Here’s a beautiful turd of a skateboard that Valterra put out in 1987. It’s an Alf board, and it’s kick ass. Alf is in full Hawaiian shorts and neon Ray Bans mode. This model was auctioned on eBay a while ago, I don’t know what it went for but I remember being tempted. Another craptacular thing about this board is the fact that the graphics are on top and the bottom is completely bare. This one has GT wheels on it, which is really confusing to men because I thought GT was a 70’s era brand, so these wheels should have loose bearings. I suppose it’s possible someone could have put old wheels on a new board if the axle size didn’t change. Can you believe ALF was actually still on the air in 1990? I wonder why Valterra never put out a Back to the Future deck.

– Thanks to Buck C for the tip.

This insipid marketing manufactured cartoon and toy line was created by the American Greeting company in 1983. According to Wikipedia, the cartoon’s creators were trying to appease television watchdog agencies crusade against cartoon violence by attempting to “reinforce the importance of group harmony over individualism.” The end result is, well.. as with any compromise of this nature, mediocrity at it’s finest.

I’ve been formulating my own skateboarding parody of this show for a year or two now. It will be called “Ho Daddy-Yo!” Yo Gabba Gabba has quite a bunch of skateboarding on it, usually in the form of some of the short intermission animations, but it also appears in the beginning of the “Cool Tricks” segment. In fact, I believe Ray Barbee makes an appearance on “Cool Tricks.” This segment is a couple years old too. So old that they got around to posting it on the Yo Gabba Gabba Youtube channel before I got around to posting it. For some reason they made this part of the Dancey Dance segment. Dancey Dance usually features someone at usually at least marginally famous leading the gang in a dance. Tony Hawk can’t dancey dance.

– Thanks to Michel Skart Poulin for the reminder.

But they seem pretty clever. I’ve never seen the show America’s Got Talent or even the UK version that I have to assume exists and the original idea was licensed form was licensed from. That’s OK, one good “homage” deserves another. From this clip, it’s apparent that a group of frat boys got together to make their own version of BMG, and it looks surprisingly good.These frat guys are called Defying Gravity. They’re ex-frat guys actually, I guess they dropped out of school to be on the show. I hope it works out for you guys, but you need a new name. I guess it’s at this point that I’m going to need to add some sort of “circus” category, seeing as how this isn’t the first time we’ve had skateboarding mentioned in conjunction with the circus. Defying Gravity takes on a bit of skateboarding in this segment that reminds me a little bit of some of those fingerboarding videos where they skate on turntables with fixed obstacles.

– Thanks to Seth Levy for the tip.

Guess what? It’s Turf week on Skate and Annoy. All Turf, all the time.

We have a campaign going to help save Surfin’ Turf/ The Turf skatepark here in Milwaukee, WI. We even went so far as to dig out one of the bowls last night and made it on the 10:00 news.

Details about whats going on, a video of the news story, and most importantly what people can do to help save the park are all at beercity.com.

More information and the video after the jump.

UPDATE: It’s been filled in. I don’t know how this effects the big picture.

I’m pretty sure this is the same board from Rob Dyrdek’s Fantasy Factory. It’s pretty tame video until you get to the end part where the guy jumps off and appears to get run over. I can’t believe they let that thing roll unchecked, and then didn’t follow through. There’s probably more footage elsewhere, looks like it’s on Woodward property. Check it out on MSNBC.

– Thanks to Egbert and Kelly Hillyer for the tip.

The Gatorade Free Flow Tour hits the Department this Saturday July 10th. Get some before it shuts down. The Department, not the contest series. The Alliance of Action Sports puts on this tour and the Dew Tour. I saw some of the Dew Tour on TV the other day under the program name of “Action Sports.” More interesting is the fact that they aired a commercial for their online store. I don’t know if they are carrying their own inventory and doing their own fulfillment or… hold on. I just called the 800 number, and once I got past the corporate phone tree messages, the person that answered said they were from StandardBoardShop.com.

The secret word is “do.” Season 5, epsiode 9. I’ve owned this for 4 years and I finally got around to watching this episode. I’ve got my kids trained to tell me anytime there’s a skateboard on TV. “Daddy, Daddy! There’s a skateboard on TV!” Usually it’s a Sketchers commercial. There’s another episode in season one where Pee Wee briefly pulls out a plastic skateboard and says something like “Oh! A skateboard! Ha ha!” Of course my kids managed to crack that that DVD. This episode caught me by surprise. I saw Pee Wee back on David Letterman (?) a while back. I hear they are talking about making another movie. Pee Wee’s Playhouse was the shiznit.

Nissen is a girls clothing brand in Japan. This commercial is airing in Tokyo. That’s all I have to say on the subject, except thanks to Jeff Thompson for the tip.

Butch Patrick as Eddie Munster. Now I have to search out a DVD of the Munsters to look for a skateboarding episode. Sounds like a job for Scott Starr. Enlarge-o-rama.