On the internet, content lifespans move at a dizzying pace. In the past month or so, we’ve seen the Philadelphia Flyers new mascot, the googly-eyed, rotund monster known as Gritty, start life as an embarrassing publicity stunt and grow into an obsession, then a movement and, finally, the beginnings of a cult. Recently, he also gained the official blessing of his home city, becoming the first Philadelphia mascot to be welcomed by a formal resolution from the city’s council. The document’s truly worth a read, in particular, because it sums up Gritty’s bizarre trajectory into the public conscious perfectly:
“Gritty has been described as a 7-foot tall orange hellion, a fuzzy eldritch horror, a ghastly empty-eyed Muppet with a Delco beard, a cross of Snuffleupagus and Oscar the Grouch, a deranged orange lunatic, an acid trip of a mascot, a shaggy orange Wookiee-esque grotesquerie, a non-binary leftist icon, an orange menace, a raging id and an antihero. He has been characterized as huggable but also potentially insurrectionary, ridiculous, horrifying, unsettling and absurd.”
To understand why the internet and, later, the far left co-opted the hairy cheese ball so quickly, you only have to look to his debut. There’s something fantastically wacky and magical about his reveal: the completely serious, ESPN-esque animatic echoing on a sea of screens behind him as he makes his entrance, silhouetted by a blinding light show. And when he steps out, we finally see it. The jiggling, wide-eyed monstrosity that is Gritty. The walking equivalent of a big, wet trumpet blast.
Read more here.