In Stan Lee Presents – The Condor, Tony Valdez loses his parents and the use of his legs. Then, with the help of robotic legs and nanobots from the family business, he turns from professional skateboarder into the skateboarding crimefighter known as the Condor. The reviews for this straight to DVD release are not good. It already aired on Cartoon Network at least once, but you can watch it for free on Hulu while it lasts or rent it from YouTube. It’s horrible, unintentionally funny, and the main character is almost totally unlikeable. 10 minutes into the plot, the publisher of the “biggest extreme sports magazine” invites Tony to spend the night so she can make him a superstar. There’s quite a bit of PG-13 sexual innuendo, micro short skirts and heaving cleavage, but the overall quality of the animation, story and voice acting is so poor that it’s only going to appeal to a much younger, somewhat confused audience.

Two comics that were originally sent to me as fuzzy low light photographs by MC. They’ve both turned up online. At the top is Baby Blues, from January, 2013. The second Calvin and Hobbes strip originally ran May 2nd, 1987. Bill waters has a new book out and unfortunately, a bunch of dead links on his website.

Aldens was a mail order catalog based out of Chicago from 1899 (not a typo) to some time shortly after 1982. This is a page from their 1978 Christmas calendar with three skateboards. I can’t ever remember seeing an Alden’s catalog despite living in the Chicago suburbs during their last gasp. Two of the models are familiar plastic boards, the Free Former (forerunner of the bidirectional popsicle stick!) and the GT Coyote II. There’s got to be thousands of Free Formers in landfills across the country. The Spinner is made from oak or kapoer [sic] which might actually be kapur. Good luck finding anything about Spinner Skateboards on google.

Andrew sent me a picture of this box some two years ago, but it was pretty blurry so I resolved to try and find one in a store, but never did. In the meantime I found some good scans online via Mr Breakfast and Flickr user Jason B. This is a limited edition box of “Rockin’ Xtreme Colors!” Fruity Pebbles with “amped up fruity take!” On the back you get a full color illustration of the Bedrock Extreme Skate Park. – Thanks to Andrew Wahl for the tip

This Frog House ad marks the last of the adverts from the Summer 1975 issue of Skateboarder Magazine, billed as Volume 2, Number 1. This was the first issue after Skateboarder took a few years off when the industry lumped in the late 60’s. There were only 38 ads in that issue, but V2 #2 would see a sizable jump in number of pages. I’m about 2/3 of the way through posting all the ads in the December 1986 issue of Transworld Skateboarding. After that I think I’m going to tackle a 90’s issue of Thrasher.

I wasn’t sure if this Miller beer commercial ever aired on TV, and I can’t remember how I found out about it, but I held off on posting it to see if I could record it off TV for the official S&A archives. I eventually forgot about it when it never showed up in anything I watched. In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been looking through draft posts lately and this one got my attention. The original video has been deleted but a quick search turned up a replacement. According to the new and apparently original source, it didn’t air because it was shot on spec circa 2006. Devo and skateboarding in a beer commercial? A beer company would probably balk at even the hint of targeting an underage audience. How dare they assume responsible adults drink beer and skateboard! Still, stranger things have happened in the TV commercial world. This post originally had another commercial for Panasonic (What? I don’t know) that had some high profile names skating a ditch, but I can’t find it anywhere.

This is a 2012 KSwiss advertisement for a parkour shoe, excuse me, Free Running shoe called Ariake. It features a cat from Guadeloupe named Sébastien Foucan who is allegedly the founder of free running which is completely different from Jackie Chan and Parkour, and has nothing to do with it in any respect. Of course, the only reason it’s here on Skate and Annoy is because a skatepark always makes a good location for a product shoot of any kind. Is that freaking PVC coping on that quarterpipe? [Source: Adrants]

Here’s a couple pages from Lane Smith’s 1993 book The Happy Hocky Family. I guess the alliteration in Happy Hocky is more catchy than the Sardonic Hocky Family. – Thanks to MC for the tip.

I’ve featured a handful or two of pages from Christmas catalogs and store advertisements from the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, but this JCPenny (1993) is the first from the 90’s. Or it isn’t. I can’t tell for sure. A Bart Simpson skateboard is no big deal, but for the discerning reader of S&A there’s more to it than meets the eye. First off, there’s the awesome “pro quality” knee and elbow pads. Also, the country of origin is listed in the catalog descriptions. I barely glanced at the nondescript dinosaur skateboard until I read “Made in the USA.” Sure enough, if you squint hard enough you can see a tiny Nash logo where the wheel well should be. So that’s interesting, right? Maybe not. I’ve seen and thought I posted this Snoopy board before, but I guess not. It’s scooter/skateboard combo with cool illustration of Woodstock in full downhill racer mode. The funny-isn thing about this deck is the fact that they have a giant registration mark from the screen printing process visible over the front trucks. I guess they assumed everyone would attach the scooter handle. A quick search on S&A reveals Snoopy posts are in short supply. I…

A dead body found in a skatepark, as seen in the trailer for the 2013 film Blood. Another post I was sitting for years, and for no apparent reason. Apparently even in Europe the skateparks attract a bad element.