i've read Raccoon is the American Spelling, and Racoon is the British Spelling! But even then there's confusion!!
Speaking as a Brit who is near-obsessed with British English - not least as it relates to US English - 'racoon' (while
some dictionaries do list it as an alternative spelling of 'raccoon'), is almost always considered [and certainly in UK educational settings] to be incorrect. I think the idiosyncratic spelling of the Witty Racoon Event Building may be a simple typo, not least because its name was changed early during the Event's Beta progress.
What seems agreed by all etymological dictionaries is that the word comes from the 17th Century Virginia Algonquian term
ärähkun, from
ärähkuněm - meaning 'he scratches with his hands' - so my choice on its spelling, academically, would be the variant more common in the US...?
There is of course a compromise.... Witty Raccoon = Amusing Trash Panda
Well, perhaps for US English exponents, since raccoons are native only to the Americas...
In the UK we never see raccoons in the wild, so we have no concept of seeing them hanging around domestic buildings, and in addition, few of us would by preference use the noun 'trash', either - although we do use the adjective 'trashy', meaning 'low-quality, cheap, and/or overly showy'.
The most common UK experience of the noun-form 'trash' is in software, where the term 'Trash Can' still sometimes describes what is now more often called the 'Recycle Bin'. In Britain, 'trash' is called 'rubbish', and a 'trash can' is either a 'rubbish/recycling bin'
* or, more usually, just a 'bin'. That said, the use of 'can' for the receptacle itself was once much more common, and while I grew up using only the term 'dustbin', my Gran would more commonly say 'ash can/bin'. Of course, this was many years before recycling became popular, and in a time when real fires were a common way to heat homes (so disposing of ash was familiar), with bins still being made of metal, like the home of Sesame Street's Oscar the Grouch.
To be even more pedantic - most Brits would never even associate a raccoon with a panda at all (I myself wondered how the term arose, so I looked it up and discovered that it's apparently because they both have at least somewhat similar black fur patterns around their eyes?) - so unfortunately, and all things considered, 'Trash Panda' might not be the best - or at least the most cosmopolitan/international - alternative term!
* Linguistic Footnote : If anyone cares, the reason why many words and/or terms which have now become associated primarily with the US, such as trash [and garbage], sidewalk [UK = pavement], drapes [UK = curtains], pants [UK = trousers], Fall [UK = Autumn] and so on are so prevalent in the US but near-unused in the UK [these days] is in many cases not because the US terms are newly derived, but actually the reverse.
Those terms listed, and many more of course, were also in commonplace, even standard, usage in the UK - during [and/or before] Georgian times (mid-late 1700s). However, when the US seceded from the UK, with the consequent lack of much social interaction between the two nations for quite some time, many commonplace terms ceased to naturally evolve in the US, while in some cases they continued to evolve in the UK - so they ended up being preserved in the US while in the UK they were gradually replaced, over time, by the other terms we Brits now normally use instead.
There's also the strong patriotic influence of Noah Webster (of Webster's Dictionary fame) to consider, since he deliberately altered many British English spellings (and invented alternative words as well) - precisely in order to make them noticeably different from their British counterparts.
... and yes, droning on about linguistic niceties which nobody else cares about is one way in which I often pass my own [over-plentiful] time...