This is a 1980 advertisement for Kodak photo paper featuring Michael Landon. This ad came out in the 101’st year of the company when they were probably at their peak. 30 years later they filed for bankruptcy mostly due to the fact that they couldn’t keep up with the world of digital photography, despite having invented it! Michael says you should order more fun for everyone. Sure, why not? It looks like the kid in the photo is wearing volleyball kneepads and a couple of rolls of paper towels around his elbows. I’m not sure about that skateboard either. The single conical wheels are pristine but I’ve seen issues of Thrasher thicker than that deck.

You might remember a Dutch newspaper article from 1980 talking about how skateboarding was becoming very popular. Here’s remnants of the same skatepark in the May 4th, 1982 edition of the Leidse Courant newspaper. This article is about the sport’s demise. This must have been slightly better than it looked when Jeroen and crew found it in 1985. Even then, you had to keep an eye open for those Mad dogs.

– Thanks to Jeroen for the tip.

Issue #268 of Mad Magazine, on the newsstands in January of 1987. It’s the lighter side of evolution. Bonus punk rock lighter side of appearances after the jump.

It’s the Buckwheat B. Rad O-Tay Skate Club T-shirt. I can’t read a copyright date on this, but it was surely produced after Eddie Murphy popularized the “O-tay” saying in his portrayals of Buckwheat on SNL. Those Buckwheat skits aired from 1981-1984, and forever on reruns. Two cast members are making the most of the u-shaped slide, but Buckwheat is getting the short end of the stick with that bent freestyle board. This appears to be officially licensed “Our Gang” merchandise.

In the second half of the 80’s I bought a barely used set of Pro Designed knee pads from local Champaign-Urbana skater Martin Pelequin. “The Mertster” as he liked to call himself, was a colorful character to say the least, almost a miniature version of Steven Tyler in appearance and behavior. Skinny, and around five foot tall and some change, he definitely overbought these double capped kneepads that he had custom made with blue denim and leopard skin lycra. They looked and felt like hockey goalie kneepads on him, so he sold them to me. I rode these kneepads until the early 90’s when I loaned them to a friend in Chicago, ironically to play outdoor hockey. He accidentally left one behind and so I never had a full set again. I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of the remaining one. One of my cats peed on it at some point this millennia, and I’m still having a hard time sending it to a landfill. The cat has long since run away. I’ve got a couple pics of the Mertster after the jump.

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.

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.

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 California Raisins button dates back to the very rad year of 1987. I’ve got those little PVC figures in the basement waiting to be photographed. What the heck is CALRAB? The California Raisin Advisory Board. They folded in 1994, and raisins have never been as cool since.

Skate Culture has a good guest article written by Rick “Spidey” Demontrond that talks about the process and history of his 2 pro models for Santa Cruz and his new one (Swindle 2) for Pocket Pistols. It’s a nice companion piece to an earlier profile on Skate Culture.