What do the Phillie Phanatic and Miss Piggy have in common? At first glance, not much, but they do share a brazen self-confidence and sense of entitlement — the expectation that they can do what they will and everyone else will just have to get used to it. Maybe it runs in the family. In a way, they’re siblings. They share a creator, Bonnie Erickson, who is also behind a dozen other sports team mascots and some of the most famous members of the Muppet universe. Erickson, curly-haired and quick-witted, lives in Brooklyn Heights, where evidence of the 82-year-old’s influence can be seen in every corner of the apartment she shares with her husband and business partner of nearly 50 years, Wayde Harrison. There are signed sketches from Maurice Sendak, sent as thanks for Erickson’s design of Where the Wild Things Are toys. There are reminders of Erickson’s work as design consultant on the original Fraggle Rock (she oversaw the build of the characters). As a consultant to the Children’s Television Workshop, which still produces Sesame Street and now goes by Sesame Workshop, she also oversaw the design and development of Tickle Me Elmo, possibly the first must-have, fighting–in–the–aisles–of–Toys ’R’ Us–on–Christmas Eve toy. (There’s no sign of Elmo here, though. “I always thought he looked worryingly apoplectic,” Erickson says.) And then there’s the Phanatic bobblehead, complete with matching piggy bank.
Her mascots are all, as Erickson puts it, “fanciful. And I think of them all as gentle anarchists.” A mascot, she says, begins with a backstory and a personality, not with drawings and swatches. This is the same process she followed when creating Miss Piggy in 1974 in response to a request from Jim Henson: He needed three pigs for a sketch titled “Return to Beneath the Planet of the Pigs.” The puppet originally had button eyes and long, dirty blonde hair; Erickson modeled her after torch singer Peggy Lee, a favorite of her Minnesotan family. “She had that low voice and just seemed really out there for women singers of the time,” says Erickson. “It was her personality, really, that inspired the pig for me.”