Disney Gives the Color Wheel of Fortune Another Spin

“It’s a platypus!” said my friend, horror overwhelming his face as he took his first glimpse at the official crest of Orange County’s new professional hockey team.

“A Mighty Platypus!”

The Mighty Platypi of Anaheim unveiled their colors Monday at The Pond/Anaheim Arena and those colors, to the best of my recollection, are burgundy/plum/purple, teal/jade/green, silver/chrome/”New Gray” and white/non-black/”Old Blank.”

Select one from each column and see if it goes with anything presently hanging in your closet.

Purple, green and silver. So it is true: Those who ignore the mistakes of the Utah Jazz are destined to repeat them.

Purple and green go together on a grapevine, but that’s about it. The Jazz was the first major league team to foist this color scheme upon a squinting public, but that was when the Jazz played in New Orleans, and purple and green are the colors of the Mardi Gras, which explains everything.

At Mardi Gras, after the first half-dozen Hurricanes, nothing seems to clash anymore. Even if it does, nobody seems to care.

Now notice the number of NBA championship banners hanging from the rafters of the Delta Center. Purple+green=zero.

Red and black wins basketball championships.

Blue and silver wins football championships.

Rouge, blanc et bleu , it appears, is about to win another hockey championship.

Purple and green hasn’t won a thing, unless we’re counting the cash-register wars now being waged inside the Disney stores of North America. Aladdin vs. The Mighty Ducks--the puck has been dropped, alert the 7-year-olds.

I’m going with the Ducks in five.

Having bulls-eyed the pint-sized, Daddy-can-I-borrow-20-bucks market with a cartoon nickname, a cartoon logo had to follow. What were we expecting? A big C and a small H? Olde English lettering? A regal neo-classic motif--with web feet and duck bill?

Frankly, I was surprised at the subtlety of the design. No mouse ears anywhere. Disney could have gone for the hammer here--big dewy doe eyes, cuddly yellow duckling on skates--but it pulled back, perhaps due to the knowledge that four months from now, grown men will be required to wear these uniforms on ice, in public.

The Disney compromise was, well, there’s no other description for it . . . a mean-looking duck mask. (Ah, sportswriting, a dignified profession.) It’s Donald’s goalie mask after giving up the winning goal in overtime off the leg of Darryl Sydor. A fowl with a scowl. Jason McDuck of the Touchstone slasher series--”Friday The 13th, Part VIII: Goofy Gets It In The Neck.”

But won’t the little pucklets be scared by those evil eyes?

“Oh, it’s much friendlier than it was six weeks ago,” reports Head Platypus Michael Eisner.

Adult reaction to the logo has gone the way of Rorschach’s inkspots. It says different things to different people.

“It’s Donald Duck drunk,” I’ve been told.

“The goalie mask is outdated by about 10 years,” commented another. “All the goalies today wear cages.”

Several others said the logo reminded them of the old “Twilight Zone” episode, “The Masks,” where a dying millionaire invites his heirs to a dinner party during Mardi Gras--keeping with our theme for today--and forces them to wear grotesque masks that, in the end, will mold their faces into the shape of those masks.

One unfortunate relative got duck lips for life.

Disney staged its unveiling, complete with a rack of merchandise in the back, at the best of all possible times--with the hockey team up the freeway immersed in the Stanley Cup finals, spreading puck fever throughout the land.

“We were planning a year ago to have the Kings in the Stanley Cup finals just at the time we were about to start,” Eisner told the audience, and you had to check twice to see if he was really joking. Apparently, he was.

“I arranged with Bruce McNall for his team to do this well on the eve of us selling our last 3,000 (season) tickets,” Eisner continued, “so it will go down as one of the greatest business judgments I’ve made in my career.”

Heh, heh, heh . . . and can we get Gary Bettman to take a polygraph test on this?

“Stanley Cup Fever” placards waving in the stands at Angel games.

“Go Kings” exhortations on electronic billboards alongside the Garden Grove Freeway.

Standing-room-only in sports bars across the county on game days.

Hockey Night in Costa Mesa.

“I think it’s great,” says Jack Ferreira, and he should. Ferreira is the Ducks’ general manager. “What the Kings are doing is exposing the area to hockey. It’s June in Orange County and all everybody’s talking about is hockey.

“From our standpoint, this couldn’t be playing out any better.”

Unless, of course, it dawns on the newly puck-addicted that next season they will have a choice.

Stanley Cup finalist . . . or 60-game loser.

Wayne Gretzky . . . or Wayne McBean.

Hip black and silver . . . or accident-at-the-paint-factory purple and green.

Royal Kings crown on the chest . . . or Mighty Platypus.

For lack of the Habs and the Maple Leafs, for lack of a better term, a rivalry is born.

* TALKING DUCK: Southland hockey fans, past, present and future, respond to the unveiling of the Mighty Ducks’ crest. C9