Thanks, I Hate It!: Dissecting the “Survivor 41” Logo

So yeah, this is kind of an out-there blog for me.  Don’t misunderstand, I’m no stranger to picking apart “Survivor” minutia.  It’s kind of my bread and butter, in a way.  But usually I save such discussion for when I discuss the season proper.  Perhaps a mention in the Cast Assessment blog, and maybe even a “Top 5 and Bottom 5” discussing season logos.  However, there’s a few reasons in particular that this logo needs to be dissected in detail for how bad it is.  Partly it’s because this logo does SEVERAL unique things wrong that I feel are worth mentioning.  Partly it’s because I already did a “Top 5 and Bottom 5” list for the logos, not to mention this one would take too long for the usually brief discussion in those lists.  But primarily, I think this deserves its own blog because this is the first officially confirmed information about the new season, and so help me, I’ve been starved for new “Survivor” content.  JUST LET ME HAVE THIS, OK?  

All right, all right, to be COMPLETELY FAIR, this is not the worst logo the show has ever produced.  I still maintain, and probably will until the end of time, that that “honor” goes to “Survivor Gabon”, and its ill-conceived attempt to incorporate the transition to HD into the logo.  But this logo gives it a run for its money.  Still, the logo is not without its good points, which we will discuss here.  First and foremost, while I was initially taken aback by the color combination, I actually have come around to liking this color scheme.  They compliment each other well, and while they are unusual colors for a “Survivor” logo, I don’t think that’s a bad thing.  What helped was seeing it placed in a graphic with every other “Survivor” logo that came before.  Because the colors are so unusual, it “pops” when placed in a collage with the other logos, and helps make the season more distinctive as a result.  It compares favorably with-and I can’t believe I am typing these words-the logo from “Survivor Edge of Extinction”.  And look, “Survivor Edge of Extinction” has many, many, MANY problems, and remains to this day the worst season of the show, in my opinion.  But the logo is not one of them.  Again, it has a lighter color palette, which helps it stand out from the crowd, and after 41 seasons, that definitely counts for something.  

Another thing I will credit this logo for is its simplicity.  I don’t believe CBS or the show has OFFICIALLY confirmed this, but rumor sites are stating that the show is using the combination of passing the 20 year milestone and the yearlong break due to COVID-19 to do a kind of “soft reset” of the show.  Still acknowledge the history, but taking the opportunity to break some norms and try new things.  And overall, I’m happy if that’s the truth!  Yeah, it has the potential to be disastrous.  Say, for instance, they decide to take the opportunity to make Fire Tokens a mainstay of the show, a la Hidden Immunity Idols.  But they could also keep the show fresh, and this seems like a good opportunity to try new things, or reset back to their base.  And frankly the logo is not a bad place to start with this.  While I wouldn’t say modern logos have been “bad”, it can’t be denied that they have gotten “busier”.  Logos in the single-digit seasons tended to be a stylized landscape with an animal silhouette up top.  Of course, given the more recent lack of diversity in location, coupled with the need to make logos more distinctive, we moved away from this.  Subsequent logos weren’t BAD, but in an effort to distinguish themselves, they needed to add more and more little details, which make the logo itself kind of blurry at a distance.  This logo, while having a different formula, returns to that simplicity, and it makes the logo look a lot nicer at a distance.  

The point here is that when you look at this logo at a distance, it’s perfectly fine.  Good, even!  But it’s when you look at the logo up close, and examine it in more detail that the problems with the logo start to show.  First off, we have something that SHOULD have been a good part of the logo, but was executed poorly.  I’m talking about arguably the central figure of this logo, the hand coming up out of the water holding a torch.  On paper, this is actually a good central image.  Usually the central image of a logo is the aforementioned animal, or a boat, or something similar to draw the eye.  A hand coming up from the water holding a torch, on paper, is a really good central image to use.  It fits with the show’s aesthetic across all seasons, even harkening back to some images from the intro to “Survivor Borneo”.  Even using the “I” in “Survivor” for part of the torch is kind of clever, keeping the torch pretty much centered and drawing the eye.  But something about this image bothered me, and it took me a few looks, but I finally figured it out: The hand and the torch aren’t connected.  

Take another look at the logo.  If you look closely, the hand holding the stick of the torch does not reach up to the “I”.  There’s a space where you can see the yellow of the interior oval containing the word “Survivor”.  This means that, rather than looking like one connected torch, the logo instead looks like there’s a hand coming out of the ocean holding a stick, and the “I” is just randomly on fire.  This idea COULD have worked, but either the hand needed to be higher up, so that it was grabbing the bottom of the “I”, or the stick needed to extend at least into the “I”, if not over it.  As it stands, the only way this is one connected torch is if the stick bends behind the interior oval, then curves back around to meet the flame, which is just dumb.  A good idea, but executed poorly.  

Next we come to the lighting bolts on the side.  Maybe I’m in the minority here, but I’m not a fan.  Don’t misunderstand, lightning bolts are a perfectly find element to add to one’s “Survivor” logo, but these particular lightning bolts just look ugly to me.  In general, “Survivor” logos, when depicting parts of island life, tend to go either for photorealism (the aforementioned “Survivor Gabon” is an example, though the alligator at the bottom of the “Survivor Redemption Island” logo is an example of photorealism in logos implemented well) or extremely stylized (think the torches on the sides of the “Survivor All-Stars” logo).  These kind of fall into a middle ground that just doesn’t work for me.  They’re clearly not photorealistic, nor should they be, but they just aren’t stylized enough for my taste.  Lazy.  These lightning bolts seem lazy.  It seems like someone searched clip art for “lightning bolt”, and took one of the first five images they found, then slapped them on the logo.  It just reeks of laziness, and is not stylized in what I would consider a “Survivor” style.  I would also complain that they’re wasting the lightning bolts when they need to save them for the logo of “Survivor Greece”, but that would assume that I had any confidence the show was ever going to film anywhere other than Fiji.  

But oh, dear reader, the laziness of the lightning bolts PALES in comparison to the cardinal sin this logo commits.  The one thing that seems near universally hated by the show’s fandom.  Yes, of course, I’m talking about the giant “41” at the top of the logo.  

Now, this is part of that rumored “soft reset” of the show.  One of the things they’re planning to do away with is the season subtitles.  I’m of two minds about this.  On the one hand, I agree that the season subtitles have been getting out of hand.  Need I remind my readers of the unwieldy “Survivor Heroes vs. Healers vs. Hustlers”?  On the other hand, just calling the season by its number, rather than a season-specific subtitle, is just lazy, and makes it harder for the seasons to stand out from one another (not to mention kills one’s chances of being found by random search engine).  I’m not sure if there is a “right” solution here, or even a “good” solution, but I think we can all agree that putting the number of the season in a giant font size at the top of the logo is not a good way to go about doing things.  

I was saying earlier that the hand holding the torch should be the central image, but size and poor execution mean that it really fails in that regard.  Thus, due to its size and central location, the eye is drawn towards the giant “41” in the logo, which is a TERRIBLE central image for your logo.  It’s a generic number.  It isn’t really stylized at all.  It doesn’t even fit with the “survival” themes that the show still nominally has.  This doesn’t feel like a uniting image that makes the season stand out.  It makes it seem like the show is just saying “Well, here’s another season”.  Like they’re putting it out for the sake of putting it out.  Like they just don’t care.  Look you have an opportunity for a soft reset here.  No one is going to care if you just have a plain logo with no subtitle at all.  

If, however, you INSIST that the “41” needs to go in the logo, then I ask you, WHY DID IT NEED TO GO AT THE TOP?  Look, there’s a balance to a “Survivor” logo.  The image at the top is balanced by the subtitle at the bottom.  The only season without a subtitle in the logo, “Survivor Borneo”, still managed to stay balanced as it s upper image was an island, a broader central image that was balanced by a black switchback in the water at the bottom.  It felt balanced.  If a logo is unbalanced, at least it keeps the “heavier” part of the logo, the subtitle, at the BOTTOM.  By having co much going on at the top, and nothing at the bottom, it feels like this logo should tip over.  Not to mention, if you’re calling your season “Survivor 41”, that makes 41 the SUBTITLE, which means it should A) Be smaller, and B) Go on the BOTTOM of the logo.  Why didn’t you just do that, show?  It would still have been dumb, but not eye-gougingly awful like this one is!  

Hoo boy.  Look, I’m not going to discuss anything more about the season in detail as yet.  Yes, I’ve read the same rumors you all presumably have.  Season shortened to less than 30 days.  The rumored cast on “Inside Survivor”.  But my policy, as always, is that I don’t discuss my thoughts until we get official confirmation from CBS of these things.  Without an official release, I’m not going to talk about it.  That said, surely you could have found a better foot to start on than this awful, AWFUL logo.  If any of the rumors are true, they’d be more pleasant than this.  Do better, CBS.  

-Matt

“Survivor” What-Ifs?: Game Changers

Well, with a regularity that surprises even me, welcome back to “Survivor What-Ifs?”, the off-season blog where we change a piece of “Survivor” history, and see how that change changes the entire course of the show.  Not that this season will have much of a chance to do so, however, as this is the most recently occurring season to date we’ll have examined so far.  As the title indicated, our subject today is the poorly-received “Survivor Game Changers”, which had, being generous, about a third of the people on it actually be “Game Changers”.  We can’t change that, per my guidelines for changes to be examined, but can we make the season better with one simple change?  That’s what this blog is here to find out.  

Before we journey down that path, however, a quick reminder that this blog will contain SPOILERS for Game Changers and beyond, as well as potentially for earlier seasons, as is always a danger when discussing returnee seasons.  As such, if you haven’t taken this quarantine as an opportunity to catch up on all things “Survivor”, read ahead at your own risk.  That said, let’s make our change.  

THE IMPACT

Despite looking at a later season, we’re going to be looking at a very early change.  Not the earliest we’ve ever changed something in a season, but a very early change nonetheless.  To be more specific, we’re going to change the outcome of a challenge in the first episode.  Recall that the first episode of Game Changers was double-length, combining two episodes into one.  The first half was a fairly definitive Nuku victory in the immunity challenge.  Not much was going to change that.  The second immunity challenge, however, is another matter.  That was a very tight race, with Malcolm in particular bringing Mana to a near victory.  

In our timeline change for this blog, Malcolm doesn’t just bring Mana to near victory, but absolute victory.  Whether it be because Mana keeps the race tighter prior to the ring toss portion Malcolm anchored, or Nuku misses an extra shot to give Malcolm the opening he needs, in the timeline we examine today, Mana wins the second immunity challenge.  This sends Nuku to their first Tribal Council, where I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that they take out Cirie.  Yes, Cirie did go on to become a power player in this season, but that was partially due to her not going to Tribal Council until after the merge.  Before that, she was a big target, particularly on the original Nuku, which is what we’re examining here.  Between multiple players (JT, Ozzy) with an axe to grind with her, and most of the tribe perceiving her as a threat, there’s no way Cirie doesn’t go out as a result of such a challenge loss.  

THE FALLOUT

The trouble with making a change so early in a season’s individual timeline is that changes tend to have ripple effects across a season after they happen.  The earlier in the season they happen, the bigger the ripples, making it harder to predict with certainty how a season will go, since we can brach out into scenarios wildly different from what we in our timeline know.  Game Changers is a great example of this.  Recall that in our timeline, episode 2 of the season starts with a tribe swap.  With Nuku having lost a challenge, does the swap even still happen?  If you’re conspiratorially minded, and think swaps only happen when production sees one tribe getting ready to steamroll another, you may think not.  After all, if that’s true, then the impetus for this swap is that Nuku won the first two challenges.  If they don’t, perhaps the show lets them play it out for another couple of episodes.  

Even IF a swap happens at this point in this timeline, though, things still change, and I’m not just talking about the absence of Cirie and the presence of Tony at the swap.  While it’s never explicitly stated, if you go back and watch the episode, it’s pretty clear that Probst is having the men and women draw new buffs from separate plates.  This worked because, with the elimination of Tony in our timeline, there were an even number of men and women left in the game.  If Cirie is eliminated instead of Tony, that number is now lopsided in favor of the men.  Sure, they could just change the number of buffs on each plate, but that makes the makeup of each plate different, since now neither the number of men or the number of women divides evenly by 3.  Which tribe gets 4 men instead of 3?  Which tribe gets two women instead of 3?  Changing the buff makeup shakes up the whole swap, and that’s without even considering letting everyone draw from one communal plate, in which case all bets are off!  

As such, we have to talk about the fallout this season in more broad generalizations than in specific events.  The first and most obvious conclusion is that Tony makes it farther in this timeline than he does in our own.  Shocker, I know.  But I’m talking more than just avoiding the Tribal Council that caused his demise here.  While Tony was a big target in the game, Sandra was really the one gunning for him, since she really wanted to be the last winner standing.  With a swap here, it’s likely that Tony and Sandra are separated, giving Tony new life in the game.  In particular, if Tony ends up swapped to the same tribe as Sarah, or ends up on Tavua, he’s probably around for quite a while.  In the former case, he has an ally who can protect him, and given the game skills Sarah demonstrates this season, I can easily see her using her social prowess to keep Tony around, despite his threat level.  In the latter case, moving to Tavua gives Tony an opportunity to find and idol, and given his manic energy, I doubt anyone else is going to find it before he does.  That alone gives him an edge that keeps him around for a while.  

Conversely, Tony being kept around kind of screws Michaela over.  She probably still makes the merge, barring that she gets swap-screwed, but recall that even in our timeline, people wanted Michaela out first, and it was only because of Cirie that Michaela was kept around.  Without Cirie, although Michaela is great, I doubt she has the skills to maneuver as needed at the merge, particularly as she never made that phase of the game on Millennials vs. Gen-X.  As such, she’s out significantly earlier, and our merge tribe overall is much whiter, unfortunately.  

The final generalization I’ll make regarding the fallout from this change is that the merge ends up being a pretty straight Pagonging as a result of this change.  In our timeline, while original Nuku did have a huge edge over original Mana, and they were pretty systematically taken out, the original Mana were not seen as major threats, and thus, Nuku was willing to eat their own a fair amount.  With the presence of people like Tony and Aubry still in the game together (since we saw that with Aubry alone, she was not enough of a threat to be taken out), and possibly a narrower majority for original Nuku, they probably see the original Mana as a more direct threat to their success, and thus move to eliminate them.  While Tony and Sarah have a bond, I doubt that bond is enough to prevent Sarah from flipping on Tony if it means a possible win for her.  If Tony did find an idol, this likely means no Advantagegeddon, since Tony likely uses his idol to try and save himself or his allies.  This will also inherently change the makeup of the Final Three, since Troyzan would be eliminated in this scenario as well.  True, pre-game alliances might have saved him, but if anti-Mana sentiment is that strong, then Troyzan may not stand a chance.  

Does a Pagonging of Mana change the winner of the season?  Eh, probably not.  Sarah played a pretty masterful social game no matter how you slice it, so even in a “Nuku Strong” scenario, I suspect she still comes out on top over everyone else.  

THE LEGACY

One of the beauties of doing a later season is that it affects less of “Survivor” history afterward, particularly if the winner remains the same, like I suspect they do here.  The only season with any returnees from here is still Winners at War, and if Sarah still wins, the makeup of the cast does not change.  Threat levels, however, do.  You see, Tony’s win on Winners at War, I think, owes a lot to his abysmal performance on Game Changers in our timeline.  By being gone so early, Tony’s threat level greatly decreased, and he had to take a look at the type of game he was playing.  This reevaluation led to his masterful gameplay change on Winners and War, and subsequently his well-deserved victory.  But without the humbling experience that is Game Changers, does the still happen?  I think not.  In this timeline, I think Tony sees no need to change up his game, as the only time it didn’t work was when his original tribe was down badly in numbers.  As such, he continues his manic, frantic gameplay, and makes himself a threat.  It gets bad enough to the point where Dakal may even throw a challenge just to get rid of Tony, but point being, he’s now out before the merge, and I don’t see him thriving or winning on the Edge of Extinction.  Perhaps Michele becomes the new Sandra in this timeline, but again, with such an early change, it’s impossible to say.  

What is clearer is how the perception of this season changes, or more accurately, WHY this season is perceived the way it is changes.  Despite the changes mentioned, the season overall is still disliked.  Some bad stuff probably still happens in this scenario.  The dumb “Combined Tribal Council” twist unfortunately is still around, and much as I’d like to say different tribe shakeups mean the painful “Varner/Zeke” incident doesn’t happen, I honestly can’t say that it doesn’t happen.  Maybe we avoid it, if the tribe shakeups are that different, but I can’t say it for certain.  As mentioned before, however, we do lose out on Advantagegeddon, and Tony makes it farther, which are both plusses.  Ignore the minus of Cirie being the second boot of the season.  

Speaking of Cirie, I think her reputation takes something of a hit as a result of this season.  Not that she isn’t still revered as one of, if not the, greatest player to never win, and rightfully so.  But this is an elimination one can’t explain away due to a twist of some kind.  No asterisk on this one.  In this timeline, Cirie is voted out fair and square.  She’s probably looked on like Richard Hatch’s elimination was in “Survivor All-Stars”: An inevitability due to her threat level.  Yes, it’s sad, and yes, the player still deserves respect, but no one is sitting here arguing that it was unfair.  

So, we lose some painful elements of the season, yet still I say it’s disliked?  Well, yes, though in this case more for boredom than for pain.  We may lose some of the worst elements of the season, but what do we really gain?  A Pagonging, and a pretty brutal one at that, continuing the trend of eliminating the exciting threats we all wanted to watch.  My beloved Aubry goes out significantly earlier than she does in our timeline.  So really, the change is that the season is boring rather than hated.  Either way, it’s still not considered one of the greats.  

On that note, I don’t think this blog will be considered one of the greats either, but I hope you all have enjoyed it nonetheless!  If you want to see more exciting scenarios, well, I’m always open to new ideas.  Feel free to submit changes you’d like to see discussed in the comments below, either on the blog directly, or in the comments section wherever this blog is posted.  Please keep in mind the guidelines for what scenarios I’ll consider discussing, which I’m leaving below.  

1. One Change Only: This can’t be a whole bunch of things or multiple things going another way to alter the course of a season.  This must be one singular event that alters the season in some way.  Cascade effects, where one change naturally leads to another, are ok, but they have to be natural and logical.  As an example, Shii-Ann not flipping and Chuay Gahn losing the final 10 immunity challenge on “Survivor Thailand” would definitely change things, but those are two independent changes that need to happen, and therefore not appropriate for this blog.  I should also mention that the change has to be an EVENT, not a play style.  Yes, “Survivor Heroes vs. Villains” probably goes much differently if Russell Hantz (“Survivor Samoa”) isn’t an asshole to everyone, but apart from that never happening, it’s a change in overall play style, not a single moment.  It’s also, as I say, implausible, which leads to my next ground rule…

2. The Change Must Be Realistic: An unlikely change is ok, but it has to be something that COULD have happened, or it’s not worth writing about.  Yes, Fang winning the first immunity challenge on “Survivor Gabon” would drastically change the season.  Would it ever happen?  No.  So there’s no point in writing about it.  

3. The Change Must Have An Impact: By this, I mean the change has to actually alter the season in some significant way.  Simply changing up the boot order is not enough.  Someone new has to win, the perception of the season has to change, or both.  As an example, I originally planned to do a blog on “Survivor Heroes vs. Villains”, with a timeline where Candice didn’t flip at the final 9.  I thought this could lead to a Heroes victory.  Then I remembered that Russell Hantz plays his idol in that same episode, meaning the flip most likely doesn’t matter, and apart from a slight boot order change, the season as a whole remains untouched.  Uninteresting, and therefore not worth talking about.  

In addition to these hard-and-fast rules, there are two what I call “Flexible Rules”.  As the name would imply, these rules can be bent with a compelling arguments, but they are two things that should be borne in mind when suggesting new situations to examine:

4. US Seasons Only: This is nothing against international seasons of “Survivor”.  From what I’ve heard through the grapevine, they can be quite good.  The trouble is, as a citizen on the US, the US version of “Survivor” is the one I’m most familiar with, know the most about, and have seen the most of.  I haven’t even seen a full international season of “Survivor”, just the occasional clip.  Nothing knocking them, of course.  I just haven’t gotten around to viewing them.  So, while I won’t outright ban the suggesting of changes from non-US seasons of “Survivor”, bear in mind that I’m unlikely to pick them due to a lack of knowledge and lack of time to catch up on the seasons.  

5. I Will Not Do Brandon Flipping At The Africa Final 9: A flip by Brandon Quinton at the Final 9 of “Survivor Africa”, voting out Lex instead of Kelly, would indeed fit all the criteria mentioned above.  I’m refusing this particular scenario, not because it isn’t interesting or worth talking about, but because it was already covered by Mario Lanza in his book “When it Was Worth Playing For”.  He covered it so well and so thoroughly that I don’t think I would have anything to add.  I’m willing to consider this scenario if someone can give me a compelling reason that Mario is wrong, or there’s some aspect he didn’t consider, but until that time, this scenario is out.  Other “Survivor Africa” scenarios are ok, though.

Hope this blog has been an interesting diversion for you all, and see you in the next one!

-Matt