When the doll-like Fuwa mascots for this year’s Summer Olympics in Beijing were unveiled in 2005, parents everywhere had to breathe a sigh of relief. While just about any symbol connected to an Olympics in communist China is going to draw controversy, at least these figures wouldn’t give the world’s children four years worth of nightmares.

Several mascots over the years have been pleasing to the eye, but many more have been ugly, confusing and downright creepy. The mascot choices have been so strange over the years that Waldi, the rainbow-shaded dachshund who represented the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, seems almost conservative by comparison.