In Depth Look at Off-the-Rails History of Roller Coaster Mascots
To start us out on this in-depth summery of this panel I'd like to take a moment to thank my co-panelist and friend Grey, who I literally could not have put this together without. You're literally the best and you put out the fire in my brain when I found out I had this panel WAY to close for comfort to the con. I'd also like to thank my friend Capser for letting me stay in his room at anthrocon because I didn't have a hotel booked.
Moving onto the actual summary, hello and welcome everyone! This panel covers many examples of roller coaster mascots, with a heavy focus on our animal themed friends. We'll cover a bit of general knowlege abot mascots, a surface level look at the history of coaster mascots and when they became popular, the previously mentioned examples, and finally a look at some of the merch that is made with the mascots and what makes good coaster t-shirts.
So why do we use mascots? For furries it really takes little explination, our fursona's are essentially our mascots and they're a way that we want the world to perceive us. Of course this is most common when looking at brand entities such as theme parks as seen in the slide above. Mascots give us a way for our brains to interperate what kind of image an entity wants to put forward. Most useful for this discussion without diving fully in are our theme park mascots. These mascots are used as walk-around characters or used in commercials and other marketing material as a stand in for the park itself. My personal favorite out of the bunch here is Orangebird, doesn't he look like a Backyardigan?
Of course these examples are probably more familiar to everyone, we've all seen the commercials around christmas with the Coca-Cola bears, or the Trix the Rabbit commercials. These Mascots are more about selling us products, or to help give a message like in Smokey the Bear's case, in a friendly way.
And these last examples before we truely get into what we came here for, the mascots that represent places and events. Location based mascots are most utilized in Japan like our friend Sarasa-chan here, but that hasn't stopped us in the US from adopting a few of our own like Gritty here. Gritty still is the mascot for the Philidelphia flyers but that hasn't stopped him from also becoming what is essentially Philidelphia's mascot in general. As for our event mascots we have to breifly mention the amazing Olympics mascots that they make, pull out for the event, and then shelve never to be seen again. It's such a shame too! Look at how cute Vinicus and Tom are!
Alright lets get into what we really all came here for. To start us out lets breifly talk about roller coaster mascots in general as they're slightly different than a theme park mascot or any of our other examples. Coasters are esentially just big kenetic pieces of art that people love to climb onto and get thrown around as fast as we can safely make them go, so why do they need a mascot? Coaster mascots mostly exist to give riders a way into the theme or story that's been built with the ride, to set expectations for what kind of ride they're getting onto.
In a moment we'll get into the different examples of roller coaster mascots, but first I want to talk about when we started giving these giant machines little guys to represent them. First off this is a very hard thing to actually research, we know that coasters haven't always been given mascots. The first coaster opened in 1942 called Centrifugal Railway and for decades after this they were all named similarly, either having the same name as previous or called Coaster or Roller Coaster or something that's vaugely descriptive like Leap the Dips. The first coaster that I found that I was pretty confident to say probably opened with a type of mascot was one of two coasters named Jackrabbit that both opened in 1920, one in Kennywood, PN and the other in Seabreeze, NY. I'm still not 100% certain that these were definitvly the first to do it but they were the first I could find to have pictures on RCDB that had signage that looked at least reminicent of the time that they would have been built. (I've also since hosting this panel visited Kennywood and seen signage near the ride that indicates that it would have opened with its Jackrabbit signage.) I'd also like to take a moment for the Wild Mice like the one on the
Okay so that's probably around when we started giving roller coaster's mascots, but what about WHEN it got popular to do so? We really did not hit the ground running with this, the graph at the bottom of the slide shows the number of coasters opened every year with mascots. I tracked from 1973 to 2016, and marked several notable coasters that opened during those years at the bottom. What surprised me most about this was that the popularity spike in giving coasters mascots didn't occur in the mid-80s like I expected it to. It certainly starts picking up there but the real spike occured in the late-90s early 2000s! Perhaps this shouldn't be such a surprise but I very much expecting the spike to occur with the opening of one of the classic rides like the Beast. Dueling Dragons opens during the spike but there wasn't really one coaster to point at and say "Yeah thats the coaster that inspidered all the others to do this." Definetly just part of the changing times and trends of the 90s.
Lets finally get to some examples of roller coaster mascots shall we? In this slide I've split the most common groups of mascots up, excluding the animals since they are by far the most popular and our focus today. Of course we have our car themed coasters like Verbolten with the Autobahn, Lightning Rod with its souped-up muscle car, and the MANY NASCAR, Formula One, and Drag Racing themed coasters. We have Aliens with Swarm and the Flight of Fears. We also have our weather themed coasters like all the Cyclones, Boulder Dash, and Windstorm,a category full of mostly disastorous phenomena. Now we get slightly stranger with our categories with one I've called "Just some guy!" represented here by our buddy Goliath and Regina which is a Japanese wooden coaster that's themed around a steampunk anime woman? Thats offical concept art of Regina by the way. And now our last category which I could only call "Go girl! Give us nothing!" this category is for all the other coasters that even if they have a name that's supposed to give us expectations for the ride still doesn't deliver on this front. What in the world is Infusion supposed to be? Racer 75? This is nothing! Do better!
To start us out on our look at some examples we gotta talk about all our big cats, a very staple mascot probably as a result in the many coasters named Wildcat. Another factor responsible for the quantity of these mascots is definetly Busch Gardens, namely Busch Gardens Tampa. BG:T while being one part amusment park is also part zoo and they keep several types of large cats on their property. On this slide you can see Kumba, Tigris, and Cheetah Hunt all from BG:T, and while I don't have an example of them here I think a shoutout to Gwazi is in order, before becoming Iron Gwazi, Gwazi was a dueling wooden coaster, one side having a lion mascot and the other having a tiger. Together Gwazi was supposed to be a Lion/Tiger hybrid locked in a internal battle for which side was stronger, which is definetly one of the stranger justifications I've heard for coaster themeing but it was cool! Cheetah Hunt takes their mascot and themeing to a whole other level, the coaster car is shaped like a cheetah, theres cheetah themeing in the queue, and the track itself replicates a cheetah's movements at one point! It's a coaster that took its theme and ran as fast as it could with it making it a stand out for coaster mascots.
Bears are another relatively common mascot for coasters to have, mostly taking their inspiration from The Beast at Kings Island. The Grizzly both at Kings Dominion and at Great America both opt to have their mascot be pictured as giant paws generally wreaking havoc either on the coaster tracks or ripping through the material of the shirt they're selling. An exception to this depiction is The Great Bear at Hershey park, they do an excellent job at showing off the whole bear, opting more for a bear spirit than a real bear.
We also have one of the logos from The Bat up here, which will be further elaborated on later. Before moving on though, we have to talk about Griffon and Gatekeeper. Both are griffons, both are gold, both of them heavly use blue, they're not part of the same company, so like whats going on? I feel like we could have gotten slightly more original with the color schemes at least. We'll get into this slightly more later but I think Busch Gardens does a better job at selling their griffon mascot than Cedar Point does with Gatekeeper.
Alright lets talk wolf mascots, definetly one of my favorite categories, very middle of the road when it comes to popularity. Timber Wolf is definetly one of our best and most consistant examples. My favorite detail about Timber Wolf's mascot is just how consistant its been, many times merch and signage can't actually agree on what a mascot looks like but Timber wolf always has this deep brown color with a lighter muzzle and eyebrows. It's always the same guy! Rougarou steps slightly away from wolf themeing but only slightly as he's a cajun werewolf, but still depicted as more of an anthro wolf rather than a hairy man as werewolves sometimes are. His themeing is slightly odd as Rougarou is the werewolf, but he's also the bayou. This sort of conundrum comes up a few times when it comes to coaster mascots and we'll talk a bit more about it when we get to Alpengeist.
Finally we get to my favorite, Big Bad Wolf from Busch Gardens Williamsburg. It's a pretty standard mascot all things considered, always being depicted as your classic grey wolf. The coaster was much beloved to the point where its successor coaster, Verbolten, has several references to call back to Big Bad that we'll touch on later.