NHL’s New Seattle Kraken Announce Name & Logos

[CaliforniaGlowin]

11 minutes ago, DTConcepts said:

Is anyone else upset they didn't go full Mighty Ducks and make the most gaudy, tentacle filled logo they could've? Their identity is very slick, modern, and professional, but I was really hoping they would go balls-to-the-wall on the Kraken identity.

Y'all talk about being a minor league name, a cartoon logo would be really minor league.

[tp49]

I'm probably one of the more "traditionalist" types around here but I have to say I really, really, really like the identity.  Don't love the name but damn that identity is nice.

 

1 hour ago, BringBackTheVet said:

 

What the actual F?  They unveiled a jersey that won't be available for more than a full year?  Is this just the "adizero authentic" that's going to take so long?  Or even the reps?

 

10 minutes ago, DG_ThenNowForever said:

A year before people can buy jerseys (and missing the 2020 holiday season) is so so dumb and so so NHL.

 

Welcome to pro hockey, Seattle! This is how the NHL operates!

Putting both of these posts together because I'm wondering if supply chain issues due to COVID might have something to do with this.  Would seem a sort of, maybe, possibly good explanation for that kind of delay.

[Corvus]

1 hour ago, BringBackTheVet said:

 

What the actual F?  They unveiled a jersey that won't be available for more than a full year?  Is this just the "adizero authentic" that's going to take so long?  Or even the reps?

 

Adidas hasn't tweeted any additional details. 

[GFB]

1 hour ago, kw11333 said:

It looks like 99% of things you see on Behance. Sports marketing people don't use those colours and shadows on logos for a reason.

 

If for any reason, sports execs are on this forum, hire people with experience in marketing a major league club. 

Survey says:

 

Quote

It didn’t take long for online merchandise shoppers to start snatching up the Kraken upon its release.

 

Online retail giant Fanatics, the NHL’s official retail partner, reported Friday that national sales of Seattle Kraken merchandise were already 50% higher than what the Vegas Golden Knights had over their initial 24 hours of making team items available back in 2017. In fact, Kraken merchandise occupied four of the top-five top-selling spot across all sports and all Fanatics-run online platforms as of midday.

 

“They’re the No. 1 selling team across all sports today,’’ Fanatics spokesman Seth Schlechter said. 

 

 

 

[Guest darkpiranha]

2 hours ago, CaliforniaGlowin said:

It's fake, but OMG

 

 

I'm buying this today if wishes can ever be turned into reality.  

 

 

[monkeypower]

Here's the true test... seeing it against all the other logos on the mothership page.

 

[MEANS]

Passes the true test, now Washington......you got some work to do.

[Gothamite]

17 hours ago, IceCap said:

The thing is that we can pinpoint when all of this happened. 

Travel guide literature of the 18th century. Which became incredibly popular. And prominent authors in this genre ended up conflating the old Norse kraken legend with unrelated legends about giant squids. I made a post in the old thread where I sourced all of this stuff down to the first instance of it happening. 

 

So while you can point to Santa Clause and Sinterklass as being representations of Saint Nicholas of Myra evolving through cultural mythological drift (though the OG Saint Nic was very real by all accounts)? The kraken is a case where I can pinpoint the moment where that transition happened and go "Erik Pontoppidan just conflated two separate things in a book that became popular." 

 

Now does this have any effect whatsoever on the way most people view the kraken? No. Not really. Erik Pontoppidan conflated two things in a popular book and that set the public image of both as one in stone. It is what it is. 

 

Still, there's a reason I can enjoy Santa Clause as a jolly reminder of one of my favourite seasons whereas I can't get over my dislike of the Seattle Kraken leaning into the squid thing. 

 

And I know that's a niche group I fall into for not being able to get over that, but it is how I feel. And I do feel like I've arrived at that honestly

 

I don't doubt at all that you come by it honestly.  If you didn't, I wouldn't be so interested in discussing it with you.

 

First of all, let me acknowledge your passion on the subject.  One of the things I love most about this board is how much we all care about things that so many let slide right by them.

 

I am curious about your reaction.  In the Sinterklass example, most of our popular concept of Santa Claus comes from Thomas Nast.  The drift isn't really all that mysterious.  We can pinpoint specific issues of Harper's Weekly where Nast introduced the rotund, figure, the popular red suit, his home at the North Pole, and many other elements essential to the story.  Nast picked up on a cultural legend that had previously been borrowed from another country's legend and expanded upon it.  Knowing how it developed doesn't impact my experience at all.

 

That's one of the things that I love about language.  Words are always shifting and moving.  Sometimes they end up meaning the opposite of what they once did.  Like "silly", which once meant "worthy" in the noble sense before switching around to mean "foolish".  So I guess I'm predisposed to enjoying the cultural drift of myths from one country to another.

 

Now, I'll admit that there is one cultural malapropism that still bothers me, and it's a geeky one, even for this forum:  Elisha Cook, Jr.

 

 

Hang on, stay with me.  In Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, there is a supporting character named Wilmer, henchman to the antagonist. Humphrey Bogart's Sam Spade loves getting under his skin.  In the novel, Wilmer is clearly coded as gay, although neither Spade nor Hammet comes out and says it.  In the film, he's portrayed In the movie, he's portrayed by Elisha Cook, Jr. less as gay and more as a dumb and impetuous boy, a "pocket edition desperado" in Spade's words.

 

 

But the character wasn't totally neutered for the screen; at one point, Spade sneeringly calls Wilmer a "gunsel", which was at the time slang for a youthful homosexual boy.  Hammet snuck that one by his editor and the censors because they presumed that it meant "gunman." 

 

 

And since Bogart introduced the word into the popular consciousness through this film, that's exactly what it means today.

 

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/gunsel

 

And now every time I read it in hard-boiled crime or hear the word used to flavor an episode of Deadwood, it's just a little like nails on a chalkboard.  A word used wrongly that everyone has decided it's okay to use wrongly and now that wrongly is right.  Doesn't bother me enough to keep me from watching Maltese Falcon a couple times every year, but it does bother me.

 

So I dunno.  I guess I offer that anecdote in the spirit of camaraderie.  I get why it bugs you.

 

Just don't get me started on James Bond's watchband.... 

[IceCap]

1 hour ago, DG_ThenNowForever said:

A year before people can buy jerseys (and missing the 2020 holiday season) is so so dumb and so so NHL.

 

Welcome to pro hockey, Seattle! This is how the NHL operates!

This league's number one draft pick is going to "Team TBD." Jerseys arriving on time was never happening. 

[FlyEaglesFly76]

Starting to like the name the more I think of it. I really like sea travel history and the mythology that comes with it. It does sound silly but if anything else, it’s unique 

[ghost316]

The Krakenphobia has dissipated a bit hasn't it?

The fear of a goofy-looking identity has been quelled somewhat by a very sharp looking set of logos.

I'm glad that Seattle had the balls to go with this name.

If they focus more on what the Kraken suggests (the power, mystery, danger of the ocean) rather than the actual visual of the monster, it'll work great.

Think of all the oceanic imagery, icons, symbols, that can be pulled in to the branding, while keeping it classy.

However, on the other hand, the theme also allows them to be a little "out there", for the kids, promotions, novelty stuff.

I think it's going to be a blast! Good work so far Seattle.

[ebod39]

3 hours ago, kw11333 said:

It looks like 99% of things you see on Behance. Sports marketing people don't use those colours and shadows on logos for a reason.

 

If for any reason, sports execs are on this forum, hire people with experience in marketing a major league club. 

 

 

 

 

[IceCap]

48 minutes ago, Gothamite said:

In the Sinterklass example, most of our popular concept of Santa Claus comes from Thomas Nast.  The drift isn't really all that mysterious.  We can pinpoint specific issues of Harper's Weekly where Nast introduced the rotund, figure, the popular red suit, his home at the North Pole, and many other elements essential to the story.  Nast picked up on a cultural legend that had previously been borrowed from another country's legend and expanded upon it.  Knowing how it developed doesn't impact my experience at all.

All correct, and well said! 

The difference is that Sinterklass is himself an example of cultural drift from

the legends of the very real Saint Nicolas of Myra. The drift from Saint Nicolas of Myra to Sinterklass is far less clear cut. It involves a great degree of cultural diffusion as the early Christian Church spread westward and northward out of the Mediterranean and into Germanic and Celtic Europe. 

 

Saint Nicolas got conflated with a number of European pagan figures, the most prominent being Odin. An old man with a beard who flies around in the sky with flying animals in late December. 

This mixture of Saint Nicolas of Myra and Odin (with a few other pagan elements tossed in) morphed into Sinterklass. Who, as you outlined, was picked up by Thomas Nast and reinvented as Santa Clause (Father Christmas was a separate syncretism of early Christian concepts and pagan beliefs who got folded into the Saint Nicolas/Odin fusion of Sinterklass later on). 

 

Nast drew on a lot of the traditional Sinterklass imagery (beard, red and white outfit, etc). While modern Santa is very much a result of his creation the elements he played with were arrived at by close to a thousand years of mythological drift. 

 

I admit this may be me splitting hairs, but it seems as if Nast just took Sinterklass and gave him a makeover to be more marketable

He most certainly drew from a variety of sources (and made some other stuff up) but he was mostly rejiggering a concept that had evolved through centuries of mythological drift. 

 

The kraken, as a concept, never really got that. Partially as a result of early modern Scandinavia viewing their viking/Norse past with a sense of embarrassment. Studying this stuff was pretty rare in the centuries after Christianization, with a lot of it written off as "pagan barbarism." 

So a lot of the sagas we now consider classic Norse literature were just sitting in dusty libraries for centuries, neglected by historians and literary scholars alike. In short? Society wouldn't let the kraken properly drift A myth can't drift if no one is spreading it. 

 

The late 18th century saw the stirrings of what would becomes the Nordic revival

movement, when academics began to study older Norse history seriously, no longer confined by the view that the "pagan" past should be written off as "barbaric." 

Enter Erik Pontoppidan, a Danish scholar and clergyman. He would have been aware of the kraken myth thanks to this revival. And he also wrote travel log literature. 
He came across unrelated tales of giant squids and slapped the "kraken" name on them. A few movies later and here we are re: what the kraken is in popular imagination. 

 

It may seem like splitting hairs but I see far less cultural drift in the case of the kraken. Whereas Santa Clause arrived to us, via Sinterklass, as a result of centuries of Christian and pagan cultural diffusion. 

 

Of course you could argue that the kraken myth entered the popular consciousness later and therefore the process was "sped up" as societal development tends to speed up the further along you are. That would be a very fair point to make. 

 

1 hour ago, Gothamite said:

And since Bogart introduced the word into the popular consciousness through this film, that's exactly what it means today.

Ok. That's really interesting.

 

1 hour ago, Gothamite said:

So I dunno.  I guess I offer that anecdote in the spirit of camaraderie.  I get why it bugs you.

Heh. Thanks. I know I'm in the nichiest of niches one this one but it's what it is. It's far easier to accept thanks to the excellent identity. I really do love how even something as basic as the number font gives me a salt-cracked seafaring vibe. It might bring me around in due time. Today isn't that day though. 

 

Anyhow that was a very interesting read. And again, my apologies for my earlier loss of composure. 

[Gothamite]

 

1 minute ago, IceCap said:

And again, my apologies  

 

No worries.  We've all been there!  Glad we can get back to pals, because I really do enjoy chatting with you.  And your perspective has always enlightened these conversations, even if I haven't always agreed with your conclusions.  Maybe especially when. 

[-kj]

24 minutes ago, IceCap said:

Santa Clause

 

Ok, now that you've typed it that way a bunch of times... am I missing something?  I thought it was Claus, except in the case of a few movies.

 

And to be equal opportunity...

  

1 hour ago, Gothamite said:

he's portrayed by Elijah Cook, Jr

 

Isn't it Elisha, not Elijah?

 

 

[El Scorcho]

4 hours ago, kw11333 said:

It looks like 99% of things you see on Behance. Sports marketing people don't use those colours and shadows on logos for a reason.

 

If for any reason, sports execs are on this forum, hire people with experience in marketing a major league club. 

 

 

 

Not only did they do what you're suggesting (and obviously so, the execution is phenomenal), but the visual parts of this identity are perhaps the most universally liked unveiling for a major sports team on this board in memory. 

[Digby]

So the issue is not the name as what It represents but the literal name name, is what I’ve gleaned. Like we have these cool creatures that straddle myth and reality, but Kraken (weird plural thing) and Squids (minor league) and Octopi (what?) are all words that are kinda weird as sports teams nicknames. This thread, and trying to legitimately think through this rebrand, is a trip. 

[The_Admiral]

Logo passes the class-composite test, name emphatically does not. 

[Corvus]

30 minutes ago, Digby said:

So the issue is not the name as what It represents but the literal name name, is what I’ve gleaned. Like we have these cool creatures that straddle myth and reality, but Kraken (weird plural thing) and Squids (minor league) and Octopi (what?) are all words that are kinda weird as sports teams nicknames. This thread, and trying to legitimately think through this rebrand, is a trip. 

 

If the team didn't exist before, it's not a re-brand is it? 

 

A branding?

[tBBP]

4 hours ago, kw11333 said:

It looks like 99% of things you see on Behance. Sports marketing people don't use those colours and shadows on logos for a reason.

 

If for any reason, sports execs are on this forum, hire people with experience in marketing a major league club. 

 

 

 

4 hours ago, BrandMooreArt said:

 

they did. 

 

If dude only knew...

 

2 hours ago, MEANS said:

Passes the true test, now Washington......you got some work to do.

 

Hold up--are the Capitals no longer using the Weagle as their primary? (Or was that script always the primary and I just never paid it any mind until now?)