Skateboarding really is dead! A disappointing marketing turnout for Valentine’s Day has been followed up with a similarly anemic skateboarding Easter. The Scooby-Doo extreme Easter baskets are nowhere to be seen this year, and so far the only thing I’ve found is a pocket skateboard game (Skate Jam) that is housed in the chassis of a VW hippie bus. I saw it with the rest of the easter paraphernalia at Target. For some reason they chose to market these with a few Easter Eggs on the packaging, which is odd. There’s nothing inherently Easter-ish about VW vans. Makes me think they will drop well below $6 in a few days. That rabbit is something I had laying around from the 80’s.

Because it’s relevant, and in case you missed the Jesus skateboarding figure. Like all holidays, Easter stuff goes on sale the day after the event. I picked up this Extreme™! Scooby Doo Easter basket last year for about $12, which was down from $30, I believe. Scooby can’t decide if he wants to hit the slalom course or barge a pool.

So I was hanging out at the mall, bringing my kid to see some really lame Shriners clowns who were out stumping for the upcoming circus. Of course you can’t go to the mall without surveying the goods and services available. There were two major department stores with skateboards as display props. I borrowed a point and shoot camera on the spot and did a little investigating.

Nau clothing company (not just another outdoor company) is using skateboarding on the entry page to their web site, as well as some banner ads in rotation elsewhere. They’ve got sustainable design philosophies, partnerships, and a code of conduct all designed to get you to spend $148 on pair of jeans. They are Portland based, and they’ve done a good job of making the images as non-location specific as possible, but it looks like Pier Park to me. Wouldn’t be the first time. Actually, before I got kicked off Youtube, I was preparing to upload a razor scooter commercial shot at Newberg! Visit the Nau web site to buy expensive skateboarding jeans, archived for posterity after the jump. – Thanks to Ben T for the tip.

If I had checked my Google alerts in the past month I might have already known that Zoo York (Not a fan) is planning a Jenna Jameson model. To promote it, they had somebody craft this really clever advert (Am a fan). To write about it, I made a not-so-clever and extremely obvious reference to the title of a world famous adult film. To illustrate it, I took the advert and butchered it to fit in our size constraints. Sorry guys. They did such a good job they are getting lots of attention in the advertising world. When is it, err, coming? No word. Head to the source to see the whole thing… uh, larger. [Source: Nick Papageorgia(!) on Why Me]

Ran across this 1989 article (oops, not 1979) by Daniel Gesmer, who we have featured before, on the Seismic Skate website while researching for another post. Gesmer has a site called Geo Skate that sells Seismic and Bottega Montana skateboards.

Theme magazine is a quarterly publication that covers global avant-garde Asian culture. Issue 13: rebel includes an article called Christian Hosoi Reborn, Skateboard bad boy to Jesus freak. with photos by J. Grant Brittain. Check it out on the website.

Skatepunk.net has some cool old skateboarding photos too. Morris Wainright sent me the farm ramp picture and a search turned up the site.

This was at the end of a series of back and forth edits of a photo of Barry Obama on a web aggregator called Reddit

No that’s not a still from the first Bones brigade video, it’s 20 years later and Lance is hitting that spot for Elwood clothing’s 1st and Hope video, which came out some time last year I believe. Has anyone seen this? It looked like a good concept for a video, instead of the usual scattergun barrage of tricks planned and practiced and over and over to make it for the video (shot on 16mm film), it features a group of friends skating together in various spots, meeting people along the way. There are a few old distinguished names in there like Eric Dressen, Lance Mountain, Matt Hensley, Ray Barbee and Salman Agah. EXPN has a nice write up with more background and some production stills. So yeah, this is old news by a year. The second hope is Athletes for Hope, which is an organization of some of the more famous names in sports whose purpose is to “educate, encourage and assist athletes in their efforts to contribute to community and charitable causes, to increase public awareness of those efforts, and to inspire others to do the same.” Basically, it’s a bunch of famous athletes trying to get other professional…