Overview

Pierre the Pelican is the official mascot for the New Orleans Pelicans professional basketball team that was unveiled in October 2013. After a photograph of the mascot was posted on Twitter, many Internet users mocked the pelican suit for being frightening and creepy.

Background

On October 30th, 2013, the Pelicans unveiled their new mascot Pierre the Pelican during opening night for the 2013 NBA season and tweeted a photograph (shown below) of him via Twitter.^[1] Within the first 24 hours, the tweet received over 840 retweets and 380 favorites.

Notable Developments

On Twitter

Immediately following Pierre the Pelican’s unveiling, Twitter users began posting jokes about the mascot’s creepy appearance, including photoshopped images of the mascot superimposed into memorable scenes from a variety of horror movies (shown below).^[2][3][4][5]

According to the Twitter analytics site Topsy,^[14] tweets containing the keywords "pierre pelican" reached over 9,100 on October 30th.

News Media Coverage

In the coming days, several news site published articles about the online reaction to the new pelican mascot, including UpRoxx,^[6] The Daily Dot,^[7] LA Times,^[8] Time Magazine's Keeping Score blog,^[10] The Times-Picayune,^[13] Complex,^[11] CBS Sports^[9] and Yahoo Sports.^[12]

Notable Examples

Search Interest

Not available.

External References