Jamie Thomas for Olloclip, the indispensable, yet disposable lens and adapter kits for smart phones. What do I mean by that? Olloclip allows you to quickly an conveniently expand the native photo and videography capabilities of your iPhone (or Samsung) by clipping a a high quality wide angle, macro, or telephoto lens. The lenses work great, actually, but they aren’t super cheap, and if you invest the $60-$100 in one their packages, you are shit out of luck when you switch to a new phone. That’s right, though your old lenses don’t become obsolete when you get a new phone, the bracket that mounts them onto your phone becomes totally useless, and they do not offer the ability to buy just the bracket. What are you supposed to do with your old one? Well according to a spokesperson you are “free to give them away or sell them on eBay.” So while I can’t argue against the quality of the product (Olloclips are massively useful, especially when photographing/videoing skateboarding, and they are well made), I can not help but be angry about planned obsolescence and unnecessary waste. After all, it’s not as if Apple doesn’t have a history of changing…

– Thanks to David ODK for the tip. On it’s own, I might not post this guy, unless I already had him in my possession. But something about his amorphous presence is a little disturbing, like some alien sent down to take notes and gradually assimilate and absorb the skateboarding populace into his undulating mass, until he grew to the size of the Stay-Puff marshmallow man. Then there’s the trictionary on the back of the box, often completely wrong or not actually showing the trick it describes. His arm is a lever that opens his backpack for storing Bassett’s Jelly Babies. Very sinister. There’s no date on this, but judging by the board and the description of the item as “vintage” I’m guessing it’s late 90’s or early 00’s. Get yours here.

Cookies, chips, and soda! Actually, that used to be a diet that sustained me well around the time these boards were made. Check out these skateboards featuring the Keebler Elf, Chester the (Cheetos) Cheetah, and the Coke logo.

I’m trying to decide how much retouching and color correcting to tackle in the Vintage Skateboard Magazine Advert Gallery. Here’s a comparison for this Zephyr skateboards ad from 1975. Not surprisingly, the forty year old pages are discolored with age. Do you prefer the scanned image with minimal color correction, or the adjusted version that is closer to what the page originally looked like but has a slightly artificial look to it? There’s an enlargement to compare after the jump, but really this is just an excuse to get you to check out Zephyr Skateboards: Young dudes in heavy spots.

Before Mark Conahan was a renown skateboard cartoonist and all around ripper, he was a chubby little kid who modeled for Campbell’s Soup. At least that’s what I’d like to think since I lost my notes on this Campbell’s Soup store display featuring a kid on a skateboard. It looks very 80’s but could easily have been from the 90’s as well. Then again, those volleyball kneepads are very 70’s. Even though that board style existed in the late 70’s, the archives of S&A have pretty much demonstrated that art directors always lag a good 5-10 years behind the times whine comes to skateboard illustrations, so we can’t be sure.

This is a 1978 comic book advertisement for a skateboard good luck charm as seen on Etsy. Apparently we skateboarders had some sort of creed that the manufacturer of this charm was willing to send you a hard copy of, along with a list of terminology. What does it mean when a pro says “coping,” “go for it,” “eat it,” or “Kick flip?” I guess I’ll never know. – Thanks to David ODK for the tip.

Oggy and the Cockroaches is a French cartoon that sometimes airs on the Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network channel here in the US. It’s not very good from a writing/directing standpoint but it occasionally has a good gag. There’s an episode called “Skate Fever” from season 4 that features what may be the first ever appearance of fnigerboarding in a cartoon. The cockroaches have glued the cat onto a skateboard, and are following him around as he crashes into things. They make a quick detour into a toy store to pick up cockroach sized skateboards from a giant pile of fingerboards on display. As a whole, the cartoon is pretty heavy handed, lots of gratuitous TNT and slapstick cartoon violence that isn’t set up very well, but there are a few good gags and the art direction is occasionally interesting. The first episode supposedly aired in 1998, so that would date Skate Fever (episode 54) to about 2002 or so. The skateboard that Oggy finds belongs to a pro named “Roller Dude,” and it features a nose bone, which is interesting, at least if you’re the kind of skate nerd who is used to visiting Skate and Annoy… Check out a…

It’s Super Frog, or possibly Amazing or Awesome Frog, riding a skateboard in the pages of the Extreme Animals coloring book found in the bargain section of Target. Quite frankly, I expected a whole lot more skateboarding in this book, but there was only this one image. Still, a frog with a gorilla grip, that’s impressive.

No, this isn’t an outtake from an episode of The Prisoner. It’s a June 6, 1978 press photo from Leicester Polytechnic School. Yes, it will soon be framed on my wall. Three models wearing the latest in Skateboard fashions designed by the Leicester Polytechnic School of fashions and textiles. They are L-R Cindy wears multi-coloured knitted stripped sweater, shorts andd leggings. Stephanie wears Navy jumpsuit with velour stripe trim and bolero, and Debie wears multi-coloured two-piece in striped velour. I’m going to hop in the old time machine and see if I can get a date with Cindy and tell Stephanie to get a damned skateboard and stop lurking. Maybe I’ll bring back her jumpsuit for GVK.

A Secret History of the Ollie by Craig Snyder is here, and it’s a whopper. It’s two inches thick and 912 pages! It’s going to take a long time to sift through this for a proper review, but in the meantime you can get yours at OllieBook.com.