In a dimly lit storage facility in Hillsborough, North Carolina, rests a detached head. Sealed in plastic, impeccably conserved and almost pleading to be brought back to life, it is the head of a legendary figure in U.S. soccer.
During that groundbreaking summer 32 years ago, Striker the dog was everywhere, more visible than any player from the 1994 World Cup, appearing on billboards, soda cans, keychains, hats, and countless other products. Children toted Striker plush toys. Adults enjoyed Striker pinball machines and Super Nintendo games, and took pictures with the mascot inside the venues.
While Striker’s components—the foam and felt head, torso, and limbs—rest unseen in the US Soccer Hall of Fame archives, this summer’s tournament features three mascots. Maple the Moose from Canada, Clutch the Bald Eagle from the United States, and Zayu the Jaguar from Mexico all appear trapped in a strange in-between realm, blending realism with cartoonish fantasy, embodying a mascot version of the uncanny valley.
Those three feel like generic AI-generated designs. Striker, by contrast, was the result of a much simpler approach: a straightforward cartoon dog. Decades later, that decision has cemented his status as one of the most unforgettable mascots in World Cup history.
John Over and Joey Banaszkiewicz helped create some of the most iconic American animated works of the late 1900s. They were young artists at Warner Brothers in the mid-1990s, during a period when Steven Spielberg was guiding the studio through a revival of animation.
Both contributed to the storylines and visual style of Animaniacs and Tiny Toon Adventures, sketching characters that a whole generation of American kids would come to know. Not all of their output was aimed at children—the first Animaniacs episode Over worked on was swiftly removed after Buster Bunny and Plucky Duck got intoxicated and stole a police car.
The atmosphere at Warner Brothers at that time, as Over and Banaszkiewicz describe it, resembled the island of misfit toys.
“I think some folks arrived there straight from incarceration,” Banaszkiewicz says, who joined the studio after finishing at Cal Arts. Over came after working for John Kricfalusi, the mind behind another hallmark of 1990s animation: The Ren and Stimpy Show.
“The currency was ‘how much can we make each other laugh,’” Over says. “We were just a bunch of twenty-somethings set loose. People would draw crude pictures of one another and see how far they could stretch a joke or an awkward moment. But it was amazing, because that’s how you really build your creative muscles.”
During the summer of 1992, between seasons of Tiny Toons and Animaniacs, the animators had no projects. For a few weeks, they killed time with extended lunch breaks or “playing several rounds of miniature golf across the street,” Over recalls, but eventually Warner Brothers executives proposed laying off or furloughing the staff.
Spielberg opposed that plan. At his urging, the team was kept on the payroll, and he instructed the executives to find them alternative assignments.
At that very moment, the committee organizing the 1994 World Cup was looking for a mascot. Alan Rothenberg, the head of the U.S. Soccer Federation, made a call and arranged a meeting with Jean MacCurdy, the president of Warner Brothers Animation.
Three decades earlier, Reginald Hoye and Richard Culley, who worked at a marketing firm near London, received a similar assignment. The 1966 World Cup was fast approaching, and they were asked to do something unprecedented: design a mascot.
It’s difficult to envision now, but before that, World Cups were largely free of the commercial saturation that defines them today. There were hardly any advertisements or merchandise—and definitely no mascots.
In just ten minutes, Culley and Hoye sketched out World Cup Willie, the first World Cup mascot ever. Willie had depth: he wore the Union Jack, and his shaggy, endearing look matched England’s shifting identity, as the nation shed its stuffy reputation and became a cultural trendsetter. This was the time of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and James Bond.
Willie was a perfect fit and an instant hit, inspiring future mascots. In 1970, Juanito—a young Mexican boy in a sombrero—became the first human mascot, a pattern that carried on through the 1974 and 1978 tournaments.
Then came the food items. Spain introduced Naranjito, a personified orange, in 1982, and Mexico followed with Pique, a jalapeño pepper sporting a mustache, in 1986.
Then matters took a strange turn. In 1990, Italian organizers held a design contest and received 50,000 submissions, depicting everything from dogs to eggplants to a humanoid piece of ziti pasta. A jury that included renowned Ferrari designer Sergio Pininfarina selected a proposal by Lucio Boscardin, an obscure painter and sculptor.
Boscardin conceived his idea while stopped at a traffic light. He took the word “Italia,” split the letters apart, and formed them into a stick figure, using a soccer ball as its head. The outcome was Ciao, a surreal modern-art creation.
The event organizers soon realized that Boscardin’s cubist concept was impossible to turn into a wearable costume, so they simply made a dozen or so sculptures of Ciao and hauled them from stadium to stadium.
Striker’s designers were determined not to repeat that error, although their initial ideas were just as unsettling.
“A lot of people were attempting a soccer ball concept,” Over says. “No one really knew what to call it. I think Joey’s version was named Soccerey Bally or something like that. It was a humanoid soccer ball with arms and legs. Joey’s storyboards are always hilarious and over-the-top, so he had soccer players taking this thing to romantic candlelit dinners, with balls just scattered around. The player is in bed with a ball, having relations with a ball, he’s everywhere with a ball.”
U.S. Soccer had no interest in promoting soccer-themed cartoon pornography, and luckily the animators at Warner Brothers started exploring a dozen other ideas, “both animal and humanoid,” according to MacCurdy. They considered space creatures, cats, cougars, and bears.
“Eventually we looked at many of the previous World Cup mascots,” Over says. “A lot of them were terrible. One was just a giant orange? And many had some historical meaning or whatever. Soccer wasn’t all that popular here, so we thought, let’s go with an ‘underdog’ concept. That’s when we started doing versions of, you know, ‘soccer dog.’”
With that, the two began a design process that left them feeling battered. Listening to Over recount what happened will sound familiar to any artist or creative who has ever applied their craft to a commercial project.
Early sketches of Striker. Illustration: John Over and Joey Banaszkiewicz
“We ran into trouble with these nerds at [US Soccer],” Over says, laughing. “They’d examine your drawings. As an animator, you’re always exaggerating. Someone kicks a ball and the leg goes way up. They’d say, ‘a child could never kick a ball that hard.’ I mean, it’s a freaking soccer dog, man. It’s a cartoon dog!”
“It turned into a design-by-committee situation,” Banaszkiewicz says. “And in animation, that’s always the kiss of death. Soon it’s ‘I don’t like these fingers’ or ‘his ears are too pointy’ or ‘can you make his smile bigger?’ Before long, you don’t even recognize him anymore.”
The dog we now call Striker was still referred to as Soccer Dog at Warner Brothers and the slightly more inventive World Cup Pup around U.S. Soccer—names that wouldn’t exactly sell merchandise. So the World Cup organizing committee, led by Rothenberg, decided to let the public choose the name. They bought ad space in hundreds of local and national newspapers, urging fans to vote by calling a 1-900 number (at 95 cents per call) or mailing in a ballot. To keep things simple, the committee narrowed the options to four: Striker, Sweeper, Champ, and Sidekick.
The effort to name the mascot.
Roughly 25,000 people voted during the six-week campaign, and Striker was the overwhelming favorite. The committee ordered a dozen Striker costumes at $2,500 apiece, assembled by Scollon Productions, a small family-run costume shop in White Rock, South Carolina. They made a few adjustments to his appearance, replacing a rugby-style jersey with a soccer uniform and placing the ball at the dog’s feet rather than having him carry it.
The dog needed a backstory, so the committee assigned their best writers to the task, and they delivered. Striker was born to Mr. and Mrs. Mutt, they wrote, and graduated with honors from obedience school. His favorite song? “Hound Dog” by Elvis Presley. As for his relationship status—he’s officially listed as single. “Playing the field,” as they say.
“He best represents sports and this country,” Rothenberg said at the time. “And, to be crassly commercial, we want to sell as much merchandise as possible.” Organizers projected they’d earn more than a billion—yes, a billion—dollars from products featuring Striker’s image.
One odd detail about Striker’s backstory is that promoters claimed the dog was gender-neutral. That notion didn’t really take hold, however: the pup was almost always referred to with male pronouns.
Striker’s boots are a size 24 wide, in case you were curious. Big shoes to fill. And someone had to fill them. That job went to Carlos Parada. Back in 1986, Parada was a wide-eyed teenager with a dream of attending the World Cup in Mexico. So he did what any reckless college student would do: he got a high-interest credit card, bought the next flight out, and hoped to crash with some friends south of the border.
Parada managed to snag free tickets to nearly every match at the Azteca. He saw Diego Maradona score with the “Hand of God” and then, moments later, witnessed what many consider the greatest goal in tournament history. He was present for the final, one of the finest ever played. He returned to Los Angeles determined to stay involved in soccer.
“When the [organizing committee] relocated from Chicago to Los Angeles before the World Cup,” Parada says, “I knew I had to get involved. You know, to score free tickets.”
Parada signed up as a volunteer, then took a part-time role at the committee’s headquarters, arriving at 6 a.m., around the same time as Rothenberg—“to get a head start on the east coast folks,” Parada recalls. The two became friendly, and when a full-time marketing position opened up, Parada landed it.
He was entrusted with safeguarding two of the tournament’s icons. One was the World Cup trophy. The 27-year-old traveled from continent to continent with it for months, always flying first class. “One seat for me,” he recalls, “and one for the trophy, right beside me.”
The other was Striker. Parada, with help from Joann Klonowski, the tournament’s marketing chief, created guidelines for the people wearing the costumes—mostly volunteers, just as Parada had once been.
“He never speaks,” Klonowski told a reporter. “He is not permitted to remove any part of his costume in public; for instance, he cannot take off his head. That would ruin the magic for the children. He—the character, actually—is neither male nor female. The character never acknowledges that there is a person inside. He communicates through mime, or through a personal escort who always accompanies him.”
Parada also made a training film that, like the guidelines, is somewhat surreal, featuring Parada cheering on his volunteers as they practice their moves both in and out of costume.
Striker was introduced in front of Mann’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood in October 1993, where he pressed his paws into the wet cement, as is customary for major stars. He appeared at pre-tournament friendlies, mingling and posing with fans, and even crossed the Atlantic for promotional events. He was at the World Cup draw, and seemingly everywhere else, covering billboards, TV commercials, airplanes, and a mountain of other merchandise.
One place he didn’t appear: the opening ceremony. U.S. Soccer had envisioned placing Striker alongside Oprah Winfrey, Bill Clinton, Diana Ross, and the rest of the lineup, but Striker was excluded, a casualty of a dispute between Disney (the ceremony’s original organizers) and Opryland USA (the company that ultimately produced it). Striker, one Opryland employee said, “is not here because we think he’s stupid.”
Plenty of others didn’t find this soccer dog stupid at all. Mexico goalkeeper Jorge Campos, Parada recalls, became oddly fascinated with the mascot and insisted on standing beside him before matches. The Argentina team also took a shine to Striker. In one of the tournament’s most memorable off-field moments, they sought him out after thrashing Greece 4-0 in their opening group match, tossing him into the air in celebration. After their next game against Nigeria, Maradona was escorted off for a drug test that ended his international career.
Both kids and adults were equally captivated, partly because the dog could genuinely play soccer.
“I quickly realized that if you put a kid who played soccer inside the costume and gave him a pair of Sambas, you could have decent control of his footwork,” Parada says. “People would go crazy when they saw Striker juggling a ball, which he could do pretty easily.”
After the World Cup concluded, after the banners were taken down and the collectible pins, caps, and sweatshirts were stuffed into drawers or donated, Striker faded back into obscurity. Others followed in his paw prints: a rooster (Footix, France 98), a lion (Goleo VI, Germany 06), a leopard (Zakumi, South Africa 10), a wolf (Zabivaka, Russia 18), a trio of aliens (Ato, Kaz, and Nik, South Korea/Japan 02). By the time Qatar hosted in 2022, we were given La’eeb, a floating piece of cloth, though an adorable one.
As the tournament has grown increasingly bloated and commercialized, Striker has become a symbol of a simpler era, when there were fewer teams and tickets were more affordable.
Rothenberg, however, largely forgot about him—when contacted for this story, he admitted he remembered nothing about the mascot’s creation. Neither did MacCurdy, the animation chief at Warner Brothers, nor Klonowski, the marketing lead who oversaw the project for the committee.
Over and Banaszkiewicz had absolutely no clue that Striker had made any impression on a certain generation of American soccer fans, at least not until they were reached out to. Banaszkiewicz put it bluntly: “Honestly, I had no idea anyone cared.”
Over did recall the short-term impact—seeing his co-creation on the side of an American Airlines 747, at matches, and on lamppost banners—but that was pretty much it for him. When Over and Banaszkiewicz got on a call together and spoke for the first time in years, however, the memories rushed back.
Neither artist feels a particularly strong bond with Striker. At one point, there were discussions about an animated series, but ultimately the dog was just a drawing to them, or an intern in a suit.
“I remember Jean MacCurdy and I went down to watch them unveil Striker, when he put his paws in the cement at Mann’s Chinese Theater, right beside Humphrey Bogart’s handprints. It all felt so… forced. The affection for this character was kind of manufactured. So it doesn’t rank very high among the things I’ve done, because you’re not injecting it with any personality as a filmmaker. There’s no story; it’s more like a graphic placeholder.”
For a whole generation of American kids, though, Striker was a piece of that magical summer, the one where they fell in love with soccer and never looked back.
Not bad for a soccer dog.
What do you feel about this post?
Like
Love
Happy
Haha
Sad
