Family Life

07.24.12 | Sarah Harnisch

The Olympics kick off Friday, and a billion people around the world will be watching. That's one in every nine people on the planet. The Olympic Committee has discovered a new problem though, one that's too late to fix. Apparently, kids are afraid of the London mascot. It's a futuristic-looking logo, dubbed Wenlock and Mandeville, and it's supposed to be an animation depicting 2 drops of steel from a nearby steel company. Seven-year-old Rosa Edwards says "they have one eye and ear, and they kind of like... kind of just freak me out." Wenlock (named after an English town in Shropshire that helped inspire the modern Olympic games) and Mandeville (whose name pays tribute to the hospital considered the birthplace of the Paralympic Games) look more like surveillance robots than humans or animals. They have legs, but no feet; arms bearing "friendship bands" in the colors of the Olympic rings, but no fingers. Both of their heads have "taxi light" in the middle, a tribute to London's famous black cabs.