So we covered the 70’s marketing tie in, now it’s time for something that reeks of the 80’s. This Max Headroom / Coke themed skateboard by Variflex is available as a Buy it Now now for $169.99. It’s got appeal for the skateboard collector crowd as well as another equally zealous group of people who collect Coca-Cola advertising material. Max Headroom pushing New Coke! As an example of the exploitation skateboards of the 80’s, this mint board is excellent, if not totally radical. It’s got the full set of plastics with nicely accented risers and a lapper. Geez, did that sentence actually just come from my brain to fingers? Please shoot me. Max Headroom’s popularity lasted slightly longer than that of “New” Coke. More pictures after the jump.

Oh how I long for the days when you could impress your half shirt and bell bottom wearing girlfriend by high jumping over your MG while wearing a hockey helmet. Check out the full advert after the jump.

In Oregon, the Lake Oswego Observer reports
that a kid named Kosh McClure was hit by a train while skating and lived to tell the tale.

Kosh McClure didn’t know how close he had come to dying until he awoke on a sidewalk on State Street. “I was laying on the ground and I couldn’t see,” McClure recalled. “Everything was really fuzzy. Everyone was like, “You got hit by a train!'”  As he recovered this week from a near-death experience, McClure and his mother, Jodi Roderick McClure, counted their blessings. The 15-year-old Lake Oswego High School sophomore spoke calmly about what it’s like to be hit by a locomotive.

And no, he wasn’t wearing a helmet, so that finally debunks that myth, huh kids? But the man won’t leave him be. The Lake Oswego police chief mentioned that Kosh should have been wearing a helmet by state law, and his case has been referred to juvenile court for a city ordinance regarding hazardous riding. That will teach him. Amazingly, some people are blaming the markings on the street and not the skater. Check out Train vs. Skateboard.

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.

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…

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.

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.

Wired 15.11 reveals how you too can survive a 40 foot fall in the XGames.

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.

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. People say Tony Alva invented them, but someone in Florida did one 1968. Ha ha. At the end of the article they point to an affiliated blog that has Tommy Guerrero’s part from Future Primitives embedded from YouTube:

San Francisco was also home to one of the country’s largest skateboarding subcultures, and this subculture would produce some of the decade’s finest skaters. The beginning of a 1985 skateboarding documentary, “Future Primitive,” shows San Francisco’s Tommy Guerrero carving, ollying and sliding his way down an avenue in the Sunset District to the chords of a bluesy skateboarding ode: “Well I’m a Future Primitive, and I skate to live.”

Ah yes, the respected documentary Future Priitives… Didn’t that win an Oscar? Right. That’s also the first time I think I’ve seen “ollieing” spelled ollying. “Ollying” may follow some sort of spelling rule, but it still looks wrong. Who makes that call? Check out Shredding Again at the San Francisco Chronicle, and if you want to recap some other efforts, try these.