his 1984 Olympics in LA.

what is he wearing? Is that a vest? An apron? A tank top?

Olympic mascots are a strange branch of character design, and their importance to pop culture is both everything and nothing. An Olympic mascot is a character the whole world will see. It is an ambassador and personification of a city/country to the rest of the world. It is a symbol for peace and the triumph of sports and humanity. An Olympic mascot is important.

However, Olympic mascots may be among the most ephemeral and forgettable characters ever. Ask anyone - they will not be able to name a single one. No one remembers these guys. The committees who commission them are incredibly distracted by actually running the Olympics. These characters get lost to history faster than my motivation to exercise. An Olympic mascot is not important.

I assume this paradox must make designing one of these guys very difficult. And may account for why so many of them are so dang strange. Here's some of my favorites.

This is Waldi. Waldi is great. Waldi sets the bar very high as the first official Olympic mascot ever, at the 1972 Olympics in Munich. He's friendly, and a very clean design. The stripes represent the Olympic ring colors, with red and black removed (due to their association to the Nazis).  A great start to Olympic mascots.

Here's Misha from the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Very cute, and more illustrative. Nice round shapes with a soft fuzziness not seen in other mascot designs.

Another one of my favs. Hodori from the 1988 Olympics in Seoul. Maybe a bit close to retro Tony the Tiger, but still a nice friendly, clean design. Being an Amur tiger and wearing a traditional hat called a sangmo, Hodori symbolizes his country of South Korea without feeling too cluttered.

Cobi represented the 1992 Barcelona Olympics in a boldly naive and avant-garde style. He's fun to look at and reflected trends in Spanish art prior to the 1992 Olympics. One of the most memorable designs, if you can say that about an Olympic mascot.

Cobi's flair was immediately tanked by Atlanta's 1996 mascot, Whatizit, then renamed Izzy. Izzy is delightfully '90s but doesn't have much going for him besides that. He was incredibly unpopular during his Olympic run. He's abstracted in all the wrong ways. No one can get excited about a blue blob with sneakers. How did this happen. 

Two years later the world got this at the Nagano (Japan) Winter Olympics. 

Things got a little better at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, though Millie's human body kinda creeps me out a bit. Note how all three characters share three colors (orange, yellow, blue) which unites them as a group. Yet each character's primary color is never more than an accent on the other two. 

My favorites of the recent Olympics are Vinicius and Tom, mascots of the 2016 Rio Summer Olympics. Fun fact - their names are a reference to the composers of the jazz song "The Girl from Ipanema." The one on the left is Vinicius, although he looks more like a cat (which are sometimes called Toms in America).  

If you thought this trip into Olympic art history was fun, there's more mascots out there to discover (and even ones from FIFA tournaments!) Next year two more from Tokyo will join this strange crew - these mayflies of the character design world, who burn brightly for a couple weeks and then are never seen again. Except by art nerds like me, and now you.

Thanks for your readership!

-dh