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	Elmira Jackals	6
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Posted 2004 November 11

Rarely if ever have I seen such a blatant ripoff of a logo as I see in the Elmira Jackals. The first time I saw this logo, I immediately thought of the Hartford Wolf Pack, and to this day one logo reminds me of the other. It's almost impossible to look at these two without concluding that one was a blatant rip off of the other, and since the Wolf Pack came into existence a year sooner, that makes the Jackals the culprit.

At first, one might be tempted to defend this logo. After all, jackals and wolves are both canids, and do look fairly similar. So why shouldn't the logos look similar? Uh-uh; I ain't buying it. The logos for the Chicago Wolves and Hartford Wolf Pack don't look very similar, so there's no reason the Jackals have to look so similar to the Wolf Pack.

The Jackals really went all out with their, er, "flattery". Both teams have the head of the animal as the primary feature of the logo. Both have the animal's mouth open in a sort of snarl. Both have the same color scheme of blue, silver, and red. But it goes much farther than that. Both have the ears represented the same way -- silver edges with the inner ear being blue. What, you think that's not surprising given the same color scheme? Okay, consider this: both have red eyes. To be more precise, both have red "whites" and blue irises. I know giving animals red eyes has gotten to be a strange trend recently, but this is just too much.

Ignoring the plagiarism for a moment, this has the potential to be a classic logo, but they dropped the ball on one key point. For some reason, the team name is covering up most of the lower jaw. I'm sure they were probably trying to do "something different", and perhaps it would have looked a little plain had they simply had a drawing of a jackals' head. But doing something different just to do something different doesn't always work. Every time I look at this logo I just scratch my head a little and wonder why they did it this way. Based on the hint of the lower jaw we do see, I can't help but wonder if the artist had trouble drawing it and this was his way of literally covering up his mistake.

Other than that, it's not a bad job. Then again, what I just said is, "Other than the fact that it's a poorly drawn rip-off of another team's logo, it's not a bad job." Not exactly a ringing endorsement, is it?. But if it makes them feel any better, they got a really good score. It's probably going to wind up being the a runaway winner for the "best score from a logo I don't really think is very good" category. It's certainly winning that category so far.

Final Score: 6 points.
Penalties: Name-logo, 2 pts; Ripoff, 4 pts.
Bonuses: None