Category Archive: Media Watch
Skate Girl
Fuel TV’s Insane Cinema series is running a feature called Skate Girl that focuses on the trials and tribulations of being a female skater, as well as a little history. It’s a pretty good feature, but not without it’s flaws. They interview Peggy Oki, who probably wasn’t too hard to track down, but nothing about other famous female pioneers like Ellen Oneil and Pat McGee. Also, it’s hard to comment on this film without mentioning something that is either funny or sad, depending on how you look at it. This documentary on the struggle of female skateboards to be taken seriously is continuously interrupted by little station bumps in the corner of the screen that are, more often than not, jiggle girls like bikini clad bimbo in the shot above. That has to be bittersweet for the girls in the viewing audience. An interesting side note, the credits reveal the the skate photographer is none other than Lisa Whitaker, the stunt double from the old Capri Slims skateboarding commercial we featured earlier.
Uh.. Barney skateboarding.
I caught this Cocoa Pebbles commercial with Barney skateboarding by accident. The transmission switched to another commercial before this one was actually finished, but I got most of it. If anybody has the full version, please let me know, because there isn’t enough coverage of Barneys skateboarding…
Vintage Skateboard Magazines
One of the things on my long list of “eventuallys” for this site is a gallery of dead skateboard magazines. I have a milk crate in my basement with some old skate rags, and I thought I had a few gems that would surprise people. Well I don’t have anything compared to Vintage Skateboard Magazines. It’s a work in progress without a lot of bells and whistles. What it does have are covers of skateboarding magazines from the 60’s to the 80’s from the US, UK, France, Australia and Japan. Some of the UK issues have scans of inside pages as well. There’s a lot of interesting documentation there, my only beef is that the scans aren’t larger. If it were up to me, every page would be available, but then again maybe it’s a good thing it isn’t up to me since our gallery isn’t even up yet. Check out the varied and often wacky past of skateboard magazine publishing at Vintage Skateboard Magazines.
Helmet safety for the kiddies
With all the recent posts about Jake Brown and those parents in Medford being idiots indicted, this helmet safety video from Danger Rangers couldn’t have come at a better time. Danger Rangers is horribly cheesy cartoon designed to teach kids about safety. How cheesy? It looks like they spent more money on animating their web site than they do on an entire season of the cartoon. This particular episode’s theme was helmet safety for skateboarding, and it centered around the “Go Games” extreme sports contest. A lot of the cartoons that have skateboarding episodes tend to have X-Games knock-offs as a plot device. I’ve pulled a few highlights, including the awesome music video for “Wear Your Helmet” after the jump.
Jake Brown was Wired
Wired 15.11 reveals how you too can survive a 40 foot fall in the XGames.
RTFM
The Oregonian reports that a couple in Medford is facing charges of child endangerment. The six-year-old and his 9-year-old brother off at the park for a few hours so he could work. The six-year-old suffered a skull fracture at the skatepark when he fell and his unstrapped helmet came off. Someone called for emergency assistance after 30 minutes.
Over it – Old dudes still skating
These articles about old guys who are still skating are still being generated. The latest one from the San Francisco Chronicle it titled “Shredding Again: In which we chronicle midlife skateboarders and their return, to be schooled by 6-year-olds.” It’s a fairly lengthy article, and includes the now obligatory video piece and photo gallery, except this time they managed to get a decent action shot. See above – “Joey Vela, 38, pulls a giant backside air out of one of the giant bowls at Pacifica Skatepark. Chronicle photo by Mike Kepka.” OK, they call it a backside air instead of a frontside, but it’s still an above average photo for one of these pieces, and not bad in it’s own right. Highlights of the article/video include a 45 year old relating the story of being taught how to drop in by a 9 year old kid. Also amusing are the quotes from the young kids whose turf has been invaded by the old dudes: From the kids’ perspective, the old-schoolers are a welcomed addition to the parks. “They rock!” said Colin Dallara, 11, from Lagunitas. “They remind me of the Z-Boys; they’re really good at axle stalls.” Yes, axle stalls.…
Wes Humpston – Kat Von D collaborate for charity.
Wes Humpston and Kat Von D got together to design a skateboard on Kat’s tv show LA Ink. Supposedly they are going to have a whole line of boards, although it seems more like something that was cooked up just for TV. The first hand drawn original board is being auctioned on eBay to benefit the Tony Hawk Foundation. My DVR didn’t pick up that episode, but someone else’s did. In the beginning of the design process there’s a funny bit where Kat says, “What should we put in the inside?” and Wes responds with “I like to do skulls and stuff.” Didn’t see that one coming. You can see the board in detail and watch the episode after the jump. It hasn’t been edited to show only Wes’ bits (get your mind out of the gutter), but hey, I didn’t have to do anything. The auction ends Friday, November 16 at 6 PM (PST). I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Kat is slightly more photogenic than Wes.
Is Hawk smarter than a 5th grader? Find out tonight.
Tony Hawk appears on “Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?” tonight at 8pm (7 central). You can watch a few clips on the official Fox web site. Must be a celebrity edition for charity. Tony might be fond of game shows with question marks, as he was also on “Who wants to be a millionaire?” Is he smarter than a 5th grader? Who knows, but one thing is for certain, chances are he’s richer than your dad. Headlines like “Tony Hawk: The “Bird Man” with Hawk-like Vision” have got to make him cringe whether or not the web sites is “dedicated to redefining success.”
From Blacula to Blaxtreme
The Back Athlete Sports Network (Yeah, I’m a subscriber) has an article titled Extreme Sportsman Carving His Own Way Through Life. I love the title “Extreme Sportsman.” It makes him sound so gentlemanly and brings to mind some old English guy dressed up for a safari with a pith helmet, pipe and Elephant gun. Blacula, I mean Blaxtreme sportsman Christopher “Crib” Butler’s interview is not very extreme. We do learn that in the 80’s his black friends accused him of trying to be white by skateboarding. Flying in the faces of stereotypes, he actually had to go to the ghetto to buy his first real skateboard! What was it? A Vision Kele Rosecrans. That makes him even more of a minority! Oh stop it, you’re killing me! Crib still skates, surfs and snowboards. Since 2007 he’s been shaping some nicely crafted longboards reminiscent of old surfboards under the name Malu Longoboards. For a brief time in the early nineties some of my friends and I thought we were “______.” I leave that term blank because “Extreme Sports” hadn’t been coined in 1992. We were skateboarding, bungie jumping, mountain biking, skydiving and motorcycle riding, etc. We called it “Live by the…











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