Cincinnati Cyclones

66

This is the team that would not die. They started in the ECHL, and that team "died" when the team moved up to the IHL one year later. Then the IHL folded, and they couldn't move to the AHL along with the other surviving teams because Cincinnati already had an AHL team (the Mighty Ducks). So the IHL team died. But the owners refused to give up, and bought a dormant ECHL franchise to put them back in that league. That lasted about three years before the ECHL team died, in part because the Cincinnati Mighty Ducks (who had been there since 1996) were still around.

But then, one year later, the Cincinnati Mighty Ducks folded. And a year after that, these guys did the zombie thing again and rose from the dead for the third time.

As it turns out, the last time the Cyclones' turn to be reviewed would have come up was during that two-year hiatus, so I'm just now getting to review this logo despite it having been in use for well over a decade.

And wow, what a logo it is! Even if one ignores the obvious stupidity of an anthropomorphized weather phenomenon, there is so much here to point out:

• The cyclone is missing teeth.
• It has teeth to be missing.
• It appears to be playing with nine or ten hula hoops.
• Something has been eating its stick.
• The left glove in no way appears to be attached to the cyclone, but rather is just sort of hanging in midair.
• It appears to be female, based on the amount of mascara on its lower eyelashes.
• It has eyelashes to be putting mascara on.

Their old logo was actually even worse. That one featured a tornado that looked like someone scribbling with a pen to make certain it has ink, a goalie mask (of a sort that goalies had quit using about a decade before the team debuted) with eyebrows, a goalie stick so short that it would be at crotch level if used in an actual game, and a goalie mitt that looks sadly like a Davy the Dolphin Boy's flipper.

That being said, both logos are so lame that the Cincinnati Mighty Ducks logo was better. And that logo was so lame that...well, you get the idea. The combined effect of all of these logos is that I'm beginning to wonder if "Cincinnati" isn't an Ojibwa word meaning "village whose hockey logos suck". You almost have to ask yourself if they wouldn't be better off just borrowing the logo the Twin City Cyclones used.

Okay, I take that back. Even this monstrosity isn't that bad. But that's about the nicest thing I can say about it.

I would humbly (ha!) suggest that the team name is the problem. Anyone who's ever seen one (or even watched the movie Twister, or even The Wizard of Oz) knows how scary tornadoes really are. But somehow that doesn't translate very well into a scary graphic for a sports logo. Thus, pretty much every logo you can think of with a tornado in it looks lame. Putting eyes and/or hands on it certainly doesn't help, but I'm not convinced it hurts much, either. Look at this team's logo, or the Twin City Cyclones', or the Muskegon Fury's logo. Imagine any of them without the eyes and/or hands. All of them look less silly, but none of them look any scarier.

I would suggest they simply change their name. But somehow, I suspect the name would crop up soon anyway. After all, it's the team that would not die. Why would the name be any different?

Final Score: 66 points.
Penalties: Alliteration, 2 pts; Cartoon, 17 pts; Anthropomorphization (egregious), 15 pts; Name-Logo, 2 pts; Equip-Logo (quadruply-egregious), 25 pts; Yucky-Logo, 5 pts.
Bonuses: None.