(Editors Note – Showtime must be doing some funky retro posting, I just saw he stole my thunder on this with a post on the 12th only I’m fairly sure that post wasn’t there an hour ago…maybe its just the cold medicine.  Sorry for the double news!  Never had to say that on Droppin.com before…)

I just stumbled upon the news that the Florida Marlins are getting a new ballpark in 2012 and to commemorate the move they are committing to the city of Miami and  re-branding themselves as the Miami Marlins…

Oh and with that re-branding comes…

Thats right folks, new colors, logos, jerseys, hats…the whole shebang…

Well first off, I don’t think this is going to help with the stereotype regarding drugs and Miami because you would have to be coked out of your mind to come up with that color scheme.  Yes the palate is a little hard on the eyes for sure but I get it.  You want to catch some of that delightful “art deco” Miami style that isn’t at all cliched and it helps capture all the  Dolphin fans.  Hey anytime you can work an orange jersey and hat into your wardrobe you gotta jump on that right?  I just hope its not to late to bust in some orange pants for the worlds first ORANGE OUT!!!

Here is a little buzz speak from the firm that handled the redesign:

“The new primary mark features a sleek, iconic marlin image swirling around an art-deco influenced M – a symbol for both the city name as well as its nickname. A new color palette has been selected with input from season ticket holders and fans of the team. The teal has been replaced with the colors of Miami – Ocean Blue, Sun Yellow and Red-Orange.

A distinguishing feature of the new uniform presentation is presence the word MIAMI arching across the front of both the white home and light gray road uniforms. This is the first time in modern Major League Baseball history that the city name appears on the front of a home jersey and illustrates the franchises commitment to it’s new city and “The Gateway to the Americas”.”

So the Florida Marlins season tickets holders, all 12 of them, voted for these “colors of Miami”?  That’s a little hard to believe.  Not only that but they have to put Miami on the home jerseys so everyone doesn’t forget where they are at.  Thats to be expected though, what with the run at every free agent on the market the Marlins are going for this off season, they are bound to forget where they are playing.

But fear not loyal Miami sports fan…our transition isn’t stopping here.  The new stadium will feature awesome things like:

A retractable roof…

Sweet, sweet fishtanks (yes 2x the sweet) behind home plate so little Jimmy with the front row seats has something to do during those long boring MLB games…

Oh and when one of your Miami Marlins goes yard in the new park…THIS HAPPENS!!!!

AHHHHH MYY EYEEEEEEEESS!!!!!

MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOP!!!

But it can’t stop, it won’t stop…it is the 2012 Miami Marlins baybee!!!

Hey anytime you can combine the glitz and glamor of Vegas with the pageantry of Sea World at an MLB game…well full steam ahead sez I!  Add it all up and I think I finally understand what Will Smith was rapping about!

(sorry I realize I probably should have warned you before you scrolled down to that image and truly apologize for any damage it did however if I had warned you I think it would have lost its epicness don’t you agree?)

On a side note at least they had the balls to go through with a full re-branding…unlike a certain horrible NBA franchise in Utah who thought it was a good idea to dust off old logos and do a horrible palate swap to try and capitalize on a hot selling alternate jersey…

(Oh and one last thing, I dare somebody…anybody (you hear me crispy creamers?) to re-brand the Miami Heat with these colors so that every Miami sports team will feature Orange and Blue.  Those are the colors of Miami after all!)

So unless you have been living under a rock the last few years you would know that a huge market has popped up in the realm of athletic footwear that promises to instantly improve your calves, thighs and butt just by strapping them on and walking around the neighborhood.  Whether by mimicking the resistance of walking on the beach, or by promising to tone through muscle confusion and resistance like walking on exercise balls, companies made some pretty crazy claims about their effectiveness…

Reebok’s take on these shoes was their “Easytone” line which promised the following:

Reebok then took the marketing approach of showing scantily clad ladies with toned legs and bootys in their shoes to prove that they worked.  The adds increased in their provocative nature and the shoes were such a success that they followed up the shoes with a line of workout apparel, pants, tops, etc… with resistance technology built in that would lift and “firm” all your lady jiggly parts…

So did they work?

Well if by work you mean made Reebok a bunch of money?  Yeah.

But did the shoes/apparel actually work?  Well the FTC thought the whole thing was a little suspect so they challenged Reebok to prove their claims…and they couldn’t.  So Reebok has been ordered to refund everyone who has bought a pair of Easytone shoes or apparel…

To quote Jimmy Fallon…”Hows that working for you”?

If you happened to buy any of the aforementioned items feel free to check out the following link to the FTC site where you can apply for your refund LINK

We at droppin are always up for a new uni change or logo change in the world of sports so its a little odd that this one slipped through the cracks.  Earlier in May the Washington Wizards took a step back to their “violent” past by unveiling new logos and uni’s.  I say “violent” past because the colors and logos are obviously a callback to the awesome Bullets jerseys from the past.  However the bullets were of course deemed to violent and DC franchise was changed to the WNBA-ish Wizards.

Anywho in this case retro is good and I give the overhaul a big two thumbs up.  See Utah Jazz, this is how you bring a dose of the past back…

As a big fan of sports branding I always keep a keen eye on clubs during the offseason to see which teams may be revamping their logos/unis.  Thanks to Uni-Watch we can all get up to speed with even the most minor of uniform changes before the 2011 MLB season kicks off.  Check out all the juicy details at the link:

Uni-Watch: MLB 2011

I had so much fun posting stuff about Kobe over all star weekend that I thought I would keep it continue!  Check out this video of Kobe filming a sprite commercial with Asian Pop Sensation Jay Chou:

Its good to know they use Autotune over in China too!

Okay I’m seeing everyone all over the interwebs ranting about Chrysler’s “Imported from Detroit” commercial so I have to chime in with my two cents.

It was a fine commercial that gave you that sense of yeah Detroit, yeah America, we can do this, we can come back, we can build stuff because we are Detroit and we are America and this is what we do gosh dangit!!!

And then I realized that we are seeing Eminem trying to act like a bad A while exiting the new Chrysler Sebring replacement, the 200…

Um surely we can import better cars from detroit right?  The new Kia Optima is a cooler looking car then this…

And isn’t Chrysler owned by Fiat? An Italian Automaker?

Imported from somewhere all right.

Welcome to awesomeville…population…this commercial

NBC Peackock…RIP

Yes with the new merger between Comcast and NBC (to quote Jim Gaffigan “Its like two pairs of dirty underwear!”) a new logo is needed and NBCUC has come up with…

…

Wait for it…

…

A little more…

….

BOOYEAH!  Oh wait thats probably TM to Disney/ABC isn’t it?

Yes the Peacock is dead, long live the boring font…To be fair, this isn’t the first time NBC has killed the Peacock logo.  The original Peacock logo was created back in 1956 and was designed to represent the networks shift towards more color programming.  By that tone I suppose new NBC Universal logo is indicating a move back to good old black and white!

The peacock went into hiatus in 1975 as NBC unveiled a highly stylized “N” which would have been all the rage, had it not been the identical logo of the Nebraska ETV Network.  NBC of course qucikly bought them off and continued Peacockless until 1979 when the peacock returned in all its rainbow glory.  The current peacock which we all know and love has been in use since basically since 1986 although its changed slightly in delivery over the years.

And now one of the most iconic brandings will go by the wayside…at least for a while I’m sure when they decide it would be cookbook to go retro and bring it back.

A little late on the news here but for everyone who doesn’t frequent shoe message boards, here is a picture of the upcoming Air Jordan 2011 which is technically the Jordan XXVI “signature” shoe:

Thanks to 0sneaker.com for the pic.  It definitely looks like they are grasping at straws to try and recreate the XI with this shoe but it looks like more of a takedown or team version of that rather then the heir to the Jordan signature line.  Overall I do like the shoe, just not sure it will be worth the assumed $175+ price point that Jordan brand seems to think their signature shoe is worth each year.

Dwayne Wade technically unveiled these during the Christmas Day game VS the Lakers but Jordan typically “officially” releases their signature shoe each year around the allstar break so I would expect the same here.

Or not.

Seriously, did we walk into the marketing department and say hey we want a new brand but we really liked what we had 20 years ago.  Any chance we could use that but change it from purple to navy blue so that all of our fans who haven’t bought merchandise in the last 20 years can’t just break out the old stuff and call it good?  I got news for you, that’s not retro, that’s lazy.  Its like they had someone design their new image from the Chris Creamer message board…not that there is anything wrong with that…

To make matters worse, if you can (thanks B-Rob), they are keeping the “Mountain” logo as a secondary logo and updating it with the new colors (which is now the 4th different color variation on the same logo, aka LAME!!!) and let me just say it looks horrible.  I couldn’t find a good picture of this, probably because nobody wants to look at it but here it is in all of its navy blue, green and yellow glory on a new T-Shirt…

WHO ARE THE MARKETING GENIUSES THAT CAME UP WITH THIS!?!?

Go Jazz!  Seriously go, get out of here!