I love a good, weird and crappy skateboard, especially when it’s from a foreign country. To look at these you would think they came from the Eastern Bloc. But no, they came from an Italy and a man named Icaro Olivieri. He was apparently quite an innovator in hockey, and a manufacturer of all kinds of sporting goods under the brand name of GIOCA, which translates to “Play.” I stumbled across one of these while looking for Tres Assi boards. It looks like Gioca might have made real skateboards at some point, but I couldn’t find any picutres outside of the advert in the bottom right corner.

Yes sir, this is a groundbreaking development. The Cami Tres Assi (3 Aces) board was a ghost for decades, but in the past few years they’ve become regularly available providing you can pony up roughly $175 or so, not including shipping. This is the first one I’ve ever seen in orange or white. I don’t think a lot of thought went into most plastic skateboards as far as color options. Many times in a product’s life span it probably came down to what resin was available in time to ship the next batch. Even accounting for color shift in the photograph, the board on the left definitely looks orange. So that means this wonder was produced in Red, yellow, black, orange, and white. So far I’ve only seen the wheels in yellow and red.

I was completely unaware of the Skuda brand of skateboards until I started posting ads from som UK-based magazines in the Vintage Skatemag Ads gallery. Like most overseas brands of the 70’s, they never had any market presence in the crowded USA market. Both of the Skuda ads I’ve seen so far are for some pretty nice looking wooden decks, but it looks like they also made some plastic decks. Photos courtesy of Jon Welton (red) and Adrian Wink (white/yellow) Update: added couple more.

First time visitor? I’m a sucker for vintage skateboard packaging. This is a box that California Free Former model #CF-26 came in. Thanks to Andra Malczewski for the picture. That’s her and Joe Collela on the box, photographed in Redondo Beach, California. Glorious!

There are rabbit holes and then there are all engulfing black holes of time wasting. I Had an idea to do a quick post about a clear plexiglass skateboard from Huffy from the 70’s that I thought was interesting. Huffy sure wasn’t the first bicycle company to get int o skateboarding (probably ACS,) and wasn’t the last one (Haro) either. My buddy Shawn still has his first skateboard, a wooden Huffy Quick Thunder. I asked him to send me some pics for the post and decided to dig up what I could in the meantime. It turns out they made a host of plastic and wooden skateboards (some in the 80’s), and even a fiberglass model, not to mention some prepackaged accessories. I had over 80 photographs, so I’m going to break them in to 3 or 4 posts by category, starting with the plastic boards.

There’s really no reason to post this generic toy store plastic skateboard (available in bulk from China for $9 a piece) other than the fact their models look… amazeballs! Adventure Bizarre? Yeah I think I saw them in Paris, circa 1977 opening up for Metal Urbain.

Oof, yeah. Sorry about that post title. Normally this is the kind of thing I would be practically tripping over myself to make fun of, but for a certain segment of the population, this makes a lot of sense. This is Ookkie, “The World’s First Learner Skateboard.” Is this product necessary? No. But if you think about all the brightly colored push and ride toys out there for toddlers, why not make it a skateboard? You can use it with the “adult” handle for control, with just the kid handle once they are more comfortable, and without the handle at all before they move on to a real skateboard, if they do at all. No, these guys did not pay me for product placement. Yes, this is at odds with my own opinion that skateboarding in the Olympics is silly. I am going to call bullshit on the advertised “specially designed trucks” that are lightweight and turn easy. What they meant to say was “cheaply produced since the baseplate is part of the plastic deck.” Who makes this? You’ll be slightly surprised.

Bugs Bunny #213 is from October, 1979. It was published by Western Publishing under the Gold Key and Whitman labels, the former in newsstands and the latter in poly bags for stores. A disapproving Elmer Fudd looks on as Bugs prepares to go into a double-truck carve grind in the pool he must have drained. That wascally rabbit… There are no other skateboard illustrations in this issue except for the one in an Olympic Sales Club ad that features a California Free Former plastic skateboard.

I had planned on adding a few pics of a slight color variation to the last Tres Assi post I made, which was a follow up to a 9 year journey, but in the process I stumbled on a third color variation that I had never seen. And so here we are at a 3rd post, this time adding a less translucent yellow model, some alternate pics of another red board, as well as the new-to-me black variation.

About nine years ago I discovered (online) a magnificent plastic 6-wheeled skateboard, and the since then I have been looking to add this exquisite wacky board to my collection of oddities. I even have an Ebay alert set up for it, but it’s never returned any positives. As is the case for a lot of barely documented skateboard ephemera, Skate and Annoy is sometimes one of the few results that come up. Such was the case for Don Brown (Yes, that Don Brown) who recently acquired his own Cami Tres Assi and tried to find out more about it. After reading his comment I reached out to him and he obliged to send us some photos… and here we are. Don got his from a friend in Italy. We know nothing more than we originally did, except for the fact the wheels are quite brittle and prone to breaking. Enjoy!