Gone But Not Forgotten: The 1991-2 Orlando Thunder

Good Saturday morning, Uni Watchers. I hope everyone has had a good week (and your bodies have recovered from any Daylight Saving Time fatigue).

About a year or so ago, I began a series entitled “Gone But Not Forgotten,” which looked at two defunct teams which lived short lives: the 1991 Raleigh-Durham Skyhawks and the 1974-5 Southern California Sun. Today the series returns with another short-lived professional football team you may remember: the 1991-2 Orlando Thunder.

For those of you not familiar — the Orlando Thunder were one of the founding franchises in the WLAF, which is an acronym for the “World League of American Football” — and the same league in which the Raleigh-Durham franchise played for one season. The original WLAF was a spring developmental American football league which had 10 teams playing a 10-game regular season. Two additional franchises were initially proposed in Paris and Mexico City. Teams were aligned in three divisions:

• North American West: Birmingham Fire, Sacramento Surge, San Antonio Riders

• North American East: Montreal Machine, New York/New Jersey Knights, Orlando Thunder, Raleigh-Durham Skyhawks (replaced by Ohio Glory in 1992)

• European: Barcelona Dragons, Frankfurt Galaxy, London Monarchs

The WLAF (as constituted above) lasted only two seasons. During the 1991 season, the American-based teams did not fare well: not a single team won more than five games (the 1991 Thunder were 5-5), but things turned around in 1992, when Orlando went 8-2, and made the playoffs. The playoff format back then was the winners of the three divisions plus one wild card. The Thunder won their first playoff game, making it to the “World Bowl,” which they lost to the Sacramento Surge. The league would technically go on hiatus after the 1992 season, eventually morphing into an all-European based league in 1995. There were a bunch of innovative differences between the WLAF and the NFL (which are worthy of further discussion at another time), but rules unique to WLAF included assigning increasing point value to field goals based on distance, and a requirement that at least one player of non-US nationality participate in at least every other series of downs. The League also featured the first use of helmet cams as well as one-way radios, enabling coaches to tell plays directly to quarterbacks.

Several of the teams in the WLAF had interesting uniforms (and I’ll probably take a look at some of those down the line), but the Orlando Thunder, for good or bad, stand out to me for two reasons: (1) they had what was probably the worst helmet logo in professional football, and (2) their uniforms — particularly their home uniform — were both groundbreaking and aesthetically polarizing: you either loved them or you hated them. Let’s take a look.

Helmet

The Thunder sported a solid white helmet, with a white facemask and what can only be described as a “clip art” logo featuring blue clouds and a yellow thunderbolt. There have been some bad football helmet logos over the years, but this one may have been the worst. The logo on the helmet was a modified version of the team’s official logo:

As you can see, the logo, which faces rightward, is used to create the “T” in Thunder, taking the horizontal cue from the lightning bolt and adding a perpendicular yellow extension. The wordmark and base of the “T” were removed to create the helmet logo. For those of us of a certain vintage, this logo literally looks like it was lifted from a page of lightning clip art from the early 1990s. Perhaps that makes it endearing to some. I always thought it looked unprofessional, even if it was a product of its time. But once we get past the helmet and logo…

Jerseys

The home jersey (left) stands out for its bright, almost fluorescent green color. Today this might not seem like such a big deal, but back in 1991 it was pretty groundbreaking for its bold presentation. While the color may have been bold and bright, it’s actually a pretty basic jersey otherwise — no stripes anywhere, with helmet logos on both sleeves, and fairly standard block numbers. Numbers on both home and road jerseys were screened-on in blue, with the home having a green/white outline, and the road having a white/green outline. Both jerseys featured TV numbers on the shoulders. The backs of the jerseys were similarly plain, featuring numbers in the same style, with screened-on NOB on nameplates. Both home and road jerseys had NOB rendered in blue serif block font. The solid white jersey (on the right) was worn in 1991. In 1992, the team added the neon green sleeves, for that extra bit of color.

Pants

The Thunder wore white pants for both of their seasons, but they actually had two separate pairs — one set featured a dark blue stripe, a lighter blue stripe, a thin white stripe, and a neon green stripe, while the other set simply had a more royal blue stripe, thicker white stripe, and neon green stripe pattern. It’s not clear to me if the pair on the right were worn in game play, as every photo or trading card I’ve seen shows the seven-stripe (seen on left) pattern. Here’s a better look at a set of game worn pants:

Socks

While most players ended up wearing low whites on top of the team-issued socks, these were actually a one-piece with neon green at the top over a white base.

__________Unfortunately, because this league existed from 1991-92 (really before the digital photography era), there aren’t as many action photos as we’d like to see. But even so, these were visually striking — especially the home set, but even the road set was bold and bright. Here are a few action shots and player trading cards.

__________As mentioned above, the WLAF basically folded after the 1992 season — although it was revived as “NFL Europe” (featuring only European-based teams) in 1995 — due to struggling attendance and TV ratings. But its impact was still felt years later, as in 2006, a certain ESPN scribe put out a call for readers to nominate their “worst uniform ever” — and the Orlando Thunder were unceremoniously ranked #2 in the football category. Just to show you how our tastes have evolved over time, the “worst” football uniform back then was considered to be the Tampa Bay Bucs’ “Bucco Bruce” uniforms — which many of us absolutely LOVE today (and which were brought back as throwbacks this past season). Paul did a deep dive on those Buccaneers uniforms in a recent Substack piece.

While there may not be as much visual history of the Orlando Thunder as we’d like, fortunately YouTube has some archival footage should you wish to relive the sartorial splendor of that franchise.

You can check out a March 1991 game against the San Antonio Riders here:

For a look at their plain white 1991 road uniforms, here they are in action against the Barcelona Dragons:

And although it wasn’t known at the time, here’s the 1992 World Bowl featuring the Thunder against the Surge, in what would turn out to be the final game of that League’s short history:

The 1991-92 Orlando Thunder may be no more, but one can certainly argue their then-unique uniforms had an influence upon a certain Northwest-based NFL team (who wore this as a one-off jersey in 2009), which itself would serve as a predecessor to the more recent “Color Rush” uniform the team still wears.

Impossible to look at the Seahawks’ Thursday-night uniform without thinking of the Orlando Thunder of the old World League. pic.twitter.com/httrwhdy5b

— Paul Lukas (@UniWatch) December 13, 2016

The Thunder are long gone…but they’re certainly never going to be forgotten.