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Giant Chicken
to Egg |
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| As Ted Giannoulas
awoke one morning from uneasy dreaming, he found himself transformed in his
bed into a gigantic chicken. Twelve years and 51 million fans later, he found
himself transformed from a $2-an-hour gigantic chicken into a six-figure-a-year
gigantic success. Giannoulas, a.k.a.
"The Famous Chicken," a.k.a. "The San Diego Chicken,"
will bring his fine feathered fun to the Metrodome Saturday when the Gopher
baseball team hosts the defending NCAA champion Miami Hurricanes as part of
the Wheaties Tournament of Champions. Golden Plump chickens, another of the
tournament's sponsors, is paying Giannoulas an undisclosed amount to entertain
what may be a record crowd. Baseball Sports
Information Director Tom Greenhoe hopes to crack the NCAA record 18,349 spectators
set for a Hawaii vs. Nevada-Las Vegas contest in 1979. The famous Chicken
just wants to crack up that crowd. Giannoulas worked a Twins exhibition in
1983 and several Kicks games, and said he has been well received in the area. "I think
the Midwest has the best sports fans in the country," Giannoulas said.
"They're out for a good time, and if their team doesn't win, it doesn't
spoil the evening." But where the
Chicken leads, home team success follows. Giannoulas said the home teams for
which he performs win 75 percent of their games. His theory posits that he
brings out unusually large home crowds, which in turn bring out the home teams'
peak performances. This weekend, Giannoulas said, he will cheer for the Gophers. "There's
good guys and bad guys," he said, "and the Chicken only associates
with the good guys. I'll put the voodoos, whammies and curses on the Hurricanes." As part of all
this weirdness, the Chicken will enter the Metrodome in a scene reminiscent
of the Golden Plumper TV commercials. Giannoulas said he won’t parachute
in, but his entrance "might involve an array of jeeps." The Chicken's
entrance into fame and fortune, however, involved an array of leaps. Giannoulas
first donned his costume March 22, 1974, when he handed out Easter eggs at
the San Diego Zoo as part of a promotion for KGB radio in San Diego. He earned
$2 an hour, but the character he created caught on, and he found himself flooded
with offers. KGB fired him in 1979; after winning a lawsuit, Giannoulas said,
he became
"a free agent chicken." Now
the Chicken is on the road 250 days each year, earns "six figures"
in a good year and realizes that comedy is serious business. "The Chicken
is the David Letterman of costumed comedians," Giannoulas said. "I
fashion myself as a visual comic like a fuzzy Harpo Marx. I look at my costume
as just a more elaborate kind of makeup. Kids are enamored, but my act is
geared for adults. It's work, and it's really hard work at times. You figure
in the heat and the sweat and the toil. But this is art. This is pop art." If strangeness
and mass adulation define pop art, then Giannoulas is correct. Still, neither
seems to have deeply affected him. He remains down to earth even after a gig
as Grand Marshal of the 1982 Mardi Gras parade in New Orleans—the event
he refers to as the weirdest he has ever worked. "Oh, man!" Giannoulas exclaimed. "Mardi Gras is like New Year’s Eve and Halloween. There were three quarters of a million people on the streets, standing shoulder to shoulder about 30 people deep. The sight of all those people bowing in adulation to a man in a chicken suit was strictly from Rod Serling."
©2002-03 info@sponsorwrite.com All rights reserved. |
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