Vancouver artist’s ‘Pedobear’ brands the Winter Olympics
YAY I love this story about a Polish paper mistakenly using an image of ‘Pedobear’ for their piece on the Vancouver Winter Olympics. It features the bear next to the official Olympic mascots, and in the paper’s defense, the characters do bear a stylistic resemblance. The image was done by Canadian artist Michael Barrick using the bear who is a popular meme on the 4chan website, where users originally posted the beady-eyed animal in response to suspect lechery. A little too appreciative of some underage Disney channel star? Pedobear. Really really amazed by how muscular Taylor Lautner got in the time since “Twilight”? Pedobear.
It’s maybe not as mind-blowing as when 4chan star Creepy Chan popped up on America’s Next Top Model (and almost won too. She was robbed), but still, it’s some more nice mainstream spillover for the site. On his blog Barrick conveyed the expected shock and amusement but also took a good dig at The State of the Media:
- I remain stunned and amused that due to a careless bit of journalism in a small town newspaper half a planet away, something I did seven months ago as an off-handed visual critique of the 2010 mascots has garnered this much attention, and
- now that it has garnered all this attention, that the [Vancouver] Metro is the first and only paper to have contacted me directly by any means at all.
So how’d it happen? Because I believe in the fundamental awesomeness of people, I wouldn’t discount this being the work of a Polish 4chan user at the paper having some fun, but more likely it’s the result of lazy Google image searching. As Barrick himself blogged, before all of this even happened his Pedobear/Olympic photoshop job was a top search result for the terms “Vancouver 2010 mascots”. Which reminds me of the time I wanted to blog about how The Walrus magazine, in a bid for kindly donations, released a video of entirely white people fawning over the publication’s brilliance; I plugged that into Youtube’s search engine and mistakenly got this video of a walrus fellating itself:
Yeah OK that joke is half a year late, but holy crap look at that thing go!
This post is dedicated to the memory of Conan O’Brien’s “The Masturbating Bear”.
You know, I interviewed the designer who did the Olympic mascots last year. I only now wish I had the forsight to ask about the UNCANNY resemblance to pedobear, which I had not noticed until now.
As a nerd aside, if he’s a Canadian invention, why isn’t he named “Paedobear”? Just wondering aloud.
Eh, sloppy journalism about sloppy journalism! I’ve edited the first paragraph, which originally had it that Barrick invented Pedobear — more correctly, he’s the artist behind the image in question, not the bear in general.