fictional teams

[Ferdinand Cesarano]

 

During Saturday's AAF game between Orlando and Atlanta on TNT, there was a commercial for the New York State Lottery that featured fans of a fictitious baseball team, many of whom were dressed in the team's yellow-and-black gear.

 

Here is the establishing shot of the crowd.

 

 

We can see someone wearing an unbuttoned home jersey; and, in front of that person, is the commercial's main character, who is wearing a buttoned road jersey. Both jerseys feature the same arched "New York" wordmark.

 

 

Here is the main character.

 

 

 

There are three caps pictured.

 

The main character is wearing a black cap with an "NY" insignia.

 

 

 

Another fan is wearing a yellow cap with the bird logo that can be seen on the left sleeve of the main character's jersey.

 

 

 

 

And a vendor is wearing a yellow cap with the "NY" insignia, smartly accessorised with a yellow polo shirt bearing the bird logo.

 

 

 

That cap can be seen on the head of a jolly face-painting fan.

 

 

 

 

The fan with the yellow bird cap is wearing a black jacket that has the "NY" insignia, over a white T-shirt with the bird logo reversed.

 

 

 

Finally, we see that the main character's jersey has the "NY" insignia on the right sleeve.

 

 

 

We never get any indication of the team's nickname; but, considering the logo and the colour scheme, I am willing to bet that it is meant to be "Canaries".

 

This is a quality production. Even the unorthodox choice not to have the letters of the "NY" insignia cross or interlock, as is traditional in New York baseball, was put to artistic use in the painting of the separate letters on the two cheeks of the fan.

 

And the font, which is non-standard yet not awkwardly distorted, makes for a very attractive wordmark and initials insignia.

 

So I say that this is very well done.

 

[Gothamite]

That’s very unusual, to put that much work into a fictional team for a commercial.  They usually pull from stock.  The football uniforms from The Replacements get a lot of use, because they look very much like NFL uniforms.

 

I’m not familiar with it, but could that be from another production?

 

And the uniforms might be gold, but that bird is in no way a canary.   That team my friend, is the Pigeons.  

[IceCap]

6 minutes ago, Gothamite said:

And the uniforms might be gold, but that bird is in no way a canary.   That team my friend, is the Pigeons.  

Either that or an alternate universe Yankees team that kept the Orioles name upon moving to New York

[AstroCree]

Like Mike replaced the Clippers with the Los Angeles Knights.

[DCarp1231]

Boston Rebels from The Game Plan look like repurposed South Carolina uniforms

 

 

Gotham City Rogues & Rapid City Monuments from The Dark Knight Rises

[Stampman]

When done well they can be real cool.

I've seen a variety of sites online dedicated to fictional teams & other sites that have a section for them.

 

So this could be a real cool thread.

 

[Ferdinand Cesarano]

10 hours ago, Gothamite said:

That’s very unusual, to put that much work into a fictional team for a commercial.  They usually pull from stock....

 

I’m not familiar with it, but could that be from another production?

 

This is definitely newly produced, for the New York State Lottery. There is dialogue in the commercial between the main character and his mitt. (Yes, the mitt talks.)  Also, in the photo that shows the "NY" sleeve patch, we can see a lottery ticket that is about to emerge from the mitt, as it would do from a machine.

 

So the mitt talks, and then essentially barfs out a lottery ticket. But the faulty internal logic of the scene in no way detracts from the superb design of the uniform.

 

 

10 hours ago, Gothamite said:

And the uniforms might be gold, but that bird is in no way a canary.   That team my friend, is the Pigeons.

 

A team with the name "Pigeons" would have to be blue. Indeed, the blue-clad NYCFC had long been unofficially referred to as "the Pigeons" by many people. And the team has officialised this by placing a pigeon logo on the shirt...

 

 

...and by offering pigeon merchandise for sale.

 

 

There is just no way that a yellow team could be called "Pigeons".

 

 

10 hours ago, Ice_Cap said:

Either that or an alternate universe Yankees team that kept the Orioles name upon moving to New York

 

In that case, John Thorn couldn't have employed his faulty reasoning to deny official recognition within Major League Baseball of the franchise continuity involved in the 1902 Orioles' move to New York. 

[Gothamite]

1 hour ago, Ferdinand Cesarano said:

A team with the name "Pigeons" would have to be blue. Indeed, the blue-clad NYCFC had long been unofficially referred to as "the Pigeons" by many people. And the team has officialised this by placing a pigeon logo on the shirt...

 

 

Oh, I know that full well.  Better than most, since I was the person who first coined the name back in 2014.  

 

But in a world of blue Rays and green Eagles, I think we can have a gold pigeon.   Because there’s no way this:

 

 

is intended to be a canary.     Especially when the rest of the design is, as you note, so solid. 

[ChicagoOakland]

How have we gone this long without mentioning the painfully generic Miami Sharks from Any Given Sunday?

 

Sidenote: is it me, or are all black uniforms for a Miami team a REALLY bad idea?

[Gothamite]

Any Given Sunday went waaaaay out of its way to stress how not the NFL it was.  Stone starts the film with a closeup shot on their fictional league logo, the script has characters explicitly mention in dialogue that they’re not the NFL, and the costume designer even worked to create uniforms that didn’t have the NFL aesthetic.  That Shark uniform could never have been confused with an NFL uniform of the time, with its monochrome black over black over black. 

 

Ironic, then, that the NFL has since ditched that classic aesthetic to the point where all-black doesn’t look out of place anymore. 

[MCM0313]

1 hour ago, Gothamite said:

 

Oh, I know that full well.  Better than most, since I was the person who first coined the name back in 2014.  

 

But in a world of blue Rays and green Eagles, I think we can have a gold pigeon.   Because there’s no way this:

 

 

is intended to be a canary.     Especially when the rest of the design is, as you note, so solid. 

*yellow

 

I'm not sure the designers were terribly worried about what kind of bird it was. It just looks to me like a random bird...and it isn't yellow or gold, but black. So...crows? That would be an awesome name. But it is shaped more like a pigeon.

[AgentColon2]

I always enjoy high school fictional football teams.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High Wolves

[Gothamite]

3 hours ago, MCM0313 said:

*yellow

 

I'm not sure the designers were terribly worried about what kind of bird it was. It just looks to me like a random bird...and it isn't yellow or gold, but black. So...crows? That would be an awesome name. But it is shaped more like a pigeon.

 

That’s too dark to be yellow. It’s pretty clearly athletic gold.  

 

Crows would have been a great choice.  And that’s closer to a crow than a canary.  I’m okay with that.  

 

[Gothamite]

3 hours ago, AgentColon2 said:

 

 

Sheesh.  What was it with 80s comedies and breasts?  Seems like every film had a gratuitous and sometimes incongruous jiggle shot. 

[SFGiants58]

11 minutes ago, Gothamite said:

 

Sheesh.  What was it with 80s comedies and breasts?  Seems like every film had a gratuitous and sometimes incongruous jiggle shot. 

 

...and thinly-veiled homoeroticism mixed in with casual homophobia. Those two qualities, along with attempted or completed sexual assault, define 1980s teen comedies.

 

Heathers is one of my favorite films for how thoroughly it mocks this type of movie.

[Echo]

17 minutes ago, Gothamite said:

 

Sheesh.  What was it with 80s comedies and breasts?  Seems like every film had a gratuitous and sometimes incongruous jiggle shot. 

Hey man, we didn't have free porn a mouse click away back then.  We had to take our jiggles where we could get them.

[Ferdinand Cesarano]

6 minutes ago, Gothamite said:

4 hours ago, MCM0313 said:

*yellow

 

That’s too dark to be yellow. It’s pretty clearly athletic gold. 

 

It's canary yellow.

 

4 hours ago, MCM0313 said:

I'm not sure the designers were terribly worried about what kind of bird it was. It just looks to me like a random bird.

 

Right. There's nothing ornithological about it. It is a generic bird.

 

4 hours ago, MCM0313 said:

...and it isn't yellow or gold, but black.

 

The bird is black against a yellow background. But a careful examination of the crowd shot reveals the existence of yet a fourth cap: a black cap with the bird in yellow.

 

 

 

 

Ladies and gentlemen, your New York Canaries.

 

[monkeypower]

The Dillon Panthers, which I understand is semi-fictitious as it's based on the jerseys of an actual high school.

 

 

And then the East Dillon Lions.

[MCM0313]

7 minutes ago, monkeypower said:

The Dillon Panthers, which I understand is semi-fictitious as it's based on the jerseys of an actual high school.

 

 

And then the East Dillon Lions.

Wasn't the team in the movie just black and white?

[4_tattoos]

Always liked the look of the Cowboys from Little Giants. I mean, would it have killed Jerry Jones to add this to Dallas' rotation?