Valterra may have been a second rate skateboard company but they did make some memorable boards. Someone in the art department had a pretty good sense of humor. The Total Blast deck from 1989 really pops in some of these color ways. This is simultaneously pretty bad and also pretty good, depending on your mood.

In my quest to bring you weird/crappy/cool boards I found this Variflex board called the “Later Gator.” It’s crappy, but something about the look in that Gator’s eyes is appealing. As the manufacturers and bootleggers of those boards were wont to do, they produced versions with multiple top graphics, which is where the gold in this post really is. There is a bespoke Variflex Gator top graphic which is boring, boring, boring. Contrast that with the Variflex V-Man, which is pretty great. SO great that I’m going to make myself a t-shirt.

As a kid I can remember seeing ads like this in the back of comic books and other publications aimed at adolescents. The gas is, you send away for some sort of sales kit, most likely a catalog and some motivational text, and then you could sell greeting cards and who knows what else to all your neighbors and extended family in hopes of earning enough credit to get some free stuff from the advert. It was your job to take the orders, collect the money, send it to the company and then deliver everything when they mailed it to you. This scheme for using a child labor farm sourced from comic books has been around for a long time, probably dating back to the 40’s with Grit, which amazingly, is still a thing. The practice of bribing kids with the potential to earn prizes probably had it’s heyday during the 60’s and 70’s. Here are 2 examples from the late 80’s and early 90’s in which you can earn a Nash or Variflex skateboard.

The bootleg graphics (on the top picture) look exactly like the ones on the original Variflex decks. Variflex shifted production to Taiwan somewhere in the 80’s, so maybe they made both branded and unbranded decks at some point. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to bootleg such wildly successful graphics. Variflex had a great pro team and produced very decent skateboards in the end of the 70’s and the beginning of the 80’s, but then started to produce rather shoddy completes. You can marvel in the mediocrity in the Living Variflex Museum (of Crap), or read about their history on Skateboard Of The Day. Thanks to Walter Meus, J.P. Begel and Pat Cash for the pics. Thanks to kilwag for the edits.

Newsflash. We won’t tell you how much your board is worth if you want to sell it on eBay, so don’t ask. Also, don’t send me a link to your auction or unless it’s freakin amazing, or weird, something like Stacy Peralta’s scalp from the 70’s or the bronzed fire hydrant that Nataas sessioned on in Streets on Fire. That being said, here’s a new one. I’ve never been asked to facilitate a trade, but I was looking for an excuse to post this Variflex advert I found in a circular for a local discount sporting goods chain. I’m going to beat this dead horse. Variflex used to be a legitimate skateboard company as late as the early, early 80’s, and well before this. And now they make trampolines. Right. Tom Livemore has some old Variflex connections trucks in pretty good condition, and he’s looking to trade for a decent set of OJ superjuices (I have some, but you can’t have them.) or a set of multi colored Panther wheels. Whaaaa?????