Tucson Roadrunners

61

Do you feel like you're experiencing déjà vu when you're looking at this logo? Or maybe déjà déjà vu? Actually, it's much worse than that. By my reckoning this is somewhere on the order of déjà déjà déjà déjà déjà déjà déjà vu.

What I mean by that, for those who don't know, is that there have been over half a dozen teams called the Roadrunners and using essentially the same logo. Most of these teams have been in Phoenix, but not all. One of them was, for some strange reason, in Toronto. And after a year in Toronto, the team headed over to Edmonton for a single season (although they used a different logo in Edmonton). Roadrunners? A bird whose traditional habitat doesn't extend beyond the Southwest? In Edmonton and Toronto? Now do you accept that global warming is real?

Anyway, the current Roadrunners are in Tucson, not Phoenix, because they are the AHL affiliate of the Arizona Coyotes, who play in Phoenix. (And no, I'm not going to make a joke about the Coyotes and the Roadrunners, because it's way too obvious.) Tucson, it should probably be noted, has had a couple of hockey teams before, and as a general rule they haven't worked out very well. To give you an idea how bad things have been, the most successful team (the Tucson Gila Monsters, who played in the West Coast Hockey League in the late 1990s) folded less than two months into its second season. Yes, that's the most successful hockey team Tucson has seen. Other attempts have included the 2006-07 Tucson Tilt of the Western States [junior] Hockey League (lasted one season), the 1978-79 Tucson Rustlers of the Pacific Hockey League (played a full regular season, but then the entire league folded before the playoffs), and the 2000 Tucson Scorch of the Western Professional Hockey League, who folded shortly before their first season began and thus never actually played.

With all this in mind, I hope you will forgive me if I'm not optimistic about the Tucson Roadrunners' chances.

As I said earlier, the other teams called the Roadrunners (Edmonton excepted) used essentially the same logo. but it wasn't exactly the same. To the right you will see the logo used by the original Phoenix Roadrunners of the Western Hockey League way back in the 1960s. The logos for the WHA Roadrunners, CHL Roadrunners, PHL Roadrunners, IHL Roadrunners, and AHL Toronto Roadrunners had slightly different finishing touches, but all of them featured a roadrunner who looked identical to this one except for various color changes. As you can see, the logo for the Tucson Roadrunners doesn't carbon copy the old roadrunner, but it's clearly just an updated drawing. I think I like the old one more. Mind you, I don't like the old one, but it at least has authenticity on its side. If the old logo can be reasonably compared (and I think it can be) to a car from the 1970s whose door rattles a bit because of almost a half century of rust and whose left headlight doesn't work because it developed a short during Hurricane Andrew, then the new logo can be compared to a 1970s-styled kit car your not-as-handy-as-he-thinks-he-is neighbor made last year whose door rattles because he lost a few screws but figured they weren't that important and whose right headlight goes out randomly because he used the wrong wire to hook it up to the battery and it shorted out the first time he turned it on. You forgive the first car its faults. The second one, you just wait until your neighbor can't see you and then you point and laugh.

Only I won't actually point and laugh at this logo. It's wrong to mock the dying, and given Tucson's history in hockey I think this team has been on life support from the moment they stepped on the ice.

Final Score: 61 points.
Penalties: Cartoon, 17 pts; Anthropomorphization, 10 pts; Name-Logo, 2 pts; Equipment (quadurply-egregious), 25 pts; State (egregious), 6 pts; Rip-Off, 4 pts.
Bonuses: Local, -3 pts.