WHAT IS WHATIZIT? WHATEVER YOU LIKE

Introducing Whatizit.

Meet the mascot of the Atlanta Olympics, the 1996 Cobi model, unveiled Sunday night at the closing ceremony of the 25th Olympiad.

A cute, cuddly . . . eh . . . thing.

A computer-generated character wearing oversized sneakers, with stars for eyes, Olympic rings for eyebrows, and four-digit hands.

It can be anything you want. It can “morph” into a basketball player, a swimmer, a runner. With the touch of a computer key, it can take on any shape or size of an Olympian.

What Hodoori the tiger was to Seoul, Sam the eagle to Los Angeles, Misha the bear to Moscow, and Cobi the canine to Barcelona, Whatizit is to Atlanta. But unlike the others, this mascot is no animal.

It was selected from among 1,000 entries, including possums, squirrels, peanuts, and even Willie B., the famous TV-watching gorilla at the Atlanta Zoo.

But organizers wanted something different, something reflecting Atlanta’s pride in its high-tech industries and futuristic design. The winning entry was produced by DESIGNefx, an Atlanta-based subsidiary of Crawford Communications Inc.

Initial reactions to the unveiling were puzzled, “What is it?” being the most commonly heard one.

“That’s why we chose the name. That’s what everyone kept asking us before. And because it’s hard to describe, we thought it was perfect,” said Billy Payne, president of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games.

Approval was not unanimous.

“It doesn’t move my heart,” said Petter Moshus, vice president in charge of design for the 1994 Winter Olympics in Lillehammer, Norway. “But it does look American without being Walt Disney. To be honest, I don’t like it.”