"Release the Kraken" is a song by Ninja Sex Party about a comedically harmless Kraken featured on their 2018 album Cool Patrol. Sports Greg Hardy, defensive end for the Carolina Panthers, is called "The Kraken" by himself and his fans. Filipino basketball player June Mar Fajardo of the San Miguel Beermen is often called the "Kraken" during broadcasts of Philippine Basketball Association games and the Philippines men's national basketball team. The term was first used in 2010 by members at the forum Interbasket.net. New York Yankees catcher Gary Sanchez has been referred to as the Kraken (often stylized as kRAKEn) since joining the team in 2016. The Mazatlán F.C. football stadium in Mexico is nicknamed El Kraken. The Seattle Kraken are a National Hockey League (NHL) expansion team based in Seattle, Washington. TV The Hakken-Kraks, sea monsters that live in a pond in the vicinity of Whoville, appear in the 1977 television special Halloween Is Grinch Night and draw their name from the kraken (their heads and long necks, the only parts of their bodies ever seen, more closely resemble sea dragons). The Australian television series Shaun Micallef's Mad as Hell has a kraken character (Michael Ward) who emerges from a closet on the set when the character Sir Bobo Gargle (Francis Greenslade) announces his intention to 'release the kraken!' The kraken's appearance is accompanied by Toni Basil's 1981 song "Mickey". The Big Bang Theory character Sheldon Cooper mentions krakens in the episodes, "Release the Kraken" and "The Date Night Variable"; in "The Hofstadter Insufficiency", Sheldon dreams of Leonard being grabbed by a kraken and pulled off the research ship he was on. The television series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea featured an episode called "The Village of Guilt" (1964), in which a failed experiment creates a giant octopus that terrorizes the population of a Norwegian fjord. In a 2015 commercial for the U.S. insurer, GEICO, a "kraken" emerges from a golf course water hazard during a televised tournament, its tentacles writhing and grasping a golfer and his caddy, as the commentators intone with characteristic understatement that the sea monster looks like a kraken. The kraken appears in an episode of Lost Tapes called "Kraken". The sixth-season episode "A Wondrous Place" of the ABC series Once Upon a Time features a kraken, which attacks Aladdin and Jasmine. It is during this episode that Captain Nemo explains that kraken