Hosoi, Skull Skates, Alva, Brand X, Dogtown, Uncle Wiggley, Blockhead, Kryptonics and Santa Monica Airlines – that’s an emotive list of brands. There’s quite a variety of shapes on offer here. Some of them may be gimmicky, and all of them seem from another world now, but this is definitely one for the hardware fetishists…

Skull and Bones meets Hawaii. Mostly skulls and bones actually. Gaze on these and wonder.

Faze 7 were one of the tiny number of old-time skateboard shops who were able to re-emerge with the revival of skating in 1987. They’d survived the dark ages on the usual mixture of rollerskates and BMX, but now their time had come again.

Another advert – and you can’t even read this one, so no chance of shedding a tear about prices in the good old days. At this stage many of the shops advertising in R.a.D were combining skateboards with BMX, a painful process for them as well as for the magazine. Since you can’t see the…

These were the days of Variflex and Life’s a Beach. Alva, Vision, Powell, G & S and Santa Cruz are all mentioned too, but without prices. Most of the advert was concentrating on BMX at this point. These days Hot Wheels are concentrating on bike distribution.

Is this serious? Well, since this is all about nostalgia, the adverts from the period may also be relevant! Somebody, somewhere might find these interesting. In this case we have Atari promoting the home computer version of 720. My recollection is that people like Steve Caballero provided the source material for this,