I post a lot of crappy skateboards here, so it’s nice to have something really… pretty? I can’t say for sure if this was up to snuff when it came out, but it probably was, at least in some circles. The 70’s had a wide range in acceptable design and performance characteristics. This Whip True Glide model is a beautiful skateboard. The colors and the design really pops, though the flexible fiberglass deck likely doesn’t. It’s beautiful, but not $500 beautiful like the seller originally wanted. I like the top graphic, color combination that includes coordinated bushings, and the speckling visible on the bottom. Very sharp, very 70’s.

The Skateboard Kid was released in 1993, but views more like 1989. It’s the heartwarming story of a bullied kid who builds a motorized skateboard that gets hit by lightning and comes to life. If it sounds bad, like the storyline had little to no thought put into it, don’t worry, because the skateboard talks, has eyes from the RC car shell that was grafted on, and can use the speed controller as a sort of prehensile tail. And it flies… sometimes. And it plays baseball. And it features a wholly disinterested and possibly inebriated Dom DeLuise as the voice of the skateboard. This movie is so very bad. Somehow Timothy Busfield signed on as the lead, and respected producer Don Was produced and cowrote some of the awful (sometimes skateboard-centric) original soundtrack. Check out Skateboard Phreak, Thrasher, Skyboardin’, and Nosegrind. Make sure you stick around of the cringeworthy “music video” for Hard to Find by Trashkittens over the closing credits. At an hour and seventeen minutes, the skateboard scenes are a little bit too sparse to be as good of a bad movie as Thrashin’, which is definitely a production level above the Skateboard Kid. I don’t recognize any of the skateboarding cast or stunt doubles, it was the 90’s after all. New Concorde (Roger Corman) films must have made some money off it, because they made a sequel. You can watch the full video after the jump, for as long as it remains online. The youtube account owner claims “*No Copyright Infringement Intended” so that makes it legal, right?

– Thanks to BPA for the tip.

This Canadian box of Cheerios has been for sale by Masteraddams for a very long time now, unless he’s got a stock of them somewhere. In your box of Canadian Cheerios you could get one of six possible trading cards/sticker with illustrations of the Skateboard Gang characters from the mid 80’s toy series. The Skateboard Gang figures were attached to pull-back and go skateboards. They’re surprisingly expensive to acquire these days, routinely going for $15-$20, so collecting the whole set would be a hefty purchase.

We’re all adults here, aren’t we? The Black Bear Bar in Brooklyn has a bowl. You can skate for free if you’re over 21 and haven’t already been drinking. This seems like an idea that would float well in any town of a reasonably large population. There are bicycle shops and bike parks with a bar, why not skateboarding? This is a little reversed in priority, bar first, skateboarding second, but it’s still a good idea, provided there’s ample circulation to disperse the stink of good session. You might notice a couple of corporate logos in the photo above. Levi’s and Huf both had a hand in this, possibly it was used in demo somewhere and this is where the wood found it’s final home. That’s pure speculation though.

[Photo nitrohydro via NYSkateboarding. Source: Brooklyn Paper]

– Thanks to Tallboycan for the tip.

Up top, Jamaba Juice kids meal cups with a skateboarding orange. On the bottom, a Jamba Juice limited edition skateboard deck by Eric Burman given away free as a promotion at SkateLab.

– Thanks to Kevin Live for the tip.

Skateboard slaat aan in Vlissingen – Skateboarding is catching on in Vlissingen, according to the December 4th, 1980 edition of the Dutch newspaper Provinciale Zeeuwse Courant. Check out the photo of that skatepark. Even though it’s low res black and white newspaper photo, it’s clearly one of those fiberglass ramps that was part of the Skate Ball system, and possibly the same blue fiberglass ramps used in Thrasherland. It’s hard to know for sure, could there have been more than one manufacturer of blue fiberglass skateboard ramps? There are similarities and differences between the two if you compare, but it’s conceivable that there were a few minor iterations over the product lifespan that would account for that. This is the only photograph I’ve seen showing the incline, full pipe parts (only half here) and the Skate Ball ramp. I’m just shocked that some of them made it all the way over to Europe.

The article comes courtesy of S&A reader Jeroen who rode this thing in the Netherlands. His crew actually found abandoned parts of the park and reassembled them in their own configuration and rode them in 1985.

Fantasma Toys radio controlled Sonic the Hedgehog Free Riders toy, skateboard edition. Reviewed by a little kid after the jump.

You’re looking at a computer game called Skateboard Kidz for the Spectrum (Sinclair) computer. The game was released in 1988 according to World of Spectrum, which would explain why it came on a cassette tape. Yes, that’s right, you used to have to load computer programs on some home computers via a cassette tape deck. Skateboard Kidz was made by Silverbird Software in the UK, and as such, all the radical 80’s dialect has a distinctly English accent. You can hear it yourself because the program files are downloadable from several places on the web, and if you don’t have a 25 year old computer, you can run it in a web browser with a Javascript MESS emulator. (FYI – Emulator does not seem to work with Safari.)

This concept from Förster Skateboards should look familiar. I think this is the fifth iteration of a natural wood skateboard shown on Skate and Annoy over the years. (1,2, 3, 4)

– Thanks to Matthijs for the tip.

A Toys R Us gift card. It should come with a warning along the lines of “Don’t use this gift card to buy any of the so-called skateboards we sell here.”