I added six more vintage skateboard advertisements to the Skateboard Scene magazine gallery. This time we’ve got sterling silver necklaces, some mystery boards from Reflex Action, more mystery boards from American Oak Company, Californian skateboards from Scarbourne, plastic GT Coyotes, and Britain’s answer to the American Kryptonic, the Ulon Speedwheel.
I added four more vintage skateboard advertisements to the Skateboard Scene magazine gallery. Included are some Ace-Flyer Chuck Taylor knock offs, Alta Sports skateboards with a “fantastic set of safety equipment,” the Great British Skateboard from Beadle, and a subscription plug for Skateboard Scene magazine, “the radical read for radical riders.” Enjoy.
Activity Pyramid sounds like something a playground equipment manufacturer would try to sell you in a prefab skatepark, but It’s part of University of Missouri Extension health and exercise teaching aid. In cleaning out my hard drive I found a craptacular cellphone snap of this banner that I took in 2010, but I found better versions online. There are adult and kids versions of the Activity Pyramid. Sadly, the skateboard is not present on the adult version, so stop riding your skateboard if you’re not a kid anymore.
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I just added a couple ads to the Vintage Skateboard Mag Ad Gallery. These come from a magazine you’ve likely never heard of titled Skateboard Scene. It’a UK publication, and as such comes with lots of UK-centric companies and products. I love old skateboard ads from the 70’s, and finding this mag made me feel like a kid again. Not necessarily because of the age of the publication, but more because it was filled with all kinds of product I had never seen before. There wasn’t a copyright date anywhere in the magazine, but thanks to VintageSkateboardMagazines.Com I can say it was published in Winter of 1977. This magazine is doubly wacky. It comes with all the usual wackiness of the 70’s and adds the UK skateboarding industry outside perspective. Check out the first two ads in the gallery. Large scan of the cover after the jump.
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Kevin found this in the wilderness of Canada’s home improvement centers. It looks like ancient stock unearthed in a garage sale, but it’s actually a product you can still buy in a few different sizes. I contacted the one company I thought manufactured this (Perma Products) for bigger photos but they claim it’s a coincidence of names. Strange considering both PermaStik products are available in Australia and New Zealand. Nice nose bone on that death trap.
– Thanks to Kevin Live for the pic.
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What do you call a kid who can skate like that? You call that kid a Cracker Jack. I totally forgot about this jingle until I watched the commercial, and it all came back to me. I never saw this particular Cracker Jack commercial, but I remember others with the same song. This series of commercials aired around 1978. Assuming the kid skating is the same one they use in the closeup, someone ought to be able to identify him.
– Thanks to Wes for the tip.
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Adam Crofts sent me a beat up copy of the Keane Brothers debut album from 1977 because it had skateboard on the cover. I listened to it, hoping that the song Keep On Rollin’ was skateboard related, but it wasn’t. The album is a truly awful mix of 70’s disco, soul, rock, country and bubblegum. It’s a freaking awesome train wreck. I noticed the producer also had the last name Keane, so I figured this was a showbiz father trying to get rich off his kids, and that this was probably the last time anyone ever heard of the Keane Brothers, if anyone ever heard of them at all. Of course I was wrong. The Keane Brothers had one of those variety shows that were all over the 70’s like flies on shitty music, and they appeared on the Tonight Show and the Mike Douglas Show. On top of that, the opening sequence of their variety show prominently features the Keane brothers on skateboards.
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Pure crap or Pure Genius? In the late 80’s I wouldn’t have been caught dead on a Variflex board, now I kind of want to make a t-shirt out of this old sticker design. The post on the Variflex XP series still gets a lot of traffic, but I’d never seen a Spittle board… until I googled it after writing that last sentence. I found one from Ebay seller toddtwist, AKA Sean Goff. Turns out the Spittle board looks semi-legit. This one sold for a killing at $280 considering NOS Variflex XP series were going for $70 8 years ago. Art of Skateboarding dates this board to 1988, and they’ve got one in a nice white colorway.
UPDATE: Justin Goetz has a mind like steel trap. He recognized this deck from an old Lance Mountain column in the November, 1989 issue of Transworld. It’s actually a pro model for Michel Spitalhouse. I added scans to the end of the post.
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Good news from the Troutdale Skatepark Alliance. A new skatepark has been approved by vote for the city’s Master Parks Plan. There’s no funding yet, but there is a donation bucket at Cal Skate in Portland.
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