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Weird mascots

The US isn't the only country that comes up with dumb mascots for big sporting events or the like. I saw on the French news the Italian mascot for some soccer related thing and it was similarly awful. I seemed to have blocked out all but the nightmarish image and don't recall enough relevant information to find a link.

Dreadful mascots are a human universal and the Japanese are no exception. This year, they're holding the Aichi Expo, the theme being "nature," much of which was paved over the build the Expo facilities. The mascots are these green pompom creatures, Morizo and Kiccoro, who have a flash-laden page about their vacation including some games and other things that make no sense, and to whom I'm being systematically overexposed by TV Japan.

Every day after Cooking for Today, they air two five minute Morizo and Kiccoro episodes. Each episode begins with the pompoms undulating to a Cuban-style melody which rapidly degenerates into a Japanese-Cuban psychedelic song with pompoms pulsating and multiplying in geometric patterns and popping their heads (or, at least, the top part of their bodies where their faces are) into the screen from all sides.

Then the episode begins. These are only five minutes, so they don't have a lot of time for plot development, and the target audience is the four-and-under set. A typical story runs along the lines of Kiccoro sees a dandelion growing all alone out of the sidewalk and feels sorry for it because it must be lonely. So Kiccoro and Morizo decide to sit in the middle of the sidewalk all day to keep it company. The next day, they come back and find it's gone to seed. They day after that, they find lots and lots of dandelions around so they don't need to keep it company anymore. The end.

Today, Kiccoro made a friend: a butterfly in the autumn woods who was all alone because all the other butterflies had gone for the season.

If you go all the way down to the bottom of this page, you can see some blue links (all in Japanese) which give you a pop-up window with a synopsis of the episode (also in Japanese) and a little picture. Click on the picture to see a clip of the video in Windows Media Player. In Episode 2 of Series 2 (the penultimate collection of links on the page), Kiccoro is standing on a small hill in the dark—the vast, vast dark lit only faintly by stars and bordered by looming mountains. It is calling out for its uncle repeatedly and at increasing volume and gets no reply. Until the end when Uncle calls, "Shut up!"

I'm kind of getting into the underlying nihilism.

462 words | August 17, 2005 08:56 PM | Lost in translation