There has never been a more cowardly logo in the NHL than the Anaheim Ducks' webbed-foot D, as seen modeled here by Mason McTavish and Trevor Zegras:
The person who designed this logo is a quack, so tepid and generic and uninspiring is its presence on a sweater. It is barely distinguishable from the Dallas Stars' logo and does nothing to pique your curiosity about the Anaheim Ducks. Detroit could use a "D" if they so chose. The Devils, too. This is a clearance-rack logo if I ever saw one, and when the Ducks announced that they'd be jettisoning it for next season, it was well past time. Replacing the "D" will be the image most closely associated with this funny little hockey team: the duck edition of the Jason Voorhees goalie mask most iconically worn by the team's longtime mascot, Wild Wing.
The former Mighty Ducks of Anaheim have reincorporated the Wild Wing logo into some versions of their jersey over the past few years, as they've missed the playoffs in six straight tries and looked to create any kind of buzz. But this season will be the first time, since they took "Mighty" out of their name in 2006, that this logo emblazons their primary uniform. While the franchise has wasted its breath running from its embarrassing beginnings, the Ducks are coming back around to the idea that their weirdness was, in fact, a strength. The era of Wild Wing is upon us again.
In the "Mighty" epoch, which began with the team's inaugural 1993–94 season, the Ducks were inextricable from their Walt Disney Company ownership. Their name came from a kids' movie about an underdog youth hockey team, they saw their logo incorporated into its sequel, and they benefited from the promotional might of the Disney monolith, which included an animated series about alien ducks that played hockey. The Disneyland proximity is on full display in the franchise's extravagant prelude to its first-ever game, which included a welcome from none other than Beauty And The Beast's Lumière, who conducted(?) a modernized, supersized, hockey-ized rendition of "Be Our Guest." (Beauty And The Beast is a hockey movie, by the way; it's very, very subtly implied that Gaston had a go as a hard-checking defenseman with the Chicoutimi Saguenéens.)
Given that Vegas has converted tons of fans with its knowingly hokey pregame entertainment, I believe that the Ducks were ahead of their time. At the very least, they had to do something to get folks pumped for a woeful squad that would be led in scoring by Bob Corkum and Terry Yake. Paul Kariya and Teemu Selanne, they were not. The most exciting part of the player introductions is when Joe Sacco gets his name announced, because for a brief moment it almost sounds like Joe Sakic is going to make a surprise appearance.
The prevailing contemporary wisdom was that the Disneyfied Mighty Ducks were an embarrassing sideshow unfit for a league that gave Richard and Howe and Orr god-like status. The most-liked comment on this video reads, in 10-year-old YouTube syntax, "im a huge ducks fan , and well the first 2 min of this i now start to understand why other NHL teams didn't take us seriously." This person is wrong: Other teams didn't take Anaheim seriously because they sucked. But with varying degrees of speed, the franchise shed most of the signifiers of this era. Most abruptly, the widely despised "Iceman"—who shouted a lot and held but did not play a guitar in the opening-night pregame ceremony—was scuttled into hiding by his mouse overlords after an instant flop of a debut.
Unveiled Friday night at the Anaheim Arena during the inaugural game of Disney’s Mighty Ducks hockey team, the Iceman’s wild-eyed, in-your-face shtick met with a chorus of boos and hisses the likes of which no Disney character has heard.
And when the Ducks played their home sequel on Sunday, the Iceman was not to be seen.
For his part, the Iceman said he thinks his icy reception was a raw deal.
“The team was down 5 to 1 and the crowd turned on me,” the 32-year-old musician said this week after being told by Disney officials to keep a low profile.
[...]
Said Tony Tavares, president of the Mighty Ducks, “We’ve ... got to put some distance between that bad performance and the crowd. At this point, it wouldn’t matter if he was Neil Diamond up there, he’d still get booed.”
Los Angeles Times
The traces of both Disney and Might were scrubbed completely after a 2005 sale. When the Unmighty Ducks, under new ownership, won the Stanley Cup in 2007—their first season wearing the webbed-foot D—perhaps the detractors believed it symbolized a permanent shift from expansion joke to serious business. But even as the Ducks enjoyed more success, that's not exactly what happened. Kariya remains a more fondly remembered presence than Ryan Getzlaf or Corey Perry, and as the generation that grew up loving The Mighty Ducks became nostalgic consumers, the lifeless "D" continued to mumble forgettably in the background. I've seen strangers wearing Ducks apparel in the wild far more often than any other hockey team west of the Mississippi, and on every single occasion, they were rocking a throwback.
The new uniforms are a case of the team succumbing to their inherent Mightiness. But Wild Wing never left. More of a fixture than the ownership or the broadcasters or even Selanne, the Ducks' mascot is the unseverable link to a past that has too often been treated like a plague. He was first introduced by the Iceman (RIP) and lowered to the floor in a move that'd later be copied by Shawn Michaels at WrestleMania XII in this same building, and he's stuck by the team ever since. He dances, he poses, he plays air guitar with his stick. Wild Wing makes everything groovy. He serves as a living representation of the Ducks' unforgettable logo, and a seemingly indestructible one, too. When he flopped into a pit of fire during a botched stunt in 1995, he reportedly escaped with no burns.
“When you’ve got that big thing over your head, you can get away with murder,” the Iceman said of Wild Wing, bitterly but correctly, back when it all began.
Anyone can have a D. Only one team has Wild Wing.
