Bats aren’t bugs!
Posted on February 22, 2008 8:42 pm
Suggestion from jamesey from the comments on the previous thread.
When MLS first rolled off the assembly line, many of us dewy-eyed innocents thought this was the most outside concept we had ever seen:
…which, yeah, it was.* But it wasn’t unprecedented – in fact, the Mutiny could have claimed to be the first MLS team to truly follow the tradition of a European power. Nike sent out press releases saying that the mascot was not actually a bat, but a futuristic cyber-mutant that controlled the ball with its mind…but other than that, it would have totally traditional. (The next time it’s a slow Friday, I’ll clip and post more stuff from the 1996 MLS Yearbook. Stuff was funny AT THE TIME, and trust me, it’s aged BEAUTIFULLY. We’re talking Sophia Loren/Katherine Helmond here.)
Valencia’s logo, like so many European logos, based on a coat of arms that usually supplies the wackiness. (Another time when it’s a slow Friday, we can talk about Coventry’s elephants.) Explanation of the Valencia bats here, as well as the picture of the coat of arms that inspired the badge. (This explanation is also on the Wikipedia page, which will probably start some sort of scandal as to whether Wikipeida ripped off the Dutch heraldry site, or vice versa.)
Maybe it’s just Spain, but their weird logos aren’t nearly as annoying as weird American logos. Not only does this badge get six or seven colors to work where Nike hurt 90′s eyeballs with a mere three**, but notice how the curve of the shield works in seamlessly with the bat to make a perfect teardrop shape. Even if MLS designers had managed such an aesthetic trick, they would have given in to the tempation to fill in the curve on top of the bat’s head, wrecking the subtlety of it. Nike’s idea of subtlety was to break the Tampa bat’s wings to make the shape of an “M.”
Valencia’s nickname, according to Wikipedia, is “Los Che,” which translates to “The Che.” Oh, come on, you expect me to use Wikipedia AND Google AND Babelfish? That’s, like, all three pillars of Internet scholarship! On a Friday afternoon! DREAM ON!
*The “Mutiny” name actually lives on. A WPSL team with an altogether more rational logo is run out of Agawam, Massachusetts. They even justify the “Mutiny” name – it’s a shot across the bow of the W-League.
**Although perhaps I’m subconsciously remembering the Mutiny’s actual uniforms.
A couple of notes:
Back in 1998 or thereabouts, I wrote the Mutiny F.O. and asked what the creature was. They replied it was a bat. Really short, one line. Interesting to learn now that a bat was not exactly the Nike concept.
To supplement the historical info on Valencia (and I’m doing this from memory of my historical research from ten years and more ago, so don’t shoot me if there is an inaccuracy): After the Moors conquered the Iberian Peninsula from 711-718, they essentially united the peninsula for quite some time until the Christians in the north successfully revolted (Pelayo in Asturias revolted within a generation, the Basques in Pamplona, and the Catalans in Barcelona were some of the earliest successful revolts). In any case, the Moorish territories were controlled by the Umayad Dynasty, which eventually dissolved into taifa kingdoms. Valencia was one of the taifas which broke away from Cordoba (the Umayad capital). El Cid, famously played by Charlton Heston, conquered Valencia after being exiled from Castile. As an exile, he is considered a warlord, not really owing allegiance to any king. He conquered Valencia and ruled it for about five years, if memory serves. After his death, the Moors retook Valencia, probably until Jaume I took it.
The shield that Valencia uses is interesting in that you just don’t see many lozenges (that’s the heraldic name for the diamond shield) in heraldry. In England and/or France it was the shield that denoted a lady at one point.
When the coat of arms for the soccer club was released, it was almost certainly blazoned, which means described in heraldic language so that any herald anywhere would know how to draw it without looking at a picture. So the shield would have been described as something like, “Under a chief azure (blue) with the words argent (silver) Valencia C. de F., per pale or (gold) and gules (red), a football natural.” Now I go through the trouble to write that out because of that last word, “natural.” Objects which have a usual tincture, like an elephant, that appear in their common tincture on the shield are often described as natural. This keeps the blazon simple, so that we don’t have to say that the eye is one color, the toes are another color, the body is another color, and all that. Anyway, in whatever year the coat of arms (or, to use the heraldic term, the device) came out, the football looked like the one on the device. My question is, if a herald looked at the blazon I wrote today, with no prior knowledge, would he use the old fashioned brown ball, or would he use the black and white ball with hexagons and pentagons?
Lech Poznan Poland 1st division looks very similar
errr..sory about the team photo, just wanted to copy the crest, but somehow copied the entire banner.
The Moors didn’t conquer the Iberian Peninsula. It was the Moops!
The weird thing about the 1st year of designs is that we had both a futuristic bat and a futuristic scorpion and the teams nicknames (the Mutiny and the Clash) had little to do with the logos.
Fast forward to FC Dallas, Real Salt Lake and the Emerald City Greens and you see that we have really come full circle, for better or for worse.
Funny stuff here!
my all time favorite soccer jersey in my collection in a white nike tampy bay muting jersey. the purple and green look pimp on the white background
Nice title Mr. Loney. I do miss that comic strip so very very much.
Favorite moment? The school play where he’s an Onion and Suzie is “fat”.
FYI: Some rapper has been known to rock the throwback Mutiny jersey…
I love the original Mutiny jersey. Nice seaweed green.
http://www.viewimages.com/Search.asp…partner=Google
http://www.viewimages.com/Search.asp…partner=Google
I’m a little worried about the future. Will my kids be ruled by tyrannical cyberbats and cyberscorpions? And what about the CyberRays?
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