Rocket City Trash Pandas

90

I will be so glad when this trend ends. Sod Poodles. Rumble Ponies. And now, Trash Pandas.

And it is going to end. You know that, right? It will pass just as surely as the 1990s trend of hockey teams with "Ice _________" names ended, just as surely as the 1970s trend with all of its powder blue baseball jerseys ended. Maybe one or two teams will last a while, just as the the Rockford IceHogs and Pensacola Ice Pilots are still around. But most of these are going to go away, because these aren't names that are meant to last. They're names that are meant to be trendy, sell a shit-ton of merchandise, and get thrown in the trash where they belong while the team either hops on the next hot trend or decides to go with a "classic" name.

It can't come soon enough.

The Rocket City business I can almost tolerate. The team is located in Madison, Alabama, which is a suburb of Huntsville. Huntsville, for those who don't know, is home to the Marshall Space Flight Center. If you check out Huntsville on Google Maps with the "satellite" option turned on, you can see the U.S. Space and Rocket Center (a little ways north of the Marshall Space Flight Center) just off Interstate 565, with a full-size Saturn rocket on the grounds. So the area definitely has a legitimate tie to rockets. Why they couldn't just call the team Huntsville instead of Rocket City I don't know, but it's not so bad.

But then we get to...you know.

In case you haven't figured it out yet, trash panda is a slang term for raccoons. Raccoons have nothing to do with the space program. Obviously teams in the Huntsville area are not required to have teams named after the space program, but the use of Rocket City implies they wanted to head in that direction, does it not? But I suppose if they wanted to have a space-themed nickname, they wouldn't have needed to have a space-themed locative. So really, this is about trying to have it both ways.

And I wouldn't mind that if the nickname they'd chosen didn't, you know, suck. But it does.

The logo isn't much better. It features a raccoon in what I assume is supposed to be a rocket made out of a trash can, but the proportions are wrong. That's either the smallest trash can I've ever seen or the biggest raccoon, and if those are the options I'm really hoping for the smallest trash can. Raccoons are creepy enough at the size they normally are. In any case, the relative size of the two things makes the trash can less of an improvised rocket and more of an improvised jetpack. And don't get me wrong, that's cool in its own way. Frankly I'd probably be willing to let all the goofiness in the logo slide if they had just named the team the Rocket City Raccoons instead. I wouldn't understand why they'd picked Raccoons for the nickname, but whatever.

Instead they had to go with Trash Pandas.

Oh, well. I'm sure the name will be gone soon, and hopefully the next one will be better.

Final Score: 90 points.
Penalties: Humanoid (the eyes and teeth), 30 pts; Cartoon, 47 pts; Name, 10 pts; Logo, 12 pts; .
Bonuses: Graphic, -9 pts.