Why Is It Called Marco Polo?
- Tyler Birschbach
- Sep 19, 2016
- 4 min read
If you watch as much TV as we do you will have most likely seen this commercial. Part of GEICO's "It's Not Surprising" run of ads where people are no longer surprised by how much they can save on car insurance (@GEICO if you want to throw some money this way for the free plug, we won't say no), a pool full of kids are playing the pool game "Marco Polo" with the "real" Marco Polo (editor's note: we can confirm that this isn't the real Marco Polo, but an actor playing him). In the commercial, Marco is confused by the game (probably because he doesn't speak English so he probably didn't learn the rules and) because they kept saying his name over and over. His confusion isn't surprising (seriously GEICO, if you're reading this send money we keep using your tag lines and name and stuff) and we were confused too. Why is playing tag in water named after a famous explorer who made most of his journey by land?
For those of you that never spent enough time in a pool as a kid to play all of actual fun games (specifically the tee game, sharks & minnows, and "who can splash strangers more off the diving board") and get bored enough to play Marco Polo here are the rules:
One person is "it", "it" closes his or her eyes.
"It" calls out "Marco" and the other players respond "Polo"
"It" swims around to tag others to no longer be "it".
Yep, that's it. That's the whole game. Yet somehow, everyone knows how to play it or has already played it. Marco Polo must have been a BLIND EXPLORER! It's so easy, a cavem - NO, no more free plugs for GEICO until they pay us. Anyway, that has to be why it's called Marco Polo.
It's not. In fact, no one can quite figure out why that's its name. As stated above, Marco Polo was famous for a great land journey. Polo is famous for travelling on the Silk Road for almost 25(!) years between Europe and China (it was actually about 8 years of travel there and back and 17 or so years basking in the wealth of the Chinese empire). Most of his travels were through some of the worst terrain (read: not water). While some argue that he never even made the entire journey he is famous for (they claim he died on the way back and his journal, which was actually penned by a colleague he met in prison, had many false stories), he remains one of the most famous explorers in history (probably in no small part due to this stupid game).
There had to have been a single instance on the journey that inspired this version of tag. There are actually a few, and people can't seem to agree. The Travels of Marco Polo (which from what we can tell is a high school project, great source!) states that:
"[T]hey were traveling to China in order to see the great Khan. Marco became very tired during their journey and fell asleep on his horse one day. His horse sensed this and dropped back from the fast moving caravan within the nation. When Marco woke up and did not see his family, he began to hear voices within the desert and thought that it was his family searching for him and calling his name "Marco". Because of this, he began to respond to those cries with "Polo". It turned out that Marco Polo was actually hallucinating and they were not calling him even though he was later found by his family."
No where else was this story supported. Others state that the name came from the fact that Polo and his companions had no idea where they were going (probably true), and that is where the name came from. Keep in mind, most of the sources being cited here are high school projects and websites that explain the rules of children's games, not highly researched papers and documents.
WiseGeek claims that there is no way to tell why it is called Marco Polo because no one really knows who first played the game. If any of you know who the first people to play this game are, let us know so we can go back and find them. The second most believable theory (besides the "Marco Polo was secretly blind and no one knows about it" one) is that it had something to do with water polo (you know, the water sport resembling handball that shares a very similar name to the game where people ride horses and play field hockey?... man all of these games have such weird and unrelated names), but there is really no way to confirm this.
So we have no idea where the name of the game came from. AWESOME! Glad we can conclude this stupid commercial about a stupid game. WAIT! WHAT WAS THAT?!
Oh, that's just Marco Polo's trusty companion... the llama (or is it an alpaca? We don't know, we are notreallyexperts in that debate...yet)... That is a totally feasible animal to transport a man from Europe to China and back, right? Let's take a look at where llamas live real quick:
LLAMAS ARE ALL OVER THE PLACE! Wait... you mean the orange part of the map is where llamas live? That's nowhere near China, what's the deal GEICO ($$$ please)?! How dare you throw a random llama in a commercial where random kids are playing a game randomly named after a random explor--- oh... we get it now. That's what you were going for. You got someone to write a whole post centered around your dumb commercial, well played (please send money).
Recommended listening while reading: Marco Polo by (recently retired) Bow Wow (though your career may be over, your legacy lives on at the bottom of blog posts about commercials)
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