LA Times April 5th

 The Walt Disney Co. has done ducks before, from Donald to all his web-footed kin.

But as the entertainment conglomerate prepares to put its National Hockey League expansion team on the Anaheim Arena ice this fall, it needs a different sort of duck-one as suitable on the chest of a 200-pound professional athlete who is missing a front tooth as it is on the pillowcase a 6-year-old puts his front tooth underneath.

"We'd like every kid in America to want to have a Mighty Ducks T-shirt or hockey sweater," said Tony Tavares, president of Disney Sports Enterprises. "I think that's one of the things the NHL is looking for us to do."

Disney plans to unveil its Mighty Ducks logo in the next few weeks, and its executives are keenly aware that professional sports logo designs are big business.

Retail sales last year of such licensed products as game jerseys, baseball caps, T-shirts and jackets reached $2.4 billion each for major league baseball and the National Football League, $1.4 billion for the National Basketball Assn., and $600 million for the NHL.

Disney, whose marketing skills are being breathlessly welcomed by the laggard NHL, would like a piece of the pie-preferably a very large one.

When it is time to choose a logo, most pro sports teams hire consultants, then conduct mountains of market research and hold contests for fans to help pick a design.

Disney Chairman Michael Eisner, in one of his characteristic moments of giddiness, briefly said the Ducks would hold such a contest, but other company officials quickly dismissed the idea.

Instead, Disney simply issued a call for ideas from its vast staff of artists, from the 400 in the animation department at Disney Studios to the staffs of the art departments at Disneyland, Walt Disney World and Disney Consumer Products.

After all, these are the hands and minds that created the glowering yet tender monster in "Beauty and the Beast," and made the genie in "Aladdin" come to life as a sly blue stud.

"By nature, this is a creative company," said Jack Lindquist, chairman of Disney Sports Enterprises and president of Disneyland. "I certainly hope that the company that came up with Mickey Mouse would be able to come up with a logo for the Mighty Ducks."

Sales often go hand-in-hand with championships. The Chicago Bulls have won back-to-back NBA titles and rank first in licensed product sales among all professional sports teams. In football, the Super Bowl Champion Dallas Cowboys are said to be neck-and-neck with the ever-popular silver and black of the Los Angeles Raiders. Some of the appeal of the Raiders' logo, as well as those of other teams that include black, has been linked to popularity with gangs.

But novelty and the pure appeal of a design are factors that can overcome a team's struggles on the field, diamond, court or ice. The Chicago White Sox vaulted to No. 1 in baseball after returning to their classic black-and-white design before the 1991 season, and many recent expansion teams have done well-including the NBA's Charlotte Hornets and Orlando Magic and baseball's Colorado Rockies and Florida Marlins.

There is no better example of the phenomenon than the Ducks' neighbor to the north, the San Jose Sharks. The Sharks, a 1991 expansion team, are tied with Ottawa for the lowest point total in the NHL, but their striking, angular logo of a shark biting through a hockey stick has made them No. 1 in NHL licensed product sales with retail sales of $150 million in 1992. The Sharks, who overtook the Kings as the NHL's leader, were second only to the Bulls in all of professional sports last year.

"You see people in Bismarck, N.D., and Tuscaloosa (Ala.) walking the streets wearing Sharks clothing," said Matt Levine, who is the Sharks' executive vice president for marketing and broadcasting. "The Sharks transcend hockey. I think the Ducks are going to transcend hockey, too."

NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman says the Sharks' success has been "terrific" for the league.

"It's given the sport broad-based exposure and a great deal of attention, especially with the younger fans," he said. "It's also given us a bigger share of the licensing market."

Some outsiders think the Ducks, handicapped by a name taken from Disney's peewee hockey movie, will be hard-pressed to come up with a logo that has wide appeal. Bettman is optimistic.

"The logo hasn't been finalized, but I expect good things because everything they touch is successful," he said.

The Duck design apparently is almost set after being culled and refined from about 75 submissions. But Disney officials are protecting it as if it were an industrial secret, intimating only that it is not Donald, and that it is not goofy, as some serious hockey fans had feared. There's a good chance that the Mighty Duck will prove to be a mean duck.

"We want to keep it under wraps until we're ready to announce it," Lindquist said. "The logo is going to be a Disney logo, but it's going to be a Mighty Duck logo, not anything that will necessarily remind you of Disneyland or television. This is a logo for the hockey team. It's designed by Disney artists, but it's not going to be like anything you've seen."

It is not expected to look like the rather crudely drawn, stick-wielding duck that was on the Mighty Ducks jerseys in the movie. Interestingly, those jerseys didn't include "Mighty" as part of the name.

"I think people are going to be kind of surprised, at least I hope they are," said Tavares of Disney Sports Enterprises. "I think it's as good as anything you've seen, and it's not going to be as silly as some people expect."

Silliness is something many teams are taking pains to avoid. The Pittsburgh Penguins have won back-to-back Stanley Cup championships, but the team scrapped its pot-bellied cartoonish penguin on skates this year, replacing it with a stylized graphic profile of a penguin that somehow manages to look distinguished.

"I think it's more modernistic. It brings the team up to the '90s," said Bill Barnes, the Penguins' senior vice president for marketing and public relations. "The other one was cute, but for me anyhow, it didn't have much punch to it.

"I don't think you want to be ridiculed when you develop a logo. It's the identity of the team, and the identity should be strong, No. 1, for the players. You don't want people to poke fun of the players. And No. 2, in order to be highly marketable, because we all know the success of the Sharks."

Baseball's Oakland Athletics changed the design of their secondary logo, an elephant that appears on their shoulder patch, over the winter. The earlier elephant, a laughing circus pachyderm depicted on a uniform shoulder patch, has been replaced by what the team calls a "more aggressive" elephant design that the A's say is "emblematic of their hard-charging attitude."

The NFL's New England Patriots, which had a 2-14 record last season, are making at least a cosmetic change in the team's image. The team did away with its crudely drawn image of a Minuteman in a tricorn hat hiking a football, opting for a more modern-looking Patriot in semi-profile.

While friendly cartoons appear to be somewhat out of style, one of the secrets to a successful design is finding middle ground.

As the Sharks' Levine puts it, a team needs a logo that is at once "aggressive enough to appeal to a teen-ager and acceptable enough for a parent to buy for a pre-teen."

The Sharks logo designed by Terry Smith, a Sunnyvale commercial designer who also creates art for trading cards, fits that qualification.

"It's a blend," Levine said. "We didn't want to be too cartoonish; we knew the Penguins had problems with the cartoon. We talked to a lot of hockey players and asked their points of view. We wanted something hockey players would be proud to wear."

The phenomenally popular Shark was born after 13 months of research that included a survey of the consumer appeal of the Sharks' particular hue of teal, as well as a Madison Square Garden screen test for the uniform.

Disney's Duck will be hatched after a much shorter incubation. The name didn't become official until March 1, and while some sketches had been done by then, the work began in earnest afterward.

"If you're not in this kind of organization, you try to get creative minds together and take input and run contests," Tavares said. "That stuff takes tons and tons of time. What (Disney) does short-circuits that. You get just as many creative ideas and don't have to wait as long."

The design and its colors are the most crucial elements to a logo's success, but the importance of what comes afterward-the marketing-shouldn't be overlooked.

The Sharks, which came up with three different logo designs to appeal to a broader range of fans, have reached a cross-section of consumers with their three Sharks stores in Northern California as well as a national mail-order catalogue.

The team also has been innovative in its designs, with such products as Sharks boxer shorts and Sharks plush toys, which proved a hit with attorneys and have been advertised in law journals with a campaign about "one shark speaking to another."

But Disney dwarfs anything the Sharks can imagine, with 201 Disney Stores in 41 states and around the world, and a consumer products division that topped $1 billion in sales last year.

The Mighty Duck could be seen on the shelves not only in Florida but Japan and France.

Disney already sells everything from clothing to figurines to plush toys, bed linens and books, and the Ducks logo will find its way onto far more than just jerseys. Eisner and Lindquist have indicated that the company won't be shy.

"We're going to market the Mighty Ducks like we market every other Disney product," Lindquist said.

The network of stores will give Disney a tremendous advantage over other team owners. The profits from licensing revenue are shared equally among the league's teams, so a Sharks T-shirt sold in say, St. Louis, means as much to the Washington Capitals as it does to the Sharks. A team profits most when it sells the merchandise itself, earning the retail mark-up as well as its share of licensing fees.

The Sharks have set an example in the NHL, and the Ducks have taken note.

"I think any time you see somebody have that kind of success, you look at what they've done right and what you like," Tavares said. "But you can't go and just mimic somebody. Even though they say plagiarism is the highest form of flattery, I don't think they'd be real flattered if we came up with a logo of a duck biting through a hockey stick."