Let the Merchandising Begin! Beijing 2022 Olympic Mascot is an Overweight Space Panda
The official mascots for the 2022 Winter Olympics and the 2022 Winter Paralympics in Beijing have been announced, and they're a roly-poly flying panda in a spandex spacesuit and a snowy, bright red lantern.
As is to be expected, Bing Dwen Dwen (冰墩墩), the Winter Olympics mascot, and Shuey Rhon Rhon (雪容融), for the Paralympics, both have an "origin story" of sorts (you can stream both below). In videos released by the International Olympic Committee, we're first introduced to Bing Dwen Dwen: happily playing in the snow (a well-known panda pastime), he's totally unaware that a giant meteor is about to hit the Earth. Luckily, this is a magic meteor and gives the bumbling panda the ability to fly, to compete as a star athlete in several Olympic disciplines, and even to go suborbital, high-fiving a spacewalking astronaut in the process.
The Olympic Committee's official explanation of the name describes how "Dwen Dwen is a common nickname in China for children that implies healthiness, cuteness, and ingenuousness – characteristics also shared with pandas."
Shuey Rhon Rhon's humble beginnings are a little more obscure. It appears that the mascot of the 2022 Paralympics came to life after getting dusted with magic fairy dust from an old painting, which then brought he/she/it to life.
"The name [Shuey Rhon Rhon] expresses the hope that there would be more inclusion for people with impairments, and more dialogue and understanding between cultures of the world," states the official press release.
Together, the two mascots make a suitably cute, if not completely incongruous, duo that we expect to see plastered to every available piece of clothing, snowglobe, and stationery by tomorrow. In the designers' defense, at least these two are more contemporary than the five-member Fuwa team that represented the '08 Games, all of which were quite heavy on the symbolism but light on the iconic.
Both mascots were unveiled by the Olympic Committee last night, Sep 17, at Shougang Park in Beijing's southwest. The venue, which used to house the former factory of Capital Steel, has since been redeveloped into a satellite venue of the Winter Olympics.
This is the second time around that Beijing has had a shot at the Olympics, an extremely rare honor. After winning the 2022 bid way back in 2015, it became the first city in the world to have won bids to host both the winter and summer Games.
Oddly, the organizers have shunned the standard pinyin romanization of the names 冰墩墩 and 雪容融, which would be Bing Dundun and Xue Rongrong, respectively, opting for something more Cantonese in flavor. Presumably, this choice was made to make it easier for non-Chinese to work out how to pronounce them.
READ: Jackie Chan and Lang Lang on Hand for Official Unveiling of 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Logos
Image: Beijing 2022
