Yesterday afternoon, Jones said, "the Red Bull liaison told us that Major League Baseball won't let us fly with the Phanatic's head on our craft. We were so passionate about that head. We spent months changing it over and over again so that it would look just like him. We're really disheartened now."
Because the decision came so shortly before the Flugtag competition, Jones said, it's much too late to rebuild the head into another kind of creature.
"We're going to have to fly it without a head," she said sadly.
Adam Denard, who will pilot the headless green belly into the river, was hopping mad last night.
"How about we cut the head off and call it, 'The Philly Mascot That Major League Baseball Decided to Kill?' " he said.
"I've been going to Phillies games since I was a toddler, and the Phillie Phanatic was always a favorite," Denard said. "The dude came up to the nosebleed seats on a 110-degree day and gave me a belly dance on my 10th birthday. That was the coolest thing ever."
Denard said that he knew that making money off a trademark was a violation, "but we're $3,000 in the hole on this thing. This is my city, Major League Baseball! My Phillies! My Phillie Phanatic! You are a bunch of freaking nerds!"
Tomorrow's Flugtag entries also include a huge flying horse crewed by a team from the Draught Horse Pub, on Cecil B. Moore Avenue, at Temple University, and a mammoth space shuttle attacked by green men who look like clones of Green Man from "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia."
"Sweet Katie" Jablonski, a Lockheed Martin Corp. engineer who will pilot the "It's Always Sunny in Space" team's shuttle, told the Daily News that she was chosen by her four male teammates because "I'm the lightest, I'm not scared, I went skydiving once - and I can swim."
