“The best way to do that is to make almost like a puppet face.” “When he was on the ice, I wanted people even in the nosebleed section to see - is he angry? Is he happy?” Allen tells me. Gritty has frequently been likened to a Muppet, a comparison that Allen finds astute, as he drew a lot of inspiration from Jim Henson’s early Muppet creations and work for the 1982 film The Dark Crystal. Concept artist Brian Allen of FlyLand Design Early concept art of Gritty, by Brian Allen. “If you choose a bull, it’s gotta be aggressive, or if you choose a hawk, it’s gotta be cunning.”Ī monster, though, can be whatever. Because with a monster, it doesn’t come with preconceived stereotypes,” Allen told me. I would so hug Gritty.)Īnd because most of the typical mascot animals were already spoken for by other hockey teams - only the New York Rangers lack a mascot, now that the Flyers have one (though the Detroit Red Wings only have a somewhat confusing cartoon octopus) - “we eventually settled on a monster. All they told him, he says, was that they were hoping for a mascot you’d want to high-five but maybe not hug. The Flyers contacted Allen after seeing the “edgier” versions of the mascots he had designed for the 2017 Georgia-Auburn college football game as part of a Chick-fil-A ad campaign. Remarkably, Allen tells me, the Gritty we know is pretty much the Gritty he drew when he sat down to sketch a rough draft. (Philadelphia’s three other major sports teams - the Eagles, the 76ers, and of course the Phillies - all have beloved mascots in Swoop, Franklin the Dog, and the Phillie Phanatic, respectively.) He was designed by the freelance graphic designer Brian Allen the impetus for creating Gritty, according to this Adweek article, was that the son of the Flyers’ COO asked why the team didn’t have a mascot in a city lousy with them. He was introduced on September 24, 2018, as the hockey team’s very first mascot. Gritty is the new mascot for the Philadelphia Flyers. The easiest question to answer about Gritty is who he is and where he came from. Ho ho ho! Gritty Christmas! Icon Sportswire via Getty Images Gritty, Explained An explainer in four acts by Emily VanDerWerff Act 1: Gritty the mascot The whole thing with Paddington 2 wouldn’t have happened otherwise. There is a hunger for this new meaning all around us. We want the morals of religious stories, but in a new secular language that preaches a desire to strive for the common good. We want authoritative figures to say, “This is right, and this is wrong.” We long for superheroes to save us and demonstrate the power of good when it stands against evil.

I’m wondering, more and more, if what we want most in 2010s America - and what we are desperately lacking - is moral clarity. (This says as much about the flaws of Twitter as anything else, I’m aware.) It feels, at least to me, like every day, the world becomes a little more ghoulish and harder to bear, and if I’m having a good day, well, all I have to do is hop on Twitter to be reminded of why I should maybe feel otherwise. But so is the sense that some fundamental promise of America has been lost in the name of progress weighted too heavily toward one side of our capitalist ledger. So, yes, the free-floating fear of death is definitely a thing. We might all die from the aliens who keep making cameo appearances in the hinterlands of our credible news sources. We might all die from artificial intelligence taking our place.

We might all die from the changing climate. The end is nigh, but what form it takes is open to suggestion. How can it be that we’re living on a planet that is, in many ways, the best place to live in human history, but also on the verge of cataclysm? I don’t think I’m alone in feeling like something has broken in the world in the 21st century. That’s what we were led to believe, at least. The world was supposed to get better, right? Things were supposed to start making more sense.

Let it snow window meme