99% Invisible - 151- La Mascotte

Episode Date: February 4, 2015

The idea of the mascot came to America by way of a popular French opera from the 1880s called La Mascotte. The opera is about a down-on-his luck farmer who’s visited by a girl named Bettina; as soon as she … Continue reading →

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. As baseball fans probably know, the Washington Nationals came to the US by way of Canada. They used to be the Montreal Expos. The team packed up and left Canada in 2005, and they left behind their name, their logo, their uniforms. And maybe, most importantly, their mascot, UP. That's our Canadian friend Andrew Norton. He has a special connection to UP. It's actually my dad who had the special connection

to UP. He died about eight years ago and his relationship with UP is something that I'm still trying to square. Okay, so a little bit about my dad. He was the boring dad. He always fell asleep at the movies. Pinocchio, toy story, dude was out cold. Family trips were planned with efficiency and thrift as the primary objective. And at our house, we subscribed to the one newspaper that didn't have a comic section. He was definitely not into things that could be classified as fun. But he had this one quiet obsession. It was rotund, orange, free, and six and a half feet tall. U.P. U.P. Spelled, why O.U. P.P.I. and always with an exclamation mark. It's French for Yippee, you know, like, Yippee. Oh, like UP! Oh, oh, oh, oh!

Monji, um, honestly, haven't looked at UP in a while. That's my sister Jessica. We're in her basement while her kids are asleep, and we're looking at photos of UP on my phone. That's the UP I know. Orange, fuzzy, wearing cleats, exos hat, ill-feeding exos shirt, and then like, googly eyes, but an approachable face.

UP looks like an orange-haired bearded lumberjack cross with a Sasquatch wearing a baseball jersey. You can picture that, right? It was when we were kids that my sister and I started noticing our dad's affection for UP. He light up when we'd see him at expo's games and he'd look for him on TV. He hated when the game would get cut too commercial because that would be prime UP time. UP brought out this side of my dad

that we just didn't recognize. All of a sudden, you're just a guy who loves the mascot. To the point where you clip a picture of him out of the newspaper and put him on the side of the fridge. An article on the fridge might not sound like a big deal, but before this, the only other article he had ever posted up was about Canada's new sales tax rates. Then suddenly, it's UPI. It should be noted that when the expose moved to DC to become the nationals, UPI switched

sports and found a job with a Montreal hockey team called the Canadians. My dad died just after that, and all these years later, I can't help but wonder what it was about UP that spoke to his long repressed whimsical side. And it's not just Andrew's dad. So many grown adults can't resist hugging and posing for selfies with mascots. Even though it's just someone in a costume, they're entranced. Well, I mean the definition of the mascot, like it comes from actually the French word

uh, masco, a little slang word, which actually means which. That's AJ Masse, writer for ESPN.com, and author of a book all about sports mascots called Yes. It's Houghton here. He was also in the dude inside the Mr. Met costume from 1994 till 1997. In 1997, when Bill Clinton was visiting Shaya Stadium, the secret service pulled AJ aside while he was in his big Mr. Met costume and told him, if you approach the president, we go for the kill shot.

According to AJ, the word mascot came to America in the late 1800s through a French opera. That was called La mascotte by a guy named Audrian. The opera is about a down on his luck farmer who's visited by this girl named Bettina. As soon as she rolls up, magically his crops start doing well and his life turns around. All thanks to this mysterious woman. And it became very popular in the United States and the terminology kind of caught on where people realize and recognize that mascot means a good luck charm. And this idea of a mascot fit right in with the notoriously superstitious world of pro

baseball. You know, there were situations where like there'd be a kid in the stand who would smile at a baseball player in a slump, he'd get a base hit and he'd give the kid tickets for the next day. And you know, and suddenly he'd go on a big hitting streak and so he would be like, hey, I want this kid to hang around all the time and that's kind of where mascots became these human good luck charms. Like John the Orange Man, who was well a man who sold oranges outside the stadium at Harvard

and Yale adopted handsome Dan Bulldog. They walked out onto the field before games. Anything that was sort of around at the time of a team's hot streak adopted handsome Dan, a bulldog they walked out onto the field before games. Anything that was sort of a round at the time of a team's hot streak could and would be claimed as a mascot. It was pretty much all animals and bystanders until the Second World War. That's when one baseball game altered the idea of mascots in sports. Yeah, this game took place in Hawaii, and it was an exhibition game made up of service members. Pitching was kind of a lanky goofy looking guy by the name of Max Patkin. The legendary

Joe DiMaggio steps up to the plate and hits a massive home runoff. The story goes that the ball went into the Pacific Ocean. And Patkin just snaps. He jumps off the mound. This is the picture, okay? He jumps off the mound and runs after Dimasio. People thought he was going to attack him or something, but actually he just ran behind him mimicking his home run trot, and the crowd just went nuts. So he kept doing this act throughout those service league exhibition games as a pitcher. His stick was sort of a mix of Jim Kary and Ace Ventura, meets the dance moves of your drunk uncle at a wedding, meets like a Parisian mine.

And when the war was over, Pac can stop being a pitcher and was hired by the Cleveland Indians to do his thing at home games to help draw in crowds. It was the first time a mascot did more than just stand around being lucky. He entertained people. And God knows people need that at a baseball game. So now thanks to Packin we have this idea of a mascot as a diversion. But there's still a big evolutionary step to get to the mascots we know today. Yeah, the turning point certainly has to begin and end with the chicken. The San Diego chicken who can really only be described

as a dude in a chicken suit. In 1974, the San Diego radio station KGBFM hired a college kid by the name of Ted Giannulis to wear a chicken suit and do promotion for the radio station. And Giannulis got into it, like really into it. The chicken had bravado, he had swagger, he was like an obnoxious frat boy and a bird costume. He danced on the field at San Diego Padres games, grabbed people's beer and pretend to chug it. And the Padres were

such a bad team that people started going just so they could see the chicken perform. And that's where the San Diego chicken kind of was born. He was this this marketing tool for the radio station that kind of Suddenly became bigger than the team itself He was eventually fired from the radio station because he took on such a life of his own So Jean-Nuelis got his own chicken costume and kept performing the station actually suit him and lost because it's you can't you know You can't copyright the idea of guy in chicken suit kids You can't copyright the idea of guy in chicken suit. Kids, you can't copyright the idea of a guy in a chicken suit.

The chicken was a big deal. Even though he wasn't an official team mascot, he had become an icon. He created the modern mascot movement. Even so, by the late 70s, the mascot scene was still pretty barren by today's standards. Only a handful of baseball teams technically had mascots, like the Philadelphia Phillies. They had a pair of characters called Phil and Phyllis. They were props. They weren't mascots.

They were props. Picture if you dressed a couple of those big boy restaurant statues in colonial garb, they were these big plaster characters that would kind of waddle out for the national anthem or if there was a home run. So when the Philly saw what the chicken was doing in San Diego, they were like, we got to get us some of that. The Philly's found someone to custom design a mascot to entertain their fans. And before she came on board, they warned her that fans in Philly could be a little unforgiving. They said, well, we just want you to know that our crowd in Philadelphia booed the Easter bunny.

That's designer Bonnie Erickson, and the booing the Easter bunny story is actually an urban legend. But Eagles fans did once Pelt Santa with snowballs during the game. Bonnie had no experience with the sports world when she took the gig. She and her husband and business partner Wade Harris then had just started their own design outfit. And they got the Philly's job thanks to a recommendation by Bonnie's former employer, Jim Henson. The Jim Henson.

You know, Muppets, Fraggle Rock, Sesame Street, Bonnie Erickson designed Miss Peggy. And the Muppet Show Hecklers, Stattler, and Waldorf. I wonder if there's anything she isn't good at. Yes, choosing what showed her beyond. She also worked with Henson on making life-sized versions of the Sesame Street characters for their Sesame Street on ice performances. So, she knew how to make a costume that people could perform and move in, which was a new concept when it came to mascots. So Bonnie got to work on this new mascot, and in the meantime, the Phillies had to find

someone to stuff inside of it and face those Santa-heckling grounds. They needed the lowest man on the totem pole, the intern, to raise his hand and say yes. That's Dave Raymond, who was that intern. He was brought on board to do things like count the all-star game voting ballots. He had no background as a performer, aside from some dabbling with disco. Nevertheless, he would be the performer inside this new mascot. Because of some delays, we didn't see the costume until the very night that I was going to wear it. And that's when I started getting a little bit Distressed because I started to realize that everyone else thought this was a stupid idea and and I was truly gonna be thrown to the wolves

The Phillies weren't even promoting the fact that they were getting a new mascot in case the whole thing just completely backfired They could be like mascot one mascot. Did you see a mascot? I didn't see a mascot But I was reassured when I first What mascot? Did you see a mascot? I didn't see a mascot. But I was reassured when I first opened the box and I was blown away with how how perfect it looked. The Philly Phanatic was born. If this were a superhero movie, this would be when the dramatic music comes on. But the Phanatic is definitely not a comic book superhero. It's all green fur like like very furry fuzzy fur. He has a snout like a megaphone.

He's very, very large and rotund, pear-shaped body with a huge belly and a kind of a duck butt. A very long neck. Stir-up socks, fillies hat and a fillies jersey. Perfect, you know, doesn't that all make sense? No, no, it doesn't make any sense that the Philly's mascot would be a big, Google-Eye monster. But it turns out that every part of the fanatic is like a masterclass in mascot design.

For starters, he's green. Not the standard Philly's red. Right, exactly. It's always easy to spot the fanatic in any of these games. And the duck butt and the pear-shaped body? No matter how you move in that costume, if you're a human being and you put one leg in front of the other, that costume looks funny. Now when I look at the fanatic, it's so clear that there's Muppet DNA there. Even the placement of the cartoon Google-Eyes is something that Bonnie learned from her time designing Muppets.

You are asking for all my secrets. Well, if you put eyes high on a figure's face, they will look older. If you put them down closer to the nose, they'll probably look younger and more childlike. Plus, there's other mascot first that she borrowed from the Muppets. Like, she designed the fanatic with licensing and merchandising in mind.

Toys, t-shirts, that kind of stuff. And like all good characters, the fanatic even has his own origin story. He's supposedly from the Galapagos Islands. The fanatic is goofy. You know, he'd rub a bald dude's head or rip off the hat of someone cheering for the wrong team. And usually he gets away with it.

It's just damn near impossible to get irate with a fuzzy green thing. The one time he did get pummeled by Tommy Lasorta, the coach of the LA Dodgers, after Lasorta had had it with the fanatic taunting him. That's the quickest Tommy's moved all year. We gotta mark that down. The quickest Tommy Lasorta moved in 1988 was after the Philly Phenatic. Oh, what a deal. And of course, that just made the Philly's fans love them even more.

Day Raymond played the Philly Phenatic from that first game in 1978 until 1993. He only ever missed five home games. Now all but three major league baseball teams have mascots, and most of them are big and furry and goofy and have googly eyes. Everyone since the fanatic is kind of in a way copying the fanatic. And so of course Bonnie kept getting work. After we did the fanatic, the next one that we were asked to do because of the popularity of the character early on was for Montreal for the expose.

Yep, Bonnie Erickson also created UPI. And when I told her about the inordinate amount of affection my dad had for the mascot, she recalled once seeing a big, burly guy coming out of the Expo's stadium with some UPI dolls in a shopping bag. He had positioned them so that they would have their heads sticking out, as if they couldn't breathe if they weren't. And I thought that was very touching. The mascot still lives in this sort of limbo between the two worlds.

He's not quite part of the team, but not quite part of the fanbase either. I think that's the power of a mascot. What fan of a team wouldn't want to be able to have that freedom to mock the other team and get a response? You know, they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they li- they know, they lif I garriously for the mascot. I think a big part of it for my dad was this aspect of living vicariously. UPI was his spirit animal, the Brad Pitt to his Edward Norton.

UPI could belly slide across the exposed dugout, take the ump to task while the whole stadium cheered him on, steal a kiss from Celine Dion after a show-stopping rendition of O Canada. U.P. is a fun dude, and I can see that maybe secretly my dad was too. 99% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Andrew Norton with Sam Green's fan Katie Mingle, Avery Trouffleman, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7KALW San Francisco and produced out of the offices of ArcSign, an architecture and interiors firm in beautiful, downtown Oakland, California.

and architecture and interiors firm in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. You can find the show and like the show on Facebook. We're all on Twitter and Instagram. Avery runs the Tumblr. I make the Spotify playlist of 99PI songs, but I encourage you to explore the entire world of 99% invisible at 99pi.org Radio to P.R.X.