Valencia College are on the hunt for a new mascot. And one of the mascots looks like it’s on the hunt for you.
Two of the three options recently pitched to fans and students are standard sports fare: a cardinal and a puma. Valencia College Cardinals has a nice ring to it and the Puma design really pops in the school’s red. And then there’s the anthropomorphized orange wearing a letterman jacket, Chuck Taylors and a smile that says he knows where the bodies are buried.
The Orange is meant to represent “enterprise and innovation” as well as nod to the history of the area. It bears a passing resemblance to the nearly immediately canned mascot for Florida Technical University (later UCF), the Citronaut.
Does anyone remember this guy? Students back then maybe didn’t love Citronaut, but we can’t get enough of him! #TBT pic.twitter.com/Oc1kp7VToi
— UCF (@UCF) July 13, 2017
Like the Orange, the Citronaut was an attempt to combine the area’s orange-growing history with markers of the school, which had been started to train employees of the burgeoning space program at Cape Canaveral. Also like the Orange, it was Something That Should Not Be.
Of course, the Orange has our official endorsement. We don’t want to know what goes on inside that presumably juice-filled head when the smile fades.
It’s time to vote for our new @valenciacollege mascot, Valencians! So who will it be? Voting takes place through March 29. https://t.co/k2ulv7Dyb9 pic.twitter.com/5Qg1pKxSag
— Valencia College (@valenciacollege) March 15, 2022
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