Languishing In London

I would read the following while listening to the neo-classic "Walking In London" by Concrete Blonde, playing somewhere in the background...! 

 Lest you cannot play a single one of these now: 

.

And therrrrrrrrrrrrrrre you go, 

double pain-in-the-you-know-what annoyance 

that is YouTube... but Blogger too, 

with the latest, greatest one being 

their "post put behind a warning for readers 

because it contains sensitive content" crap 

ten years after the fact...!?!?!?!?!?!? 

Ah, you gotta love the artistic take on this umpteenth campaign aiming to launch yet another wild bunch of sports aficionados... 

Just so you get the setting right: this takes place in Canada, not England. The sport of choice is baseball, not rugby but, oddly enough, not hockey either (although it gets mentioned enough times as it is!) And the time is NOW. 

A controversy is brewing up there, right now...! 

Nothing too classy, mind you - for the Northern Lights alternative to the real deal is not all too bright, eh? 

It was bad enough that London (the one in Ontario, not the real one, hence) chose to turn the late, underrated, great singer-songwriter Warren Zevon into a hairy, oversized mascot by the name of "Warren Z. (Zed) Vaughn" for the purposes of selling baseball to a small-time community with an already (and all-ready!) conceived team concept inspired by the song you can listen to on the screen above, serving as the perfect rallying song for a team christened after it, in the homonym town to boot... The London Werewolves had it all ready to go and all going for them indeed, it would have seemed... 

Somehow, though, that didn't work out and it was back to the drawing board for these second-class, would-be Londonites - and what came out of that creative process was even more appalling the second go-around than it was the first time... 

Because, the second time around, the marketing whiz kids north of the 49th parallel could only think of the most distasteful mish-mash of history, fiction and sports right in the middle of the mix, as they languished over the dilemma of selling baseball to a community that is part of the Jays-fanbase by necessity - and is, therefore, quite blasé about it all, in reality... In an effort to "make it fun" again, they wound up serving the most distasteful recipe ever this side of a Calgary Hitman...!  

"Diamond Jack" is the all-new obvious mascot for the new team-concept called the London Rippers - as in some kind of homage to Jack The Ripper, yes. As if it had not been bad enough to trivialize the horror of this murderer (who was never caught - and never paid for his crimes, on this side of life anyhow) and render it innocuous by dubbing the comedic lead of Three's Company decades ago as one "Jack Tripper" - these guys had to inspire themselves from fellow Canadian model "Calgary Hitmen" out west, which has been a hit in merchandising much more than on the ice, as it was... But that is another story - right, Bret? 

The big difference is, of course, that Bret "the Hitman" Hart is a clown, a bogus act, a doofus of the squared circle, no more and no less than theatrics; while Jack The Ripper was a very real, horrific, sickening assassin that transcended human traits in an era that was so classy, so civilized... He walked among these aristocrats too, mimicking them to the hilt. And yet - he was downright beastial. Evidence enough that monsters in human form can be found to be walking among us at any given time, really. 

To market something that evokes Jack - the historical Jack - is somewhat equivalent to glorifying violence towards women, towards the lower class of society, towards the weaker and most vulnerable components of our society. To do so reinforces that connotation in young impressionable minds that are, let's face it, the primary audience for such products (and we no longer speak of baseball, of course, but of the associated, licensed merchandise that rakes in the big dough for these things: caps, t-shirts, all conceivable forms of paraphernalia.) 

The werewolf mascot, though a blood-thirsty beast by nature (sorry, Underworld fans - I know you prefer the Lycanthropes to be distinctively described so as to never be mistaken for mere bloodsuckers...!) it still remained a likeable creature that fans, of all ages, could hug and even cuddle with...! But a plush version of JACK THE RIPPER...? Who'd want to cuddle with THAT? Granted, over the years, there have been likeable, huggable shall we call them "difficult characters" in many other fields - and they were successfully marketed too. But let's face it: Yosemite Sam never killed anyone. He might be guilty of quite a bit of "misorabbitry" there but not of misogyny! And he's just one example of the type...! 

The slanted word of choice is RIPPER here - pluralized, since there will be a whole team of them based upon the model of Diamond Jack who is himself based upon we know what...! London number two there really wants to breed a whole new generation of Little Rippers, do they? When opposing teams come, the crowd will chant "RIP'EM, RIP'EM GOOD!" - is that it? Of course, this sport lends itself just a tad better to this sort of thing as "ripping one" is the sport's jargon for hitting a ball safely for a base hit - however, "rip 'em" would infer slaughtering the opponent and that might indeed be even more reprehensible than the Hitmen out west - but wait, there is more than a tangible connection here! For the character of Diamond Jack is said to be a "frustrated hockey player" who went into baseball to vent said frustrations upon poor innocent baseballs...? "He rips them" - good - see? He "rips the cover off" of them, to be precise! And then he founds his own team of presumably equally-gifted rippers - once he gutted the poor werewolfie there who tried to do just the same, first, in that wretched town...? One can only presume that is the unwritten, undisclosed storyline, eh? But back to that ripping business, from the other end, now... "Ripping" is a verb that is way too violent to be associated to anything Pierre de Coubertin would have approved of as official competition in his Olympic Games - and yet we hear, often enough, that this player "ripped a shot inside the crease past the goaltender to win the game" or that that other player "ripped an inside pitch into the bleacher the seats for his 10th career Grand Slammie of a Home Run!"

However, here, this Diamond Jack's primary mandate is to make the game of baseball more fun as well as more accessible to Canadians, in a way that it becomes a part of Canadiana itself...! And, in that, both the look of the character and his name do not help at all, really. 

Because, for the common Canadian, alas, the verb ripping has a lower connotation or two - and there is nothing marketable to the whole family there. "Ripping one" is much more commonly associated with letting natural gases go in Canada - aye, we speak of flatulence here. And it is also commonly heard around strip clubs: which is something that Jack The Ripper would have actually liked, quite ironically enough - in a very lugubrious way here... 

Verily, the only appealing or endearing trait that this character of Diamond Jack displays is the fact that he is a former hockey player - most probably a goon. Canada loves goonery! The fact that he is such a "frustrated" hockey player only reinforces the notion that he most probably has been a goon, a thug on skates. Those were not the descriptive words used by team president and general manager David Martin, but it is what is implied by "frustrated hockey player" for those able to read between the lines, whether you like it or not, Dave...! This team, as the previous one (the Werewolves) was established as London's entry into the independent Frontier League - a league that sets the bar high (or low - depending on your point of view) regarding the means to attract the customer base... Said customer base must be comprised of a little or a lot of "frustrated players" devoid of any skill, real talent for it (hence the frustration which translates into slashing, darting and other illegal uses of the hockey stick!) and these frustrated goons are now daddies, too - they passed on the frustration gene onto their wretched progeny... alas. Rabble multiplies easy - we all know that! 

Thus, since said fanbase is Canadian, a mention of hockey is not only necessary, it is automatic and rudimentary. That was done; they got that part right. But that is simply the elementary ingredient - everything else, they got wrong! A hideous mascot (even the Boston Celtics' leprechaun, as Machiavellian as he may look, looks a thousand times more marketable!) and a monster, really, that no one in their right mind could like. Nothing in his look or character that is remotely Canadian or, more importantly, contemporarily Canadian (sorry to break it to you, Rippers - but the stove pipe hats are gone, just like the bowler and top hats!) while the character seems to represent not competitiveness but monstruous anti-social resentment... Any other type of fantasy-based critter would have been better than this! Haven't you noticed how poorly similar-themed logos have fared elsewhere: such as the CFL's Ottawa Renegades, the lamented high liner fisherman of the NHL's New York Islanders alternate jersey and the rugged, all-around dislikeable as unoriginal tough Roman Centurion displayed on the AHL's Binghampton Senators uniforms? And there are more examples like those, out there... 

Haven't you learned yet that, as an uncontestable rule, mascots have to be furry, friendly, fierce but in a cuddly kind of way, in order to maximize A) merchandising and B) the team's viability overall...!? 

With all this, one can also languish all the more over the current whereabouts of poor Warren Zed Vaughn - and what might have happened to him after his being discarded? Fur coat? Rug? Baseball cap type of... Hat? (Not a Victorian stove pipe hat, mind you...) 

While all this is going on, meanwhile, back in the real London, the Occupy movement is getting notices of eviction - but nothing transpired or came out of that yet. This while in the Ontario, Canada version of London, the Occupy protesters have already been rudely treated, eh?    

Remember when I started this long diatribe in writ by stating that London, England and its Canadian namesake are light years apart? That latest bit of news tells us volumes about that, right there...! 

+++