Hagerstown Flying Boxcars

131

Flying Boxcars sounds like a name that has to have been made up by the team, except that you're left wondering why a team would come up with a name as weird as Flying Boxcars. So it may help explain things if I tell you that the Flying Boxcar was the name of a cargo plane used by multiple branches of the U.S. Military, as well as the Taiwanese Air Force. And it has a clear tie to Hagerstown, because the factory that made most flying boxcars was in Hagerstown.

But maybe it doesn't actually explain it. I mean, even in a sports landscape that features teams like the Rumble Ponies and the Sod Poodles, this is an odd name. It's in that weird liminal state between normality and whatthefuckery. It's too weird to be a normal name, and it's too normal to be a weird name. As such, it just doesn't work.

It's also a weirdly unimpressive image. Take a look at the other planes that appear in sports team logos. They're almost always fighters, occasionally bombers. Why? Because fighter jets are cool in a way that bombers aren't, and bombers are cool in a way that cargo planes aren't. In terms of coolness, fighter jets are like F1 cars, bombers are like muscle cars, and cargo planes are like...minivans. Don't get me wrong. Minivans are useful for a lot of people. If you've got two or three kids they're a practical vehicle to own. There's a reason you see lots of minivans in suburban neighborhoods and not a lot of F1 cars, and it's not just the cost. But practical ≠ cool. Minivans are about the least cool kind of vehicle you can own, and the fact that they're practical is one of the main reasons they're not cool. Cargo planes are arguably the most practical military planes there are; following the same logic as with minivans, this makes them the least cool military plane.

And don't we want our teams to have cool logos? Granted, after a quarter century of writing for this site (and that's a realization I could probably have done without) I know that a lot of us don't have teams with cool logos, but it is what we want. And at least some teams try to deliver. It's why you have teams named after lions and wolves but not moles or possums, why you have teams named after pirates and kings but not project managers or postal carriers, why even when you look at teams named after non-predatory birds you find teams named after cardinals and ravens but not nuthatches or wrens. But then other teams don't try at all. They go out of their way to be uncool. This team is the epitome of that approach.

So let's talk about the logo. The plane itself I have no complaints about. It's a Fairchild C-119 cargo plane, i.e., a flying boxcar. And it's a pretty good rendering of one if you ignore the hidden baseball bat (which I won't). If the plane was the only thing in the logo it would be about a decent logo, which given the name is about the best anyone could hope for. But no, they decided the logo needed something else, and so they put the Jolly Grey Giant on top of the plane. The proportions of JGG (particularly the arms) imply physical maturity, but all in all he looks quite childlike. Maybe it's the smile, maybe it's the way he's holding onto the controls that are bizarrely sticking out of the plane, maybe it's the fact that he's also holding a bat, maybe it's all of the above...whatever it is, he definitely gives off the vibe of a little boy in a man's body. Furthermore, his childlike appearance makes it look like the plane isn't an actual plane but rather one of those coin-operated rides you used to see outside K-Mart back in the days when you used to see K-Marts. In short, the Jolly Grey Man-Child absolutely ruins this logo, turning it from about as good as one could hope for to about as— well, I was about to say "about as bad as one could imagine" but that just seems to be daring the gods to prove me wrong so I won't say that. But it does definitely ruin the logo.

NOTE: Although only one baseball bat is visible in the logo, I'm going to assume there's one on the other side as well.

Final Score: 131 points.
Penalties: Equipment (egregious), 27 pts; Cartoon, 47 pts; Player, 51 pts; Logo, 12 pts.
Bonuses: Local, -6 pts.