I feel sorry for the “model” who got a big break only to end up bent over facing away from the camera with a Jimmy’Z fanny pack and her ass being the main attraction of the poster. “Look Ma, I’m on a poster!” Unbelievably, the seller thinks this is worth $79! I made an offer $10, which he refused. I upped the ante to $11, and the seller countered with $35. I don’t think they recognized the sarcasm in my bids. – Thanks to Matthijs for the tip

Rip Skates was a (crappy) budget brand from Surrey Skateboards, a skateshop in the UK that exists since 1977. The shop in Surrey closed down, but you can still visit them online and buy their new stuff or check out the cool pictures of the good old days. The graphic on this deck looks great, the ‘monster clown’  killing the vert skater and destroying his ramp reminds me of some of the old Deathbox designs. Was it a reference to the death of vert in the late 80’s? Anyway, it was very unlikely that you would have become a good street skater with this complete! For sale on Gumtree for £5.

This time around we have something known as a “Protuff” skateboard, and apparently this is #5. I’ve never seen the Protuff brand, so I would have assumed it was some sort of European equivalent to Nash or Variflex, but this auction came out of Florida. As is sometimes the case with these toy store boards, there’s more than meets the eye here. The Grim Reaper comes complete with some of the oddest looking plastic trucks copers you’ve likely ever seen.

Denver the Last Dinosaur is possibly one of the best bad cartoon relics out there. Basically, a dinosaur egg hatches, and hangs out with kids skateboarding, riding BMX and sort of communicating in a more subdued Scooby Doo style. The animation is horrible, I swear it approaches 5 frames a second. The voiceover is what makes this cartoon enjoyable/eardrum piercing. The character actors are awful. It’s like listening to somebody do a really bad impersonation Jeff Spicoli, for 20 minutes… The series started in 1988 and ran for two years, so that was right at the tail end of the California craze. There’s an episode called Venice Beach Blast where part of the gang gets hassled for skating on the bike path. The authority figure (Is he a cop or a security guard? He looks like a Forest Ranger.) explains that the community got the signatures together to get skating banned and the bike path built. Now you think this would would turn into a civics lesson that ends with a skateboard park being built, but it doesn’t. The skaters in the crew turn against their biking brothers and go renegade. There’s a lot of whining (almost life real life),…

Jeremy Scott copied Jim Phillips. We called it, and the rest of the interwebs caught up, including the folks at N.H.S., who sent this out yesterday: We are having a problem with this person ripping off Phillips and Santa Cruz artwork. Please help us spread the word. You can use the information below. This is the image that kicked it all off, we did not produce this link or the attached image of it, we are not sure who did produce it Read the rest, after the jump.

John Lucero recently found the original screen from his first pro model on Madrid. It looks ready to pull! I’m surprised it’s to small but then again they could get away with it on those flat boards back then. – Thanks to Jodie at Empty Pools for the tip.

I was going to pass on posting about the re-rerelease of the Back to the Future Hoverboard replicas from Mattel until I watched a little bit of another Hoverboard video featuring Bob Gale, the co-creator of Back to the Future. He’s talking about items featured in an auctioned that benefitted the Michael J. Fox Foundation for parkinson’s research. Blah, blah, blah until you get to the part about one of the original props being auctioned at Sothebys for $17,000, and then being resold a few years later for $55k. (!) Also interesting, the mechanical effect used to make the hoverboard appear to float when thrown on the ground. The video shows two different boards, one used for the wire flights and one used for the throw down.

What does it all mean?

This week’s Shot of the Week features Larry Martin circa ’88 or ’89 out in the Mojave desert. There were better “skate shots” to pick from his batch, but I wanted to showcase the ramp and not necessarily the action or the photo. Here’s a little more on the subject from Larry: I built this ramp on poached land in the Mojave desert near Lancaster, Ca. around 88… I had moved there with my wife after living in Ventura/Fillmore Ca. all my life. There wasn’t many ramps in the Antelope Valley at that time. The Palmdale one from the “Great Desert Ramp Battle” was toast. So, I made some new street/ditch skater friends and enlisted them in my idea to just build a halfpipe in the desert for anyone/evryone, and hopefully the police would leave us alone. They did, and we had it for about a year/half before the High School party crowd ruined it. We cut the templates with a jig, but the rest was all done without power tools. The wood of course was scavenged. This was during the savings and loan scandal, and huge housing projects were closed everywhere in the valley. Signs were just the easiest,…

Durable plastic. Wheelies and spinouts! Goes forward! SkateBot from Playtime, circa 1986. Robot. Varibot. Frontside Indy! Radical? ebay!