The 1968 Winter Games in Grenoble, France, opened the floodgates for Olympic mascots by giving the world Schuss, a cartoon character that became known as the Skiing Sperm. All manner of misshapen and barely identifiable creatures have followed, from Waldi the multicolored dachshund (Munich, 1972) to Magique the star-shaped snow imp (Albertville, France, 1992) to Izzy the computer-generated ... something (Atlanta, 1996).

However strange, those mascots were released in simpler times. In contrast, consider what has happened to Wenlock and Mandeville, the Cyclopean mascots for this summer’s London Olympics.

Wenlock and Mandeville, which purportedly represent drops of steel from a girder of Olympic Stadium, entered the modern-day wilds of photo-editing software and a flourishing culture of online snark. They have been turned into Queen Victoria. They emerge from the eyes of Gordon Brown, the former prime minister of Britain. They are drooping objects in a Salvador Dalí painting. Sometimes they’re plaid, sometimes they’re striped. Often, they are not appropriate for a family newspaper.

“I saw them and I thought, wow, these are kind of stupid,” said Tyler Davis, 21, a student teacher in Mahanoy City, Pa., who created an animation in which Wenlock shoots flames out of its eye onto Buckingham Palace and Big Ben. “I look at these mascots and think, ‘We’ve put millions into this and it’s on a pedestal.’ It’s my job and others on the Internet to chip away at the pedestal.”