Legend Of The Esquilax

People keep asking me: "What is that logo-thing?"

Chocolate Esquilax Our mascot is an abstract representation of an Esquilax. As you will recall, an Esquilax is a legendary horse, with the head of a rabbit, and the body of a rabbit. This graceful, strapping, lithesome, running Esquilax has been our logo since sometime around 1983...

It was spring, I think. Probably. A warm westerly breeze whispered, warning us of the Arizona summer that was none too far away (whatever the time of year, it's either summer now, or summer's on its way). We knew it was time—some say past time—to make our mark. We needed a logo.

Society was hip-deep in evolving mega-corporate symbols. Funky-clever was passé (along with Disco), and GenX-style grungy-clever had not yet spread from Seattle. The multi-national soft drink companies and sports apparel importers were tying-up every conceivable geometric shape and swoopy blob; the really big guys were all adorning their corporate empires with death-star¹ logos (which they quickly discarded) and a blue and white color scheme (which not enough have abandoned, even today).

Those were fast times: every clown, zoological creature, or specimen left on the door mat, was dragged to the trademark lawyers'—not unlike a few years ago, when the entire English language had dot-com tacked to its end, to be sold to the highest bidder (even words I've coined have been cyber-squatted). But I digress...

We needed a logo.

It might have been too late, then. People were watching the Little Hoss on the Prairie⁵ on real television (not cable); only dedicated techies owned personal computers, and the Internet had yet to escape from academia. To put the timeframe into sharper focus: I once took a book I had written using a small HP computer, and printed with a text-formatting program I had written myself, to a photocopy shop; the clerk said "You sure are a good typist," never even considering that it might have been printed with a computer.

Computers were slow, expensive, and difficult to use. The logo must convey small, quick, and friendly. Herewith begins the bunny tail (sorry).

Quick as a bunny is not a glamorous appellation; after all, dogs truly do expect to catch the rabbit. Ours is a rabbit with a mission, a rabbit in a hurry, which is why to many it only remotely resembles a rabbit. (A fleeting resemblance, you might say.)

Being on the south side of six-feet myself, I usually miss the connections between rabbits and Jimmy Stewart movies.

I once met a guy who promptly told me that his outfit owned every form of rabbit (never mentioning an Esquilax...) as it pertained to a corporate image, icon, logo, wall decoration, mascot, spokesperson, sycophant, or patsy. I asked him if they had discussed it with Hugh Hefner before sewing-up an entire class (or phylum?) of the animal kingdom as their own. Anyway, I figure as long as I avoid bow ties, there's room.

Esquilax Siting

Chocolate Esquilax We first saw an Esquilax in the wild in the mid- '90s, on The Simpsons² television program. It was in the spring, I think, probably. Most likely during one of the May ratings sweeps episodes. Anyway, it was that episode about Lisa's wedding, where Homer wanted Lisa's fiance to wear pig cufflinks, and Maggie sang...

No wait, it was before that. It was in Friar Wiggum's Fantastical Beastarium, but it was the same episode. It was here in what was, to the casual observer, just a plot device to lead us from the Beastarium to Lisa's wedding, that the first commercially viable Esquilax hopped into our hearts. For lead us it did, showing that we should not, nay, mustn't, judge a bunny by its tail.

"Ooh, and here, out of the mists of history, the legendary Esquilax, the horse with the head of a rabbit, and the body of a rabbit. Oh, look! It's galloping away!"
- Chief Clancy Wiggum, in episode 2F15 ("Lisa's Wedding"), on The Simpsons

Our mascot's name is Hoss (it may be named for a character on the old Bonanza³ television show, or after hasenpfeffer⁴, we're just not sure).

Now you know the real story. Come to think of it, The Simpsons didn't start until after Little Hoss On The Prairie was canceled. And in 1983 I was in Southern California, writing for the HP-75C portable computer, which had a kangaroo logo (a bit of a joke—see, it was a portable computer that fit in a pouch; some thought it fanciful back then).

That's close to the truth. About as near as we'll get without digressing into Timex Sinclair TS1000 and Canon F1. Besides, I'm out of chocolate.

References

Death Star logo
The letter Oh ("O") in the company name, or next to the company name, or as the punctuation in "Corp." was turned into a big, ominous globe, reminiscent of the Death Star™ from the first (then fourth) episode of the Star Wars™ trilogy (now six-ology) of space cowboy movies. The Death Star logo fad was short-lived, because market research showed that customers were afraid of Death Stars. Note that the Death Star logo has recently re-emerged as an integral part of Saturday morning cartoon shows, to help desensitize the next generation, and show that multi-national corporations are really action heroes (mighty morphing mega-corps.).
The Simpsons
Cartoon show on the Fox television network, known for hastily-produced rude content, and adult situations—Fox, that is, not The Simpsons. The cartoon show was based on a snippet from the short-lived Tracy Ulmann Show, which was based on a counter-cultural comic strip called Life in He11, which apparently was derived from '60s contributions to the art by R. Crumb, who based his work on the voices inside of his head.
Bonanza
If you missed it, Bonanza was a television show from the 1960s, where the actors from All In The Family, Star Trek, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, worked as cowpokes while waiting for jobs on their own shows to start. Bonanza starred several huge men, all about the same age, who were cast as a mix of fathers and sons of each other. The most endomorphic of these hulks was called Hoss, even though his name was Eric. Plots usually had one or two of these men out of town, presumably to renegotiate their contracts, somewhere on the road between Tucson, Arizona and Virginia City, Nevada (which were apparently two-days ride apart), while the remaining characters stood around waiting for this week's mysterious stranger to ride into town (who, likely as not, had a grudge to settle with one of the men who had just left for Tucson). Women appearing on Bonanza generally had fatal illnesses; they rarely made it to the third act.
Hasenpfeffer
In the Northern European tradition, this dish is a lubricant and protective coating for the arteries, designed to prevent leakage.
Little Hoss On The Prairie
A television series from the '80s, produced by and starring Michael Landon, who had formerly been one of those giant men on Bonanza, but for some unknown reason was called Little Joe (size is relative). Apparently Little Joe married the first woman who made it through the third act, and they lived happily ever after—except when mysterious strangers rode onto their prairie.

Before you ask, no, you can't use our Esquilax on your Web page. That's because it is a trademark.