Olympic Mascots Inspire Imitators With an Eye for Parody Tyler Davis Tyler Davis, a student teacher in Mahanoy City, Pa., created an animation in which Wenlock shoots flames out of its eye onto Buckingham Palace and Big Ben. The 1968 Winter Games in Grenoble, France, opened the floodgates for Olympic mascots by giving the world Schuss, a cartoon character that became known as the Skiing Sperm. All manner of misshapen and barely identifiable creatures have followed, from Waldi the multicolored dachshund (Munich, 1972) to Magique the star-shaped snow imp (Albertville, 1992) to Izzy the computer-generated ... something (Atlanta, 1996). However strange, those mascots were released in simpler times. In contrast, consider what has happened to Wenlock and Mandeville, the Cyclopean mascots for this summer's London Olympics. Wenlock and Mandeville, which purportedly represent drops of steel from a girder of the Olympic Stadium, entered the modern-day wilds of photo-editing software and a flourishing culture of online snark. They have been morphed into Queen Victoria. They emerge from the eyes of Gordon Brown, the former prime minister of Britain. They are drooping objects in a Salvador Dalí painting. Sometimes they're plaid, sometimes they're striped. Often they are not appropriate for a family newspaper. "I saw them and I thought, wow, these are kind of stupid," said Tyler Davis, 21, a student teacher in Mahanoy City, Pa., who created an animation in which Wenlock shoots flames out of its eye onto Buckingham Palace and Big Ben. I look at these mascots and think we've put millions into this and it's on a pedestal. It's my job and others on the Internet to chip away at the pedestal. The pedestal was constructed by the International Olympic Committee, which says: "The mascot has the job of giving concrete form to the Olympic spirit. Spreading the values highlighted at each edition of the Games; promoting the history and culture of the host city; and giving the event a festive atmosphere. From more than 1,000 submissions, the London Olympics organizing committee selected the work of the design agency Iris Worldwide. The process of creating Wenlock and Mandeville took 18 months, according to Grant Hunter, Iris's regional creative director for Asia. Wenlock's name is derived from Much Wenlock, the town in England where the Wenlock Olympian Society held its first Olympian Games in 1850 - considered an inspiration for the modern Olympics. Mandeville's name comes from Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Aylesbury, England, which held the Stoke Mandeville Games, a precursor to the Paralympics. The organizers did not say how much they paid the firm for its services. Olympic organizers are going to face increasingly difficult challenges in designing logos and mascots, said David Placek, founder and president of Lexicon Branding. The firm, based in Sausalito, Calif., is known for coining product names like BlackBerry, Swiffer and PowerBook. "People can manipulate things easier today, there's no question about it," Placek said. BlackBerry became CrackBerry. We couldn't have predicted that. When the iPad was first announced, there was controversy over feminine napkins. The question is how long does it take for that to go away and does it get in the way of your message. The sports blog Deadspin invited readers to submit their own parodies of Wenlock and Mandeville. Among the entries: a mascot as Gene Kelly from "Singin" in the Rain"; the two mascots strolling across the street alongside the Beatles in their album cover for "Abbey Road"; and the mascots helping soldiers raise the American flag at Iwo Jima. "They're hideous," Barry Petchesky, a writer with Deadspin who organized the contest, said about the London Olympic mascots. They're complete P.R. creations, and once it's out there, it's the Internet. It's the Wild West. The unofficial re-creations, however clever or tasteless, may be irrelevant to the core audience that a host city is trying to attract, said Peter McGraw, a marketing and psychology professor who runs the Humor Research Lab (known as "HuRL") at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "Most people fail to realize that the mascots aren't designed for them," he said. They're designed for children. "It's the same reason some adults had problems with the "Star Wars" prequels. But a lot of kids really liked Jar Jar Binks. Hunter, who was involved with the development of Wenlock and Mandeville for Iris, said the firm anticipated such worldwide manipulation of the mascots. "You can't please everyone," Hunter said. Digital tools have democratized creativity in many ways. You can now generate a Photoshop comp or a mash-up video in minutes. News-jacking and memes are a part of Internet culture. That's why customization lies at the heart of our idea. We always wanted the world to make them their own. People like Dave Robertson of Edinburgh, Scotland, did just that. He used Photoshop to put one of the mascots onto the podium of the 1968 Mexico City Games in which Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in protest. Robertson said when he saw a photo of one of the mascots waving his appendage, he immediately thought of the famous gesture. "I tried to be satirical rather than offensive," Robertson said of the mascots. It's more of a criticism. Wenlock and Mandeville "looked like something out of a horror movie" to David Hodgson, a 34-year-old Web designer in Stafford, England. He substituted them into stills from the 1980 Stanley Kubrick film "The Shining," with Wenlock throwing an ax into a door and Mandeville on the other side, leaning back in terror. "I think it's very difficult to make a mascot," Hodgson said. But I didn't see anything particularly British in those images. For Dave Slaney, a 47-year-old graphic designer in Nottingham, England, the mascots had a more animated flavor. One of his images features a London mascot as a green monster akin to Mike Wazowski, the green Cyclopean star of Pixar's 2001 film "Monsters, Inc." Slaney said. Maybe with time they'll grow on me a bit.