6/18/2006: 2008 Olympics mascot spotting

[Undertoad]

Crappy international sports mascots are an IotD theme. We had previously had the 2006 Olympic mascots to point out how crappy they were, and the 2004 World Cup mascot entry is so old it sort of breaks the blog view and doesn't show who wrote comments.

The above was a news image and the caption suggested that this was "the" 2008 mascot, and I was all prepared to write another totally snarky entry about the crappiness of another international sports mascot.

Researching the matter, though, I learned that the Beijing Olympic mascots are excellent!



I like these a lot - they bring a sense of Chinese style to the notion of the mascot. They're particularly effective when they take up cycling and fencing and diving. Their five colors represent the five rings. The red character is the Olympic flame; the others represent important Chinese animals.

But I guess that only highlights the poor quality of the lifesize version, which is just about as analogous to the drawn mascot as a blow-up sex doll is to a real live woman.

Please no snarkiness about my analogy. You know it's right.

Another problem is their Proclamation of the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad, which totally limits the use of the cool, beautiful mascots through terrifying intellectual property restrictions. I can only assume that use of the mascots here is considered acceptable because IotD is not a commercial venture. I don't think this is a violation of international copyright law, but if IotD is taken down this week, this will surely be the reason why. You can tell China has embraced parts of Capitalism, because whatever else they think of individual rights, they are willing to enforce intellectual property rights to make quick money.