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Night of the Living Skate Zombies: skateboarding in the Limelight Club
Early signs of skateboarding about to cross-over into mass culture. This event took place in the Limelight Club which was a notable establishment in 1988. Sponsorship was provided by Vision and Slam City. Even if this wasn’t the first event of its kind it was certainly one of the first. The idea of having a…
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Steve Douglas: Vans Skatepark and Australians moving in on USA
Two things in this month’s instalment of news from America catch my eye. First is Steve writing about Vans planning to build a big skatepark. I think at this point it was to be at their factory, not the shopping mall extravaganza which came later. But I think that the move towards providing big and…
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Pacer Advert by Doug Cameron
Where did this come from? I had forgotten this. I can remember Doug Cameron doing graphics for Pacer, but this advert had slipped from memory. There’s so much in here, even if you don’t get half the in-jokes (and I certainly don’t). I wish they had done more of these, but in pure commercial terms…
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Jimmy Scott and Mark Rogowski, Munster 1988
Dobie took this picture of Gator and rollerskater Jimmy Scott at the Munster competition in 1988. Once again, I find little to say. This is a very dry period!
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Price List Style BMX and Skateboard Mail Order Advert 1988
Other than contemplating what things cost back then, there is little to get excited about here. But a lot of people DID get excited about such things. Some shops and mail order companies built up cult followings. It would be interesting to hear from anyone who used to buy their gear from Everything at Your…
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Mark Gonzales and Prince, Drayton and Snow
The attempts to get the text out of this scan have produced utter nonsense. I may come back to it. Shame: not only does this contain the story about Mark Gonazales being escorted out of a Prince concert only to come close to the man himself outside, it also has the tale of a strange…
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UK Skateboard News: September 1988 — Derry Thompson Quits ESA, Clan Skates Opens
First an OCR health warning: the text below has been extracted from the scan using Optical Character Recognition. So there are likely to be some horrid mistakes. And maybe some funny ones. This also means that the effort involved in keeping this project going has increased again. So the year has got off to a…
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Vintage eighties skateboarding: Powell, Livingston, and Munster. Contents of a issue 67 of R.a.d Magazine, September 1988
I don’t have any disks containing text this old. They survived for another ten years, but were destroyed in the New Deal fire. So we’re mostly going to have to do with scans for this issue. I’m trying to use OCR to extract the text, but it’s very patchy. I can’t get the credits out…
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The shape of things to come: Opening of Slam City shop in Neal’s Yard
At first I wondered if there was anything particular to say about this Slam City Skates advert, other than that it features Ken Park at the wonderful Latimer Road ramp, and that the un-credited photograph would almost certainly have been taken by Paul Sunman. Then I noticed that it listed the famous shop in Covent…
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Steve Caballero, South Bank, London, 1988.
Time for a look at 1988… Flipping through the year, this cover caught my eye as redolent of the time. The Powell Tours help defined that era and provided a focal point in an age before stadium skateboarding even seemed a possibility. But I note now that one of the cover lines reads “hot street…