Word: misha
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...thought Moscow's Misha was unbearable. Take a gander at Bald Eagle Sam, official mascot of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. Bob Hope did, when the creature was unveiled at Los Angeles city hall on the day after his Soviet predecessor went into hibernation. Sam, hatched at nearby Walt Disney studios, struck some observers as a rather poultry imitation of the U.S. national bird. Hope did not duck the issue. "He has a good makeup man," the comedian said, gamely, and confessed his own regret at not participating in the Olympics. Clucked Hope: "Too bad gin rummy and beanbag...
What belies the merriness of Misha's smile for the tourists is the pervasive sense that the Americans are not here to compete. Every tourist at a Moscow Olympic event finds himself brought up short when he looks out and fails to see the deep-blue warm-up suits with the red-and-white USA on the back of the jerseys. The reaction has had its odd consequences. One tourist group in Leningrad last week began singing God Bless America in the hotel bar - "It made us feel good," one of them told me - and last night about...
...traffic, as one would expect from a klaxon-less society, is occasionally punctuated by the shriek of rubber tires under stress. Not a teen-ager anywhere. They are in the summer camps, we are told. The city is spotless and newly painted - a kind of Disneyland gilt. The Misha bear, with his Olympic-rings belt, smiles at one from everywhere. He began to get to me after a while - largely because of the mascot's eyes: astonished above the half-moon smile, they become the demented, loopy gaze of someone who has had too much Stolichnaya, the best Soviet...
...refurbished Lenin Stadium was swarming with more than 15,000 people for much of last week. Gymnasts, musicians, students and some 100 truckloads of soldiers were on hand to rehearse the opening ceremony; the troops were readying flash-card routines, including a rendering of the ubiquitous Teddy-bear mascot Misha. As if to underscore the official line that all was going well, newspapers trumpeted a statement by an African sports official that "in spite of the attempts by certain circles at frustrating" the Games, "they will be a success...
...potential than actual. While costly advertising campaigns have been killed, the purchased TV ad time can still be filled with regular, non-Olympic material. Even manufacturing expenses have not necessarily been totally wasted. R. Dakin & Co., the San Francisco-based company that bought the rights to make and sell Misha bears in the U.S., could defrock the critters of their Olympic belts and name tags, producing perfectly salable and politically inoffensive Teddy bears...