As a nickname for raccoons, it goes back to a long time before the Guardians 2 movie.
Not that long, it was credited to a Redditor who coined the term in January 2014.
The first time I’d heard the term was the film, and I think that was the case for a lot of other peope.
An article on the company that makes the logo (among other logos):
Yeah, the Rocket City Trash Pandas were uninfluenced by Guardians of the Galaxy in the same way that the Baby Ruth candy bar was uninfluenced by the baseball player.
Trash Pandas! I love it.
It’s reasonable to guess they totally picked it because of the movie. The meme just happens to be older.
Yeah, having both “Rocket” and “trash panda” in the name of the team makes it blatant, especially given the timing of everything. But the organization is wise to distance themselves from it and claim that there’s no connection given Disney’s reputation.
It’s about that time.
As noted in that article, the baseball team reached a legal agreement with the roller derby team yesterday, in which both teams will be able to use the Guardians name, and which allows the baseball Guardians to proceed with official usage of it (including selling merchandise).
I’m looking forward to seeing the Guardians in MLB. I assume by the time spring training starts they’ll be wearing new uniforms.
That would be my guess. They revealed their new logos, etc., when they made the announcement of the new name last summer; at that point, they also unveiled some mock-ups of what the new uniforms will look like.
The sponsor logos will be a bit smaller.
And they’ll have In Loco Parentis shoulder patches.
In what I am sure the Guardians hope to not be a “sign” of things to come…while fans were in the team’s store at Progressive Field this morning, purchasing new team merchandise, a sign outside the store broke free from its mounting and crashed to the sidewalk. Thankfully, no one was injured.
Well as someone on reddit said, it is built on top of an Indians burial ground 
Nice! A quote from the ESPN article:
Anyone else see that “Guardians” logo and think parody team from Bedrock?
Keeping that same Indians script font makes it seem they’re insincere/disingenuous about entirely moving away from the past (offensive) branding. They could have come up with something more art deco to match the winged logo / guardian statues.
There’s nothing racially offensive about the font, though. The franchise is 120 years old, I can understand wanting SOME connection to its history.
Exactly. This isn’t a case where they need to “nuke it from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure”. Their organization had some branding which was racially insensitive, and so they’ve moved away from those aspects as they should have.
What else should they change? The colors? Do they need to move out of Cleveland? Do they need to demolish their stadium? Those are silly suggestions, as is the suggestion that somehow their font is racially insensitive in some way.
Then they should have gone with “Spiders”. 
:scuttles away: