Meet The Seattle Mariners Original Mascot…Sort Of

It might be hard for many Seattle Mariners fans to believe, but this April marked the 35th birthday of their beloved mascot, the Mariner Moose.

The Moose was conceived through a contest directed at kids that was designed to give the club a permanent mascot for the very first time. But did you know that the M's also had an unofficial mascot who was briefly tenured 11 years before the Moose came along?

That representative of the team was also chosen as the winner of a mascot contest, but this one was not for children and took place on August 17, 1979 at the club's old stadium, the Kingdome.

The open invite mascot-off was the brainchild of then-marketing director, Jack Carvalho, and brought out a motley slew of characters all vying to become the Major League club's biggest cheerleader and antagonist for visiting foes.

The cavalcade of hopefuls that showed up that day included a salmon; a rabbit; a bear; a pelican; a deer; a mouse; a kangaroo; several gnomes; and even a man dressed up like a baby whose knees became bloodied during the peculiar pageant after crawling across the Kingdome's artificial turf from the outfield wall to home plate. Even the mascots of the city's other two professional sports franchises at the time - the Seahawks' "Seahawk" and Wheedle from the Supersonics, were part of the competition's field.

Get our free mobile app

But the clearcut winner among the three-judge panel was Spacie (also spelled: "Spacey"), a quasi-anthropomorphic incarnation of the Space Needle, standing approximately nine feet tall with a human body clad in a white leisure suit and the head of the famous landmark's Atmos.

Spacie was actually portrayed by Brian Keil, a contractor from the Emerald City, who fashioned the outfit using a pair of white pants with a 62-inch inseam, and made the character's head out of a trash can lid, an old spittoon, and a CB radio antenna (for the spire).

To achieve the height necessary to pull off Spacie's lofty look, Keil wore stilts underneath the suit which propped up his rather vertically-average human frame by about three feet.

The former painter says he got the idea for Spacie while working on a construction project in Seattle when he turned and looked at a breathtaking view of the Space Needle.

Spacie became an immediate hit with fans and not only went on to appear at a handful of homestands for the Mariners (although it's unclear exactly how many games that eventually totaled), but also at events like Seattle's Seafair festival (where Keil reportedly walked dozens of miles over the years on stilts), at Supersonics games, and various other venues.

Despite his many public successes, Spacie was not adopted as the M's full-time mascot because, as Keil reports, the team's management told him there was not enough money in the budget to pay him (he won $100 for winning the mascot contest - which is about $500 in today's money). And so, as time went on, Keil retired from making appearances as the tall, skinny fellow with the parceled world monument for a head.

After roughly 40 years without any Spacie sightings in the Pacific Northwest, a clip from an old baseball bloopers video featuring the mascot emeritus (this time in a big-and-tall sized Mariners uniform) showed up online a few years ago and went viral on social media - finally giving Keil's invention the global acclaim it's long deserved.

This in turn also led to a resurgence in interest about the limited history of the M's mascots, including a feature story on Seattle TV station KIRO, several YouTube videos, and an appendment in Wikipedia's longstanding page about the Mariner Moose.

But the cherry on top of this revival was no doubt Spacie's selection for inclusion in Seattle's Museum of History & Industry, which has since enshrined the enigmatic mascot's headpiece within the reflective surfaces of its hallowed display cases. This, after Keil nearly donated the defunct character's old garb to the local landfill years prior.

Although I went to many Mariners games inside the Kingdome during the 1980s, I sadly don't recall ever seeing Spacie in person, as 1979 found me just a little too young and not invested enough in baseball to be in attendance just yet.

That said, I can only imagine the reaction I might have had upon spying this offbeat creation when I was all of six years old. Terror might be going a bit far, but as the kind of lad who was heavily consumed with all-things UFO and extraterrestrial visitation at the time, I'm quite certain I might have been convinced that Spacie had come down to Earth to abduct me, or at the very least give me a good probing with his makeshift spire.

There's just no denying the mascot exudes a strong 50s sci-fi vibe, and easily could have made an appearance in an early episode of Dr. Who or been out to get Buck Rogers in at least one installment of a Saturday serial at the old movie theater in my hometown.

Admittedly, the head portion is clearly responsible for most of the science fiction ruminations, while the rest of Spacie has me chuckling over the notion of him filling the profiled space that John Lennon originally occupied alongside George, Paul, and Ringo while making their historic march in the crosswalk on the cover of Abbey Road.

Whatever the case might be for you upon gazing at Spacie, there's no question why we loved him so much back in his day. And while there's more than a little piece of me that would love to see his legacy remain in its own special place within obscurity, there's also another side of me that thinks he'd make for a fantastical comeback as the future mascot of the Seattle Supersonics, should the NBA ever get their act together and grant the Emerald City a franchise once again.

Whatever the future might hold, we love you Spacie, now and always. And we also love and thank you, Mr. Keil, for befriending his persona from inside the Ether we call imagination, and bringing him to the other side to forever be our friend.