The Islanders And The Fish Stick Logo

[Terrier]

A new book has come out about the Islanders' infamous Gorton's Fish Stick rebranding.


https://nypost.com/2018/12/06/inside-the-disaster-that-was-the-islanders-fisherman-logo/

Click to read more...

 

[blood gin]

Alexa is Billy Joel's daughters name isn't it?

I still don't think Christie Brinkley is her mom. I mean where did the genetics go?

 

[Tarantula]

A must read for me as I love horror stories!!

 

[Killion]

Alexa is Billy Joel's daughters name isn't it?

I still don't think Christie Brinkley is her mom. I mean where did the genetics go?

I've met quite a few people from LI who claim to be Billys' next door neighbor.

 

[vadim sharifijanov]

i've never seen i know what you did last summer, but how many other hockey logos have inspired movies?

the islanders pulled off a reverse-mighty ducks.

 

[DJ Man]

In TV commercials, the Gorton's Fisherman was portrayed by actor Denny Miller, who'd had a brief career as Tarzan (one movie, no dialog). I guess that the graphic is based upon him.

Denny Miller

 

[Big Phil]

I never was an Islander fan, but I love dynasties and could always respect the players on there and their accomplishments. We may never see a team win 4 straight again, so they have history.

But man.........that logo.........just horrid. I get it to an extent, the Islanders were a sad sack franchise at this time. In the mid 1990s a friend of mine said he was at a movie theatre and maybe he was talking too much but the guy ahead of him turned around and said to him "Do you mind?" He told me, you wouldn't believe the hat he had on, my friend recalled........it was an Islanders hat! That was funny, because, who the heck had an Islanders hat on in the mid 1990s?

So there is a bit of a history lesson on how the Islanders were perceived back then. Then the jersey switch and everything just went downhill for them. Look, at least the old ones are the same ones Potvin, Bossy and Trottier wore.

 

[DJ Man]

They should have been called The New York Americans (or Long Island Americans). Tradition!

 

[McGarnagle]

I never was an Islander fan, but I love dynasties and could always respect the players on there and their accomplishments. We may never see a team win 4 straight again, so they have history.

But man.........that logo.........just horrid. I get it to an extent, the Islanders were a sad sack franchise at this time. In the mid 1990s a friend of mine said he was at a movie theatre and maybe he was talking too much but the guy ahead of him turned around and said to him "Do you mind?" He told me, you wouldn't believe the hat he had on, my friend recalled........it was an Islanders hat! That was funny, because, who the heck had an Islanders hat on in the mid 1990s?

So there is a bit of a history lesson on how the Islanders were perceived back then. Then the jersey switch and everything just went downhill for them. Look, at least the old ones are the same ones Potvin, Bossy and Trottier wore.

But they came at a moment of a bit of an identity crisis. Not only were Bossy and Potvin long gone and the team becoming mediocre, but you also had the Rangers stealing all the attention in town by finally winning the cup and investing big money in the franchise and dispatching the Isles in the first round in the process. Torrey left in 92 to start the Panthers, Arbour retired in 94, from what I'm reading, though Pickett didn't officially sell the team until 96 (to fraudster Spano), he had essentially withdrawn from any active participation in the team's administration and his minority investors were running it at that time.

So in all of that, it was a rather big crisis point for the franchise, so bringing in a new look to symbolize the changes and try to compete for merchandise sales in a market where they were already behind the 8 ball seems natural. They just chose a bad design, which honestly isn't that bad in retrospect. If someone didn't point out that it resembled the Gorton's fisherman, it'd have been no worse than what Buffalo did in going to the black and red with the big buffalo head.

 

[Normand Lacombe]

So in all of that, it was a rather big crisis point for the franchise, so bringing in a new look to symbolize the changes and try to compete for merchandise sales in a market where they were already behind the 8 ball seems natural. They just chose a bad design, which honestly isn't that bad in retrospect. If someone didn't point out that it resembled the Gorton's fisherman, it'd have been no worse than what Buffalo did in going to the black and red with the big buffalo head.

I thought then and still do now that it was a bad blunder by the Islanders to change their logo and colors. There was absolutely no reason to do it. The classic logo was synonymous with Stanley Cups and players like Bossy, Trottier, Potvin and Smith. Going from the simple, yet superb, look of the outline of Long Island between the NY and Islanders to a cartoon image of Stan Fischler dressed as a fisherman was a disastrous move.

 

[Johnny Engine]

I can't help but think that the worst thing the infamous round of 90s designs did was validate an almost-as-bad trend from the 70s where teams just jammed a handful of on-the-nose elements into a circle and called it a logo. The Islanders, Sabres, Jets and Scouts all fit that mold, and while the Capitals don't, would anyone miss the wordmark-and-hockey-stick look if they had stuck the landing on their redesign?

 

[Tarantula]

I can't help but think that the worst thing the infamous round of 90s designs did was validate an almost-as-bad trend from the 70s where teams just jammed a handful of on-the-nose elements into a circle and called it a logo.

I always thought that a basic rule of thumb for any logo, corporate or team, is it should be pretty much possible to draw by hand. Not too much detail, should be able to spot it exactly from a distance.

 

[Tarantula]

, it'd have been no worse than what Buffalo did in going to the black and red with the big buffalo head.

The awful trend of almost every franchise going to black for a primary colour, and a few years before that, teal or whatever flavour or variation of. The worst aspect of a rebrand is when they change their main colours in my opinion, colour is one of the main identifiers for any logo or brand.

 

[Johnny Engine]

The awful trend of almost every franchise going to black for a primary colour, and a few years before that, teal or whatever flavour or variation of. The worst aspect of a rebrand is when they change their main colours in my opinion, colour is one of the main identifiers for any logo or brand.

Seems like you and I are on similar wavelengths with this sort of thing.
To me, it's a damn shame that Gilbert Perreault, Phil Housley, Alexander Mogilny, Rasmus Ristolainen and Jack Eichel all appear to have played for the same franchise, but Dominik Hasek, Miroslav Satan and Danny Briere mostly looked like they played for an entirely different team.

 

[Killion]

Seems like you and I are on similar wavelengths with this sort of thing.
To me, it's a damn shame that Gilbert Perreault, Phil Housley, Alexander Mogilny, Rasmus Ristolainen and Jack Eichel all appear to have played for the same franchise, but Dominik Hasek, Miroslav Satan and Danny Briere mostly looked like they played for an entirely different team.

Yes agreed. Vancouver another team suffering from a major identity crisis over the years. Add in the WHL Johnny Canucks, Millionaires.... Salmon colored 3rd jerseys.... that big dumb 'C' on their jerseys etc. My God.

 

[tony d]

I actually didn't mind the angry fisherman logo. Certainly wasn't worse than some other jerseys/logos around in the 90's.

 

[Hoser]

As I said elsewhere last week, in retrospect I don't believe the fisherman jerseys were objectively all that bad but came to represent a particular period in time when seemingly everything was going wrong for the Islanders and it was just going to get worse.

That said there's something I've always wondered, and I don't believe the book touches on based on the online preview I read: why did the final product have much more extreme wave-pattern stripes at the bottom than the prototypes presented over the summer?

This is what the actual game-worn ones looked like:

And here's a photo of Travis Green and Darius Kasparaitis modelling the new duds in the summer of '95:

Look at how much more extreme the wave pattern on the game-worn one is compared to the early ones worn by Kasparaitis and Green, which had just a little bit of a curve. What gives? I wonder what made them take a design that was controversial right from the get-go and make it even wackier. Anyone know?

 

[Tarantula]

They should have been called The New York Americans (or Long Island Americans). Tradition!

And have the Rochester Americans as their affliate, I like it, Long Isle Americans!!

 

[The Panther]

There's no defending it. It's an absolute eyesore. Aesthetically awful in every way. But you can say that about every new mid-to-late-90s' jersey.

 

[Hoser]

They should have been called The New York Americans (or Long Island Americans). Tradition!

If they were going for "tradition" they should have been the Long Island Ducks...

 

[Johnny Engine]

If they were going for "tradition" they should have been the Long Island Ducks...

Or they could have taken a page from the CFL and called themselves the Mightyducks.

 

[Hoser]

Or they could have taken a page from the CFL and called themselves the Mightyducks.

Tsk-tsk, the Rough Riders and Roughriders played in separate leagues until the '50s. Much like the AHL's Norfolk Admirals and Milwaukee Admirals.

I read a duck-themed motif was considered for the Islanders' rebrand in '95, but they didn't want to ruffle the Mighty Ducks' feathers (pun absolutely intended).

 

[WingsFan95]

As a fan of black-teal design I objectively like it but as an Islanders jersey it makes no sense. The original redesign at least kept the colours the same. I think it could have worked with original colours and if you take away the fisherman so you have the better Islanders lettering and stick.

As I said elsewhere last week, in retrospect I don't believe the fisherman jerseys were objectively all that bad but came to represent a particular period in time when seemingly everything was going wrong for the Islanders and it was just going to get worse.

That said there's something I've always wondered, and I don't believe the book touches on based on the online preview I read: why did the final product have much more extreme wave-pattern stripes at the bottom than the prototypes presented over the summer?

This is what the actual game-worn ones looked like:

And here's a photo of Travis Green and Darius Kasparaitis modelling the new duds in the summer of '95:

Look at how much more extreme the wave pattern on the game-worn one is compared to the early ones worn by Kasparaitis and Green, which had just a little bit of a curve. What gives? I wonder what made them take a design that was controversial right from the get-go and make it even wackier. Anyone know?

 

[greyraven8]

I thought then and still do now that it was a bad blunder by the Islanders to change their logo and colors. There was absolutely no reason to do it. The classic logo was synonymous with Stanley Cups and players like Bossy, Trottier, Potvin and Smith. Going from the simple, yet superb, look of the outline of Long Island between the NY and Islanders to a cartoon image of Stan Fischler dressed as a fisherman was a disastrous move.

The logo was synonymous with their Stanley Cups but in my opinion it's anything but classic. It's been around a long time and people are used to it, but looking at it in isolation it doesn't measure up.
Certain land shapes lend themselves better to a logo

Long Island doesn't. If anything it looks like something that belongs on a Rorschach test.

 

[Hoser]

I got a copy of the book for Christmas and just finished reading it today. Of the book itself I'll say the writing style is definitely couched firmly in the sort of "technical writing" that a thesis would be written in, so it's no surprise that the book's genesis was Hirshon's doctoral thesis. I like it. It's prose with many period accounts and retrospective anecdotes sprinkled in, but with each of those anecdotes meticulously referenced in about 40 pages of numbered endnotes. It's like a postmortem report with enough pizzazz to keep it from being interminably dry.

Hirshon's overall conclusion is about the same as what I'd said in my post in "What was the worst jersey in modern NHL history?": it wasn't so much that the jersey designs themselves were objectively 'bad', it's that they were introduced at a time that coincided with the worst era in the Islanders' history. There was just so much bad stuff going on behind the scenes, and the results on the ice so putrid, that the fisherman logo became inextricably linked with managerial ineptness and on-ice futility.

What was most interesting to me about the story was the background work that went into it. The Islanders management headed by "The Gang of Four" minority owners—Paul Greenwood, Ralph Palleschi, Bob Rosenthal and Stephen Walsh—were enticed by the runaway merchandising success that the Sharks, Ducks and Panthers experienced and wanted to cash in. The Islanders were among the league's worst in merchandise sales, and saw that the new teams that were only a few years old were making a ****-ton more money than them, so at the ownership group's behest and at the suggesting of the NHL they hired SME Branding to do the redesign. (And let us not forget that the Isles weren't the only ones; in the abbreviated '94-'95 season the Flames and Blues introduced new unis, and the following season—remember, only about eight months later—the Bruins and Capitals did too, with the Ducks, Bruins, Kings, Penguins and Canucks introducing the first "third jerseys" on top of that. Lots of teams were trying to capitalize on this.)

The seed of the fisherman idea was to create a more kid-friendly branding with an easily identifiable mascot, rather than the nebulous idea of what an "Islander" was supposed to be. As the New York Post article says, the fisherman caricature was inspired directly by the Billy Joel song "The Downeaster 'Alexa'":

I was a bayman like my father was before
Can't make a living as a bayman anymore
There ain't much future for a man who works the sea
But there ain't no island left for islanders like me​

So the fisherman was really supposed to be invoking a reminiscence for the 'baymen' working off the eastern coasts of Long Island. SME made many designs though, and it's not clear in the book who really pushed for the fisherman. The SME guys said it was the Islanders management who pushed the fisherman idea (while SME's preferred option was a lighthouse), and the Islanders management said it was what SME presented to them so they went along with it. It seemed nobody wanted to be seen as having been on the hook for making the decision to go with it. Either way the story goes that SME hadn't done any focus groups or other research they would normally do at the Islanders' behest, because the team itself was going to or already had. In the end nobody did, and it wasn't until after the logo was chosen and leaked to the press that the media poked fun at the similarities to the Gorton's mascot.

In the end ironically Islanders merch sales actually improved.

The very end of the book includes a transcript of an interview Hirshon did with former SME designer Pat McDarby, who passed away before the book was published. I thought it was amusing that he expressed some disdain for the original Islanders logo, calling it amateurish and noting the objective design problems it had. I don't know that I could say he's wrong. He did say that at a certain point it doesn't matter if there's a particular affinity for it, and that we're seeing a resurgence of 'retro' uniforms that are objectively 'worse' because of that affinity.