Heavy Metal<\/a>. Actually, especially Heavy Metal.<\/em><\/p>\nPossibly my favourite example of a piece of media becoming a name of a pro sports team is the Baltimore Ravens. While many teams are named after a bird, this one has some interesting history. The name Ravens is a reference to Edgar Allan Poe’s 1845 poem The Raven. This isn’t my favourite example only because I love Poe, it’s my favourite because I love the idea of a bunch of meathead Baltimore fans cheering for a character in a 150-year old poem about a guy who misses his girlfriend. And the idea of Terrell Suggs celebrating a sack by doing a brief poetry reading is kind of hilarious, too.<\/p>\n
More recently, movies have become a source for team names in professional sports. When the NBA decided it wanted to expand into Canada in 1993, they chose Toronto and Vancouver to get teams. Toronto formerly had an NBA team named the Huskies until 1947 so the logical choice was to revive that name and respect local heritage. Unforunately, Minnesota now had an NBA team named the Timberwolves and no one was able to come up with a logo that was able to distinguish a Husky clearly enough from a Timberwolf, so a fan contest for a new name was held. We all know where this story goes. The team ends up being named the Raptors (and being really unremarkable if you don’t watch them, disappointing if you do watch, and frustrating if you actually care). I was pretty young when this happened, so I didn’t think about the name choice too much. I was six, so I was wondering why every team ever wasn’t named after a dinosaur and why anyone would choose to eat something that wasn’t a Chicken McNugget*. It was literally only in 2011 when someone pointed out that the Raptors name was a result of the early 90s resurgence in the popularity of dinosaurs – which was a result of Jurassic Park hitting theatres – that I made the connection. It is certainly not a direct connection where money was paid towards either the team or the movie to promote the other. There was no deal struck between Steven Spielberg and the basketball franchise (although Spielberg and the Raptors have had similar runs of shittiness since the naming), and there is no mention of Jurassic Park in the press releases I read about the team name, but I believe the connection is there and in researching everyone seems to agree they were trying to cash in on the dino-mania months after the film’s release. In fact, after the fans sent in their choices for a new team name, the entries were narrowed down to 10 names, including Raptors, T-Rex and – further proving Jurassic Park’s runaway popularity – Dennis Nedry. Another bit of evidence for this connection is that there were no professional sports teams (that I know of, at least) who were named after dinosaurs before the release of the movie.<\/p>\n
*OK, admittedly I’m a bigger dinosaur fan than most people who aren’t six year olds, but where are the dinosaur team names? The University of Calgary has teams named the Dinos but I can’t find any pro teams ever named after dinosaurs. They’re so badass. My best explanations: The animals are cool but the names linguistically tough. Tyranosaurus Rex is the obvious choice but too long. So you can go to T-Rexes but that sounds a looks awkward. Teams don’t end with X for a reason. ‘T-Rex’, like one of the Toronto NBA candidates, is weird and abstract, like all the players combine to make one T-Rex as though it’s some kind of prehistoric Megazord. Also, their arms are so silly. The next most famous dinos are the stegosaurus, the pterodactyl and the triceratops. These are all too long to say and hard to spell. ‘Raptors’ may seem overdue, but they weren’t cool until Jurassic Park turned them from an 18-inch tall animal to a 6-foot tall killing mastermind.<\/em><\/p>\nI’ll admit the connection between Jurassic Park and the Raptors name is a bit tenuous but ultimatey undeniable. Of course, it cannot compare to the Holy Grail of Team Names Based on Movies: The Anaheim Mighty Ducks. As you probably know, The Mighty Ducks was a 1992 non-animated Dinsey movie about a lawyer who is caught drinking and driving and is sentenced to coach a peewee hockey team… because when a judge finds out you have an alcohol problem and make poor life decisions, the first thing they do is force you to spend time with unsupervised children. The movie was a smash hit, making $50 million on a $10 million budget and was a small cultural phenomenon for Canadian (and plenty of American) kids. In 1993,\u00a0 The Walt Disney Corporation got a brand new NHL franchise which they chose to name The Mighty Ducks of Anaheim to create some good synergy between a successful fiction movie and a hockey team in California which could use all the help it could get. So what began as a fictional sports team became a multi-million dollar ongoing business venture of a pro sports team. After this, things just get out of control. A fan contest was held to name the mascot, a duck\/human hybrid, of the (real) Mighty Ducks and the winner was the name Wildwing. Wildwing’s face was used to make the logo of the Anaheim Mighty Ducks which was then used as the logo for the fake Mighty Ducks in Mighty Ducks 2. After Mighty Ducks 2, Wildwing became the star of an animated show called The Mighty Ducks, which also spawned a direct-to-video movie. So to get this straight, a live-action film was made, which was parlayed into a real professional hockey team, who then created a mascot, who inspired the logo for the movie’s sequel, and then was given his own TV show, which was spun-off into its own movie. I don’t know if that’s Walt Disney’s synergistic wet dream, Naomi Klein’s corporate takeover nightmare or the inspiration for Inception but it’s… it’s something. It’s impressive, albeit in a creepy way.<\/p>\n
When we look at the Mighty Ducks story as exemplar of the larger idea of the intersection of sports name and pop culture as a whole, it shows just how hard corporations are willing to work to milk every cross-promotional dollar out of these teams, characters and ideas, or as they see them, properties. Of course Edgar Allen Poe didn’t intend for his poem to spawn an NFL franchise but the idea only requires one connection. There’s something charming about choosing a single song, poem, business or animal to represent you and your city, as it’s something you probably grew up valuing, or at least being exposed to. The Ducks example seems more focused on exploiting something to death, milking it until it’s dry, and on top of all that, it’s a connection that was never really genuine in the first place.<\/p>\n
New franchises have been handed out only sparingly since the late 1990s, but if the names of stadiums are any indication, there will be a lot money behind trying to lock in the next team name, too. I don’t think the future of pro sports will see the Ducks as an exception, but a precedent. People often point the Green Bay Packers as a great example of sports surviving and succeeding without corporate interference. The team is owned by the citizens of Green Bay and their stadium is staffed by volunteers. The reality is that this team got their name from the packing plant that bought their original uniforms. The intersection of sports and commerce is inescapable, and pop culture is more powerful than ever.\u00a0 The Anaheim Mighty Ducks were purchased from Disney and renamed simply the Anaheim Ducks, but this may prove to a corporate step backwards. A near-lockout of the NFL and what is looking like a lost season in the NBA will cause leagues to monetize everything about existing teams and get in on the ground floor of making money should the leagues ever see the need to add new teams to be added to the mix. The corporate renaming of stadiums was once seen as tasteless, but now its common practice. The Mighty Ducks, by their very name advertising an external property, may soon prove to be the rule, not the exception. ‘What’s in a name?’ used to be an extremely abstract question. As time passes, the definitive answer will probably just continue to be ‘money.’<\/p>\n
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