[Editor’s Note: Membership card designer Scott M.X. Turner is back with this week’s installment of Remembership, his retrospective series about the Uni Watch membership card program. Enjoy. — PL]
By Scott M.X. Turner
The sixth edition of our Remembership series looks at various banners and banner-like displays that some card-carrying Uni Watch members have chosen for the back of their cards
When creating these designs, a lot of our choices are based on the source material. Some of the reference photos I used show banners with strong backlighting. That’s why three of this week’s designs have faint reversed-image numbers and letters showing through. It’s fun to capture that real-world sense of a banner flying in the sunlight. It’s also no coincidence that those three had white nylon as their main fabric.
This first group includes the HERE banner (one of many cards ordered by reader Bob Andrews) flown at the spot where the Baltimore Orioles’ Frank Robinson socked a homer clear out of Memorial Stadium. Fran Simmonds asked for the LET’S GO BUFFALO pennant that Oxford Pennants made for the Buffalo Bills in 2020. The Boston Celtics’ retired-numbers banner was Luke Vaughan’s idea. And Judy Adams asked us to recreate the construction-paper BELIEVE! sign from Ted Lasso. Meanwhile, the Chicago Cubs fly pinstriped banners with retired names and numbers at Wrigley Field (Jeremiah Allyn and Justin Groenert), and the St. Louis Cardinals display their retired-number banners in the team’s clubhouse (Oliver and Gary Kodner). All four of these readers asked for the banner version of their name-and-number treatments rather than a simple jersey back.
While not technically banners, Doug Steffanson asked for cards based on the sails from his boats. The first is from back around 2008, the second in 2021.
A large S and stripes are painted on a wall at one of Syracuse’s athletic facilities (Andrew Grant). More of an affixed plaque than a banner, the Mets display their retired numbers atop the left-field stands at Post-Shea Stadium. John Schandler chose Keith Hernandez’s No. 17 for his cardback.
Just one housekeeping item from our last installment, about fictional teams: I omitted two members’ cards. The first is Will Schieber’s worn-on-film Hamilton Steelheads jersey from the Canadian TV show Power Play. The second is Robert Kahn’s Springfield Nuclear Power Plant team from The Simpsons. Here they are, with apologies to those readers:
Next: Remembership will be going on hiatus for a few weeks, but we’ll be back in April with the Big Haberdashery Extravaganza!
The six edition of our Remembership series
*sixth
This is so much fun from a sports graphics point of view. I love this series.
I think I missed the previous entry with fictional team designs. Good stuff, has me wondering if the actual Anaheim Ducks have ever worn the movie uniforms. I cannot recall that happening, even when Disney owned the team. That would be a fun one-off alternate to roll out at some point.
Also made me think of the most iconic fictional uniform for each sport, has uni watch dug into this before?
For baseball I would say it is easily the Knights from The Natural, Hockey I am torn between the Ducks and Chiefs from Slap Shot.
For basketball it is probably Hickory from Hoosiers, though the uniforms themselves don’t feel very iconic. There are no fictional football uniforms that come to mind as iconic, most of the best movies feature real teams, fictionally all I can think of is Any Given Sunday and Varsity Blues, and neither of those uniforms really stand out.
The most stand-out recognizable fictional football jersey is, far and away, Al Bundy’s Polk High jersey from Married With Children. Instantly recognizable to any guy who grew up in the 1980s/1990s! The Slap Shot Chiefs are the hockey favorite with an asterisk, as the jersey is identical to what the real-life Johnstown Jets wore (with a different name, of course). So I would say the Syracuse Bulldogs are the next best fictional-team candidate (though I’d agree that the Mighty Ducks will edge them out in younger demographics).
Remake of The Longest Yard had a jersey number “X” worn by Goldberg
Football – Waterboy – Swamp Dogs
The Replacements – Washington Sentinels
My favorite part of those Cubs flags is the ghosted number from the reverse side of the flag being seen through the white background.
+1, absolutely love the attention to detail