Bootleg mania
I found a seller on eBay with a lot of well-done bootlegs for sale. They are all from the same brand ‘Choke’ and the quality of the graphics is pretty good. From left to right we have a fake Santa Cruz Jason Jessee, S.M.A. Mike Conroy, Vision ‘Street Ghost’, S.M.A. Eric Tuma and a World Industries Jesse Martinez. I contacted the seller and he seemed to be a very friendly reader of S&A and a collector of bootleg decks! So here goes his story on Choke according to Omar:
‘Choke was a brand of skateboards sold in a department store in Spain called ” EL CORTE INGLES. ” They were sold between 1986 and 1991 approximately . There were 3 different prices and 3 different qualities . They came complete with trucks and wheels, bad axles and plastic wheels in cheaper models, and bootleg trucks of the Gullwing Super Pro and PU wheels (with a lot of sizes and designs) in the “best” models. Over the years I discovered that most of his designs table were copies of brands such as Vision , SMA, World Industries …’
Check out more details of the graphics after the jump. Some of the boards are still for sale on eBay.
Thanks a lot to Omar for the pics and story!
Top graphics of the boards:
No need to hide the name ‘Jason Jessee’:
Nice detail of the ‘Martinez’ deck:
We had another fake ‘Street Ghost’ in the past:
The complete boards had NMB bearings, which were not bad at all:
Weird that a company can base its entire business model off of copying other famous graphics. It’s not like they were going to fool anybody into thinking those were real, unless they were little kids, but then those little kids probably wouldn’t know what they were anyway. Cool post.
Street Ghost is a crazy one to try and copy. These seem better than your typical blatant rip off. I wonder if this was some sort of shady licensing deal.
I collect bootlegs do you know how to contact this person?
Follow the link in the article to the Ebay seller.