They’re often weird, unrelatable and sometimes inappropriately sexual, but big brands can’t get enough of them
Mascots are weird. But then so are we. Why do we allow our purchases to be influenced by the chirpy golems (a sexy banana, say, or anthropomorphic mucus) that emerge from the over-refreshed imaginations of ad execs? What unholy alliance of fandom and corporate stupidity brought most sports mascots into being (with the honourable exception of Partick Thistle’s peerless Kingsley)? How unhealthy would a tiger become if it lived on frosted wheat flakes? What the hell were Wenlock and Mandeville, the London 2012 Olympics masc-blobs, all about?
I can offer no answers, only a microscopic amount of history. The word mascot is derived from the Provençal mascoto, meaning spell or enchantment. It only entered common English usage in the late 19th century, partly thanks to an opera, La Mascotte, about a “keeper of turkeys” who brought people luck, as long as she remained a virgin: yes, it started weird and remained so.
