OK get ready for it, this is a long one. I found a catalog for Athena International Corp in that magical place you’ve all heard me refer to: a box in the darkest depths of my basement. 8 pages of amazing crap in glorious color! Lot’s of bootleg stuff in there too… they even bootlegged the Nash logo! The styles are split between the 70’s and 80’s so it’s difficult to say exactly when this was printed, although there are a couple clues. I have no idea where/when I acquired this, I might have bought it off Ebay or a reader might have sent it to me. ( Was it you? Let me know! ) Enjoy!

This bootleg is one of the funniest crappy/80’s bootleg deck I have ever seen. The Thrill Seeker graphic looks like He-man getting busted attempting to devein a giant shrimp. He-man doesn’t look happy at all and the shrimp seems scared a hell. It was found on ebay, but it didn’t sell. I’m not surprised, because the seller listed it as a “Conan the the Barbarian” deck, so all the true Masters of the Universe fans missed this one. He looks a little overstuffed, like a bright pink Stretch Armstrong. Turns out you can get a licensed Masters of the Universe He-Man decks via a collaboration between Super 7 and Element. Despite being licensed, it still looks like a bootleg or at best, a toy store board. Trying to find better pictures of the He-Man deck turned up more carppy boards from Sk8 Bali. – Thanks to David ODK for the original post idea that I just couldn’t leave be…

It looks like someone tried to copy the Santa Cruz Jessee Neptune model from 1988, but he or she wasn’t as good as Jim Phillips and didn’t know much about Roman mythology either. The spear and the helmet makes the ‘God of the Sea’ look more like a Viking dressed up as Neptune. Not the first time this graphic has been butchered. Sold on eBay (in 2014) for $18.58 after 6 bids.

Here’s another counterfeit Brand-X Sean Goff deck, this time in a different color way. Amazing that they straight ripped off the graphic without changing Sean’s name, and hilarious that they stuck a Powell graphic on top. – Thanks to Christoff Vermeulen for the pics.

You can quickly got down a rabbit hole when you start searching for skateboards on those Chinese import sites. Here’a couple of beauties: A children’s skateboard with the Spanish word for puberty, and some World Industries and Santa Cruz knockoffs. It’s important to remember that brand products are beautiful, flexible in performance, stable in quality, novel and complete in style. And as always, dangerous actions, please play under guidance of professionals. Bonus Baker knockoffs after the jump.

This edition of Australian pro skateboarders and companies I did not know existed is brought to you by Ken Macleod, who posted a picture of a Ken Gibbons pro model. I tried to find something about it/him (Ken) and that led me to the photography of Chris Stroh, whose portfolio is primarily surfing, but also includes some 80’s era skateboarding. That’s Ken in the photo above, in the bowl at a place called “Five Dock,” circa 1986. Unfortunately, Ken was the victim of a hit-and-run and died in 2006. I scraped the web for more bits and pieces on Ken and Bonzer and managed to find a few items.

I forgot where I found this one, but it is clearly a copy of the Lucero X1 deck from 1986. I can’t read the word right under the front truck, but the original deck says ‘Schmitt Stix’.

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…

Tanner Palm sent in a couple pics of a “Smia” Bootleg of the Kevin Staab Pirate deck. It’s the same board seen in this post, but the pictures are high resolution and the top is visible as well.

This cheap looking Alva complete sold for $118 on eBay a while ago. The sticker on the tail says it’s ‘made in Taiwan’. Sean Cliver thinks some company had a short-lived licensing deal with Alva to produce cheap completes, since there are only a few examples of these Taiwanese decks. Anyway, I did some research: details of this deck and more examples of Alva completes after the jump.