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David Lassen's postcard from Beijing: August 25, 2008
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BEIJING — High among the best things about the end of the Olympics is this: I won't have to look at the Fuwa any more.
The Fuwa, as you are unavoidably aware if you've been in Beijing for the last three weeks, are the Olympic mascots. There are five of them: Beibei the fish (which looks nothing like a fish), Jingjing the Panda, Huanhuan the Olympic flame (which has flame-like hair), Yingying the Tibetan Antelope (which looks nothing like an antelope) and Nini the Swallow (which looks like a kid wearing a bird's head hat).
Eliminate the redundancy in their names, and — as we have been told over and over (and over and over) — you get Bei Jing Huan Ying Ni, which means "Beijing Welcomes You."
The consensus among the media is they're the worst mascots ever, which is saying quite a bit because in Turin the mascots were a snowball and an ice cube. But these get the nod for two reasons: sheer volume and particularly dopey walking versions.
It hasn't been all that long ago that the Olympics had a single cartoonish mascot — Sam the Eagle from the L.A. Games comes to mind — but somewhere along the line, someone decided that if toys of one mascot sell, multiple mascots would sell even more.
And so we had three in Sydney, three in Salt Lake City, two in Athens, two in Turin and now five here.
And so, at the venues, you're liable to run into five people walking around in giant inflatable mascot costumes about 8 feet tall and 4 feet wide. A couple of us were talking about the mascots as they blundered through the backstage area at track one night, and agreed there's something about them that just begs you to punch them. It's like they're walking punching-bag toys.
But to the best of my knowledge, no one ever yielded to that temptation.
Probably because there can't possibly be a dumber reason to risk a stint in a Chinese prison than taking a poke at a giant inflatable antelope.
— Check out David Lassen's blog from Beijing at blogs.VenturaCountyStar.com/lassen.
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