MITCH BLATT

The NHL has found a great idea to bring interest to hockey: Unleashing each NHL franchise as a superhero!

They have partnered with Stan Lee to reveal one hero per day every day in January. We’re still waiting for 10 of the heroes to be unveiled, but the 20 they have so far look cool. See them at NHL.com.

Yahoo! has a long story about the background and details of the project. Apparently some of the “hockey purists” don’t like it.

“I understand what’s happening right now. We’re getting negative feedback from some of the hockey purist bloggers,” said Baratta, chief creative officer for Guardian Media Entertainment.

As noted in the Yahoo! article, the characters are kind of “cheese-tastic,” but attaching super-human characteristic to athletes and teams is nothing new. The marketing campaign is supposed to appeal to young kids who might like such action comics, but I think it also brings attention to the NHL to a broad base, as noted by the blog coverage this project has received. Even if older sports fans aren’t comics fans, they still might tune in to the All-Star game just because they are reminded by the attention this marketing campaign is receiving.

For that matter, I’m not even a hockey fan, so I wouldn’t be writing about hockey at all if it weren’t for the Guardian Project. Sure there’s a lot that’s ripe for ridicule in terms of the story-lines and weapons that any superhero is going to use, but if it increases the viewership of the all-star game and the second-half of the season, it will be a success.

You can vote at Facebook for what character you want to see revealed next. We need to see the Avalanche!

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