9/28/2004: 2006 olympic mascots
 

http://cellar.org/2004/2006mascots1.jpg

Ladies and Gentlemen, your 2006 Turin winter olympic mascots.

But wait, they have a costume version.

http://cellar.org/2004/2006mascots2.jpg

Soon to be frightening children everywhere!

What the hell are those supposed to be? And why does the blue one have a block head?

Oh ye gods...I don't know if those are better or worse than Greece's 2004 mascots.

According to the official website, Neve's a snowball and Gliz is an ice cube (as if these objects had some natural tendency of sex orientations).

Gliz sort of reminds me more of Marshie, the fluffy puff marshmallow from the online cartoon Homestar Runner.

Obviously celebrating the ancient Italian anthropomorphic marshmallow cult.

Why didn't they dress mascots up like the Shroud? Now *that* would have high public recognition!

Just guessing, but their names..."Snow" and "Ice"? That *would* explain the square (ice cube) head on the one on the right, and in blue. Anyone? Bueller?

The only mascot they need
 

There's only one. A giant green stuffed dollar bill. Or whatever currency they use in Turin. No wait, it's mostly American TV that makes the money. Might as well be a dollar bill.

I wonder who comes up with these things. They don't appear to be very "atheletic" to me. Tell me......... do they only have one tooth, or did they outgrow their dentures? I've heard your vision is very limited when wearing one of these huge costumes. Disaster: One of these guys backing into a swimming pool.............. :eek:

Place your bets for when they will be competing here. :)

The last decent mascots were for Salt Lake City. With this new ice cube thing, I suppose I no longer feel too ashamed at Atlanta's. No, wait, I still weep over that blue... thing. Ugh.

I think they're kind of cute. terrifyingly cute, but cute nonetheless. I like them better than the blobs Athens came up with, and they certainly couldn't get any worse than Izzy, the demonspawn mascot of Atlanta's games.

Mildly interesting article found while googling for pics of mascots from Olympiads past. I was looking for a reasonably complete webpage with decent sized pics of each mascot.

This was the best I found, though it's a bit out of date.

I think the Athens mascots were better than these. Those actually had historical backround. Yes, those things had a meaning. --

"Phevos and Athena, the brother and sister mascots of the 2004 Olympics, might be considered a step above the usual stuffed toy Olympic merchandisers come up with every two years, if only because this particular mascot has hundreds of years of history behind it. The male and female dolls, whose gender is only distinguished by either blue or orange dress, are based on a bell-shaped doll from the seventh century BC. And, they are named for two Olympian Gods: Phevos, god of light and music and Athena, godess of wisdom and patron of Athens."
you can find that here-
http://openhere.com/current/496787895.stm


What does an ice cube and a snowflake have to do with culture??

Old and ugly is still ugly.

After looking at this timeline it appears that the whole Olympic mascot thing started going to hell in the early '90s. All the ones before that were cute animals that people liked--even I had a Misha bear, even though the Olympics were held by the dirty Communists in the Soviet Union that year. For some reason they decided to get "creative" with these ugly ass things that defy description. Every kid at the Olympics would want a cute Teddy bear or bunny, I'll betcha they didn't sell very many stuffed Izzys.