This wraps up any uncertainty about the authenticity of the Hobble Wobble, which seemed like it might have been artificially created to look like it was vintage. The name of the inventor made it easy to look up the patent this time. Harold Katz filed his patent in October of 1958 and finally received his patent in March of 1960. This short highlight article on the Wibbler must have been published sometime shortly after, making my original guess ( After the hula hoop in 1958 and before skateboard fad in 1964 ) pretty accurate. Somebody should pay me for this research. Hello Betsy? This is not skateboard related, you may cry, but I will endeavor to prove a direct connection in the following presentation. Can someone dim the lights please?
Thanks to Jim Thompson for these photos of Wee Willie Winkies. That’s “winkles” not “Winkles” as in Wee Willi Winkels. These disgusting looking, sickly pale, pink, fleshy appendages come from Scotland. Sausage skateboards probably require pizza grip to deal with all that extra grease.
Ryan Sheckler is still a thing, and he’s a thing for Lume Cube. Lume Cube is a wireless flash / lighting system. It’s a pretty cool device actually. They are tiny, waterproof, battery powered strobes you can link together and control with an app to use for discreet, highly mobile and quick photo lighting. In addition to using a smartphone to set up Lume Cubes for use with a DSLR, you can use an additional mount to supplement your phonecam’s lighting. After watching some of the tutorials I have to say that I’m impressed by the system. It’s expensive, but seems very well thought out. One thing that does seem needlessly obtrusive, to use a Lume Cube even once, you’re going to need to provide a valid email address and register the the cube (with serial #) via your smartphone. So what happens if you want to loan it to a friend, or share a cube amongst different phones? For instance, you may use different assistants on different shoots. Why should you have to provide a valid email address just to use the cube? What if the email address and serial # conflict with a previous registration? This is a major deal to me, can you tell? Another instance of needless overreaching by a tech company. An email address to register a product for warranty purposes makes perfect sense, but just to use a physical product? I’m calling bullshit.
This Barbie and Ginger toy dates back to 1997. Ginger is a battery powered dog that barks and walks, and can be used to tow Barbie on her skateboard, complete with little Hotwheels-style wheels. The top frame is a still from a creepy TV commercial. It may have been 1997, but the girl on the left looks like she’s stuck in a 60’s children’s book. The screen cap looks craptacular, but that’s as good as it gets. Someone digitized TV commercial in pre-hd days. The same low-res version with awful motion compression artifacts is all over the web under assorted watermarks. Unfortunately nobody’s uploaded a decent version of it, not that you’d want to watch it endlessly. It does have a sort of hypnotic quality to it, in a Jonestown massacre sort of way.
Sultana Yo Fruit packaging, made in the Netherlands with 90’s American marketing. I especially like the “What the fruit do I know?” tagline on the side of the package. I’m not sure what the little mascot actually is, but Matthijs thinks it’s a cellphone. Stranger things have happened. They look like miniature pop-tarts, but not meant to be put in a toaster.
Normally I might push this post off to the Broken Kingpins section without comment but the Tubuloids video for It’s Getting Weird connected with me on a primal level. I think GVK missed his calling. Their album on Beer City Records doesn’t come out until October, but you can preorder it now.
Alright, we’ve got special behind the scenes access to Skateboard, the movie, courtesy of this July, 1977 edition of Wild World of Skateboarding magazine. The article seems hastily written, and does not really offer much behind the scenes action outside of some photos from the set. However, it’s got lots of poorly written press release action. It also offers an interesting glimpse of the state of skateboarding at the time, such as the lack of “established rules of Downhill in organized competition due to the infancy of skateboarding as a spectator sport.” Apparently, all the competitions in the film were staged. I haven’t seen it in a very long time, but I recall as a kid I thought this was a sort of hybrid of documentary and drama. The tone of the article is amusing in retrospect, as it treats the movie as, well, a film and not the kitsch time capsule it turned out to be. Pics and full article text after the jump.
Why yes, that is Jack Barmby of the mighty Portland Timbers rockin’ a Nike SB hat for some reason. It’s not the flopping that soccer critics hate, it’s the posing. This is Portland Timbers related post #6 for those keeping score at home.
John Aguilar sent in some photos of a recently completed (OK, February of 2016) Debra Barto Memorial Skatepark, located on the Tulalip Reservation, near Everett, Washington. It is named in honor of the woman in the tribe who pushed hard for building it. John said this Grindline park is a good time as long as it’s not being overrun by scooter and BMX kids. Yes, that bottom feature is supposed to look like a canoe.
