It’s no accident that costumed characters like the Phillie Phanatic and Youppi! resemble Muppets on steroids: Erickson also created Miss Piggy and other Jim Henson characters during her 40-plus-year career working with and consulting for Henson and the Sesame Workshop.
Contemporary mascotry has combined a proven staple of children’s television—a performer in a ridiculous full-body suit—with the gentle tomfoolery of clowning, the silent lucidity of mime, and good old-fashioned hucksterism, creating a new performance genre: corporate vaudeville. Although team mascots flourished on the high school and college level in the years BC (Before Chicken), the costume craze didn’t really take off in the pro ranks until 1974, when Giannoulas wore a chicken suit to a San Diego Padres game for a radio promotion. Over the last four decades, mascots have multiplied like rabbits, although few of Harrison/Erickson’s giant creatures belong to any recognizable phylum. With ever-increasing ticket costs, the onus has been on sports franchises to provide not just a competitive contest but a full-fledged entertainment experience: hence the proliferation of enormous, silly-suited cheerleaders who not only kick sand on umpires and dance to Gary Glitter’s “Rock and Roll Part II” but also act as goodwill ambassadors, visiting schools, hospitals, and the like. In the last year alone, the Phillie Phanatic made more than 700 promotional appearances, ranging from charity walks and bar mitzvahs to a cameo on the ABC sitcom The Goldbergs and the inauguration of Pennsylvania governor Tom Wolf.
“Baseball’s been berry, berry good to us,” says Erickson, sitting in the couple’s spacious Brooklyn Heights apartment, paraphrasing the classic Saturday Night Live character Chico Escuela. An original Charles Schulz sketch of Charlie Brown in pitching gear hangs on one wall, near a framed drawing from Maurice Sendak, sent as a thank you for Harrison/Erickson designing a set of Where the Wild Things Are toys. Erickson organized the mementos of the couple’s prolific career into 20 archival boxes, stuffed with sketches, fabric swatches, construction specs, and slides. It’s remarkable how consistently each finished product reflects Erickson’s initial freehand drawing, no matter which medium she’s working in. “Storytelling is the most important part of everything,” says Erickson. “It’s how we communicate with each other. Whether you do it with a sock or a very complicated piece of puppetry or a costume, that’s really what it is. It’s just an assistance to help you tell that story.”