[PHOTO] Pachi the Pan Am Porcupine, at Yonge and Dundas

[rfmcdonald]

Pachi the Porcupine, official mascot of the Pan Am and Parapan Games, remained poised at Yonge and Dundas. The mascot's genesis was described, if perhaps harshly, by Torontoist's Will Sloan.

Who the hell is PACHI? This is the question that your humble correspondent asked when he first saw the smiling porcupine’s effigy atop a bus stop at Yonge and Dundas. “Meet PACHI!” said an accompanying sign, which explained that he was this year’s Pan Am mascot and encouraged us to tweet selfies at #HostCity. It’s also a question you may have asked if you’ve seen him at the many parades, community centres, and ribfests he’s visited in our fair province these past few months.

[. . .]

PACHI was birthed by a group of Grade 8 students from a school in Markham, who entered their design into the TORONTO 2015 Mascot Creation Challenge as part of their phys-ed class. However, like Poochie, the ill-fated third wheel of The Itchy and Scratchy Show, he seems as if he were created out of pie charts and focus groups by a team of marketing gurus. Like a Canadian cinematic blockbuster of the Passchendaele or Men with Brooms variety, PACHI feels like an attempt to create a facsimile of an American product (in this case, a loveable anthropomorphized animal).

CBC's take is more neutral.