Below, an animation introduces the mascots for the 2012 London Olympics, Wenlock and Mandeville.
From the Guardian:
The pair are based on a short story by children's author Michael Morpurgo that tells how they were fashioned from droplets of the steel used to build the Olympic stadium. They will be crucial in raising funds and spreading messages about the games.
Wenlock, named after the Shropshire town of Much Wenlock that helped inspire Pierre de Coubertin to launch the modern Olympics, and Mandeville, inspired by the Buckinghamshire town of Stoke Mandeville, where the Paralympics were founded, will become very familiar in the next two years. The chairman of the London organising committee of the Olympic games (LOCOG), Lord Coe, said the mascots were aimed squarely at children and designed with the digital age in mind. He said they had the most positive reaction in workshops to road test them.
Among the designs rejected at the start of an open pitch process were anthropomorphic pigeons, an animated tea pot and a Big Ben with arms and legs.
Despite the taxi lights atop their heads, Guardian design critic Jonathan Glancey doesn't see much that evokes London in the design of these two characters, except maybe the city's security cameras:
If they have American habits, Mandeville and Wenlock appear to have been conjured from Japanese comic books and computer games. Where they are evidently Londoners is in the look of their cyclopean eyes, that may remind many of the lenses of CCTV cameras staring from pretty much every building, station and street corner in the city.
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