Mike McGill, Kevin Staab, Tony Hawk and Christian Hosoi in a promo for The Quiksilver All 80’s All Day Vert Challenge on January 7th, 2011 at SurfExpo in Orlando, FL. The video is mildly amusing, coming off better than most of the skits in Animal Chin, yet highly reminiscent of course. Skaters committed to show so far are Tony Hawk Christian Hosoi ,Mike McGill, Kevin Staab, Andy Macdonald, Mike Frazier, Ben Schroeder, Buck Smith, Henry Gutierrez and (wait for it….) Rodney Mullen????? Apparently. No word on whether his parents will let him skate vert yet. Video plus one with slightly extended highlights from last year, after the jump. – Thanks to Bob Mechtly for the tip.

Tony Hawk made an appearance on an early episode of Yo Gabba Gabba, and he just made an appearance on the wall at the Yo Gabba Gabba facebook page.

Tony Hawk was on the cover of the complimentary August 2010 Continental Airlines magazine. There was also a one page interview with him about his role as a businessman. Check it out after the turn. Thanks Gillian.

Not much to add here, except to say, let’s not forget about saving the Turf skatepark. There has been some sort of development regarding the city’s decision to abandon their eminent domain claim on the land. It seems like potentially bad news since the city had planned to donate the land to the cause. I guess this means they won’t own it after all? I don’t know exactly. I wish they’d shed some light on the subject. One thin g I do know, it looks like they will have some fundraising t-shirts soon. Another Here’s funny one though. The local Fox affiliate has a video titled Tony Hawk admits to traveling to Greenfield’s the Turf skatepark., as if he was a presidential candidate who just admitted to some sort of shady dealings.

I’ve been formulating my own skateboarding parody of this show for a year or two now. It will be called “Ho Daddy-Yo!” Yo Gabba Gabba has quite a bunch of skateboarding on it, usually in the form of some of the short intermission animations, but it also appears in the beginning of the “Cool Tricks” segment. In fact, I believe Ray Barbee makes an appearance on “Cool Tricks.” This segment is a couple years old too. So old that they got around to posting it on the Yo Gabba Gabba Youtube channel before I got around to posting it. For some reason they made this part of the Dancey Dance segment. Dancey Dance usually features someone at usually at least marginally famous leading the gang in a dance. Tony Hawk can’t dancey dance. – Thanks to Michel Skart Poulin for the reminder.

This is actually almost two weeks old, but it’s still well worth mentioning. Hats off to the Tony Hawk Foundation, who has introduced a new requirement for skatepark grants; No more prefab wooden parks. Read the press release titled “If Not Concrete, Then Why?”

I can’t even find the original source for this image. Let this be a lesson to whoever gave birth to this very droll illustration. Next time don’t forget to put your name on it. – Thanks to Colin for the tip.

Another Tony Hawk refernce in a comic, this time in a strip called xkcd, which I wrote off based on this one strip, but is actually a pretty good comic with pretty bad art. – Thanks to Stephen B for the tip.

If only there was a video about the making of the video of the process of turing a skateboard video game controller into a real skateboard. Ripped from the comments of Skate and Annoy, The Tony Hawk Ride controller set up as a real skateboard. I’ve heard a lot of people have problems with the controller on this game. I saw Tony give a demo on a talk show.They had a random kid come out of the audience and try it, seemed like it worked well. Who knows, maybe there was a Wizard of Oz type character behind the curtains with a hand controller. People grouse about the cost of the controller too, but as the folks at Game-TV.com have shown, if you get tired of playing the game, you can always actually, you know, err, uh, ride it. I wish I had a budget at S&A to do thid sort of thing. Maybe they are saving the good video for something else, but it seems like they didn’t make the most of this opportunity. – Thanks to Cory for the tip.

Webcomic Penny Arcade did a strip about Tony Hawk Ride. It’s not about skateboarding though, it’s about buying and reviewing video games. Post-modern self-reference is so last decade. The guy did, in fact, hate it. I couldn’t really tell from the strip.