Bassetts Jelly Mascots

Hello! Look, Bassett's have made some jelly sweets especially for the Olympic Games in June. HERE THEY ARE:

They are jellied versions of London's Olympic mascots Wenlock and Mandeville, who are officially described as "two drops of steel with cameras for eyes"

Their story is that classic fairy tale of two drops of steel who are rescued from the last girder used to build the Olympic Stadium (the camera eyes are not explained in the story).

Their names are taken from some boring places in the UK that have some tenuous historical connection to the Olympics. Kids love boring places in the UK with tenuous historical connections to the Olympics almost as much as they love drops of molten steel.

WITH CAMERAS FOR EYES.

(They had to add the camera for eyes bit as someone on the design team was worried that characters based on bits of metal might be a bit, well, dull. And thank God they did! Imagine if Wenlock and Mandeville just had NORMAL eyes! I wouldn't have been able to get on board with that at all.)

So what happens when you take a blob of molten steel with a cycloptic eye camera and turn it into jelly*? THIS: 

What is that? What am I supposed to think about that? That I'm about to eat a jellied version of a drop of molten steel from a girder that went on to be used to make a building somewhere? YUMMY. And you thought Rowntree's Randoms were random. (They aren't)

Anyway, here's the mascot from Euro 96 when England held the European Football Championships:

Look at him - a lion, a nice friendly recognisable lion with a kind lion face. He's called "Goaliath" which is a real name plus has an amusing football related pun in it. But sadly in 1997 all lions were subsequently deemed racist. In fact, all cuddly animals were banned from being used as mascots in the UK after all of them were found to have some connotations of evil, antisemitism or just "didn't reflect our core values as a nation". The only safe, inoffensive material to base a mascot on was found to be steel girders.

That's why we got these two. PHEW!

In the future, I hope all symbols, mascots, logos and cereal-box characters will be reduced to shapeless proto-forms which don't resemble any recognisable object or carry any any preconceived associations.

So here's my idea for a mascot for the 2016 games. They can have this for free:

He's called Olympic Bob and he represents fair play and a conscientious attitude to picking up litter.

(P.S DON'T WORRY HIS EYES ARE CAMERAS)

Bassetts Jelly Mascots, £1
Gobble Monkey says: 2 out of 7

*i think I heard this question asked on University Challenge once.