When a plain old skateboard isn’t enough and you need to add a motorized sound to get the kids excited, the Irwin corporation has you covered. The advert is most likely from a 1965-66 Playthings Magazine, an industry publication for toy retailers. A suggested retail of $1.98 ( Under $17 according to the US Inflation Calculator) would have gotten you a noisy plastic sled that didn’t really turn. Fun! Time to “cash in on this surfboarding business.” Order your Whoom-m Jr. Sidewalk Surfer now!
It’s been a long time since I’ve added new zines to the 80’s skate zine gallery. Chipping away at the backlog, here are Skate Edge #2 from New Jersey, circa 1983, and Raw Zine #8 from Connecticut, circa 1988. That’s 32 ages of photocopied nostalgia from the collection of Kevin Johnson.
While we were out, Playmobil launched an action set featuring Chad Muska as the skateboard bandit and George Michael as the cop… Or maybe that’s not really true. However they currently have 2 sets featuring skateboarded typecast as the bad guys. There not just run of the mill skateboarding-where-they-aren’t-suposed-to-be bad guys either, they are involved in high stakes robbery and… it’s hard to say what that stick is for… illegal water divining?
I must have sent away for a catalog from Action Sports in 1984. I just found the postmarked envelope with full color one sheet and photocopied price list. I think that tagline is supposed to read “The 1 Ultimate High.” Aside from the vaguely Celtic typeface, it’s an interesting choice for a time when any given correspondence with a smaller skate brand seemed to have about a 50% chance of including a short handwritten a religious message. I’m not sure why I sent any for this catalog in 1984, since I never really rated the Action Sports brand. I think it might have been because the Invader had a sly look to it.
Thanks again to Nathan Kipnis we’ve got even more pictures of the fiberglass Skate-Ball ramps at the Rainbo Skatepark in Chicago, Illinois circa 78-79. Includes a bonus shot of Jay Adams and Dave Hackett.
Apparently in the world of skateboarding there are these things called magazines, and in particular, the longest running skateboard magazine called “Thrasher” is still a thing. Why on earth would Skate and Annoy link to Thrasher? We like to help out the little guys. Yuk, yuk, yuk… You should definitely check out the Kevin Thatcher interview from the January print issue that just went online. Hey kids, Kevin was a name once synonymous with Thrasher. It seemed inconceivable that there would ever be a Thrasher magazine without him, but to hear him tell it, it was definitely a group effort. Learn about the gory, glory days of mechanical paste ups before everything became Wild Riders of Keyboards…
Photo: Self described Pro-for-5-minutes Kevin Thatcher in the Winchester halfpipe in 1978, by Gary Medeiros as seen at Tunnel Skateboards.
Girl is Not. 4 Letter Word has a good read on Stephanie Person, a female black professional skateboard from the 80s. I could not recall her specifically appearing in mags in the 80’s but she did, and I do remember the featured “Sugar and Spice” article in Thrasher. Her experiences as a black female skater in the 80’s are unique even to other female skaters in the 80’s and not all for the reasons you’d expect. It’s notable that her career and sponsorships were result of her smart thinking and persistence. I only wish this had been a little more in-depth. One amusing side note: The editors’s note has to explain what a Swatch is for younger readers.
Soon after Skate and Annoy went online with it’s own domain name after jumping ship from Annoying.com, I had toyed with idea of adding a discussion area or bulletin board as they were called in the online days of Sleestak.net circa ’03 or so… I was never quite happy with the pricing, capabilities, or performance of the early options so I did a lot of investigating and putting off the final decision, until Facebook made all that stuff irrelevant. In the immortal words of TLC and other irrelevant 90’s phenomena, I ain’t to proud to beg. Since the comments section of these posts are barren, and morel like to receive a comment on our FB page, I’ve decided to jump on the height of 2010 technologies and start a Skate and Annoy Facebook group, in the spirit of Edvard Munch. Join, post and destroy!
We started as a print zine in 1986, moved online around 1996 and moved into “new media” (late 90’s buzzword alert!) around the turn of the millennium when we started recording and archiving skateboarding whenever it appeared in movies, TV shows or commercials that we were able to see. You may have seen some of our donated archival footage in the 2008 documentary Deathbowl to Downtown. At the time we started the biggest hassle was the actual recording. Now that the technology is simple, the biggest hassle is keeping track of it all.