London 2012

I'm sure you've notices that the new 2012 logo is a certain cartoon character engaged in a certain activity... Here's all the previous logos up until 2004. My favourite is Helsinki -->

Comments

[tc]

I like the logo. It's forward thinking and brash and quite different to anything I've seen for previous Olympics. Why is England full of so many reactionaries? Have a look at some of the appalling 'alternative' logos designed by 'joe public'(http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/6722205.stm) Some of them aren't actually logos, they're collages. Idiots!

[Matthew Whitfield]

I do love the public entries. Most of them begin with "I just knocked this up in 20 minutes, and it's better than what those overpaid fools did!", and yet they're all terrible. I can see what the logo is trying to achieve, but I dislike it precisely because it isn't forward looking - taken together with the animated video it looks like they lifted it directly from a Salt'n'Pepper video circa 1987. It's a tragic 80s version of urban modernity, overly inspired by graffiti.

However, as it's staying, I want to start a campaign to get Bill Cosby on board as the official spokesperson to take over from Seb Coe, with a message along the lines of "hey kids, with your beat boxes and your finger lickin', wall taggin', cheek your elders 'tude - get yaself some sportin' action - it's like the jazz, but with more runnin'"

And a black kid could be tagging his back with a spray can wherever he went. That sort of thing.

[AJE]

It won't last. Surely. Was the first line of the post too subtle? Am I the only person who sees it?

[JRWB]

I can't work out which cartoon character you mean, but whoever he is he's going to go blind if he keeps on.

[tc]

Well, I do like the fact that they have avoided the pit-falls of, say, incorporating '2012' into the word 'London' in a 'clever' way - or manipulating London's infamous skyline (what is there again? That big wheel thing, the gherkin building, that awful BT tower, Jamie Cullum's looming forehead, Big Ben) into spelling out the word 'Olympic' or 'Excellence' or 'Achieve' or 'Facile'. So that's good. And what you are forgetting Matthew, is that Salt'n'Pepper were WAY ahead of their time (two white girls from Harrow blacked up with fake accents!) and that to be even beginning to explore their radical aesthetic some twenty years after the inital furore of "Push it" in the public sphere is equivolent to Cadbury's employing Yoko Ono to glue her eyelids open and stick a Curley Wurley up her arse during the ad breaks of Coronation Street. Totally RAD-I-CAL!

Can you still get Curley Wurleys?