Bow before my arcane knowledge of useless skateboard related information. This Valterra Rad-isaurus looks suspiciously similar to Denver the Last Dinosaur. Both appear to be released in 1988, although I can’t tell for sure about the Valterra board, the copyright is hard to read. They both appear to be the similar species, and they both wear mohawks and sunglasses, but only the Rad-isaurus has pants. Denver is obscene! Won’t someone please think of the children? Follow me dear readers, and we will tackle the question that archeologists have been pondering for decades: “What happens when a group of pop-a-wheely, BMXer, fun-loving, skateboarding, and rock-music-listening contemporary kids open an ancient dinosaur egg?”

From the same company that brought you Super Bat Justice Man, comes Ninja Frog on a skateboard. You might notice a similarity to certain Mutant Ninja Turtles. I don’t usually have this sort of encyclopedic knowledge at my fingertips, but the phrase “Non-fall Action” was oddly familiar, so looking it up wasn’t hard. The frog on the left is actually riding a skateboard, although it’s hard to make out. Those are turtles riding skateboards on the right, which is an actual graphic on one of a few different TMNT skateboards. it looks like one of them has a Hosoi knockoff!

I’ve seen a lot of Nash skateboards over the years, but I’ve never seen the Ramp-ant, which you can buy from Hermann’s Attic on Ebay. I’m not sure what the LSD inspired artist was going for, but I can’t believe they missed the obvious opportunity for a double pun had there actually been an ant on a ramp on the bottom of this deck. Even so, it’s a pretty great example of a horrible graphic. It reminds me of the Tubes for some reason. A Tarampula could probably take this Ramp-ant.

A trip to the toy store almost never disappoints when looking for Skate and Annoy fodder. One of the Kryptonics license holders makes some plastic skateboards that are near Penny board quality, the wheels have decent bearings and they spin quite freely. The trucks are tight, but they have a little room to loosen built in already. The deck design, namely the kicktail and off-putting concave could be better, but it’s not an abomination. At $40, you could do worse when shopping for a beginner who just wants to roll. (UPDATE: Looks like a Mojo Pahse III) Then there’s this Disney character board with Jake and the Neverland Pirates that appears to be molded in one piece, trucks included! Almost ready to ride right off the injection molding machine, just add bearings and wheels.

When this came up for auction I made myself stop following it because I was trying to save money and my basement is already filled with all kinds of bullshit. Now I’m kicking myself because it sold for only $40, although I think shipping was something like $20 if I recall correctly. Still, for the money, this is the kind of bulshit I should have added to my collection. On the surface, the board is nothing special, but on closer inspection the truck and wheel combination is pretty interesting. It’s got 60’s style Chicago Trucks with the sheet metal baseplate, and yet it has 70’s era urethane wheels. Then there’s that awesome color sticker with a hotdog skateboard that says “Frankly the Best.” The icing on the cake is the 2 color screen printed graphic on the box. They were really giving this thing the hard sell. – Thanks to David Maes for the tip.

As a young kid in the mid 80s I thought Hot Wheels cars were cooler and fresher than the ones from Matchbox and Majorette (Mattel already introduced Hot Wheels in 1968, but little did I know). This crazy thing here looks like the first skateboard you would give your kid to make him say farewell to his kiddie toys and let him go out to play in the real world.  Still, I don’t think I would have been too happy with this as a kid, because we knew about Hot Wheels, but we also heard about Powell, Vision and Santa Cruz, so I guess you can’t fool a kid with crappy skateboards! More pics after the jump. Look at the difference in size between the front and the back truck, this really gives it the look of a racing car. Both trucks seem to have the old school truck pattern, but I think the deck is pretty recent though:

Three Sims boards in different colorways? No, the middle one is a Speedent, copied from the Sims ‘New Wave’ team deck from 1981 by Bernie Tostenson. The legit Sims images are from (left) eBay Watch March 2010, and (right) February, 2011. The Importers and Exporters Association of Taipei turned up some history of Speedent: ‘Charles Yeh, CEO of Speedent Corp, has been exporting Taiwan-made sporting goods world-wide since 1975. The first line that Yeh introduced to the international market was skateboards …’ Considering the original date of this early graphic (1981-1982) and Speedent’s origins in 1975, I’d say that Charles Yeh was a pioneer of crappy bootlegs!

Pacer was a brand from the UK that produced some decent boards during the late 70s and early 80s. Towards the end of the 80s they started to make rather crappy completes (pics after the jump). Still, the decks in the picture above (both from eBay) are definitely bootlegs from the original 1988 ‘Maniac’ deck, designed by Doug Cameron. The left one has the typical flat pig-like shape that most of the very cheap decks have and still have, but the funny thing about this one is that the front picture was stolen from a 1987 Valterra team deck called … ‘Ramp Champ’. The complete on the right seems to be a Rusher Sports, which surprises me, since Rusher Sports was a well-known company that had their own designs and the shape was different than this one, if I remember well. I have never seen a Rusher Sports that copied from the big brands, so maybe it’s a Rusher Sports/Pacer bootleg.

Ming Ta Supply is/was located in California and they produced Enzo boards from 1991 untill 1997. They couldn’t have chosen a worse moment and using graphics of vert skaters on their boards was definitely a bad move. This is maybe why I could only find one Enzo complete and it was for sale on eBay. Ming Ta Supply also seemed to deal in furniture, building materials, Christmas decoration, sporting articles, toys … I wonder where those came from.

This fake Kryptonics complete is even less well known than the first Kryptonics bootleg that I posted on S&A.  I had to check AOS  to find out that the original graphic came from a 1989 team deck, called ‘Footprint’. Also, I have never seen bootlegs with this shape and coloured grip. Kryptonics started to make crappy boards near the end of the 90s (I think around ’97), but this is definitely a bootleg, since the seller confirmed that he got it when he was a kid in the 80’s. Price: £0,99 on Gumtree! Thanks to Nicola Rushent for the pictures.