Ken Park. It was on the Park that I was really able to get
the feel for Hawaiian soul skating. Tic-tacs, head dips,
getting tubed-things were really starting to click. By the
time I had graduated to a Vision Johnee Kopp, I felt I
was ready for some real hot dogging. "When am I gonna
get to ride Wallos?" I kept asking Chandler.
Chop scopes for MPs while Kale, Gina and Sam duck and cover.
Josh Zickert scares himself silly with a kamikaze
attack on a narrow Honolulu double.
OK, what you have here is an increasingly lame
attempt at a concept piece. I went to Hawaii last week as
a guest of the Natural Koncept team, and, as the trip was
fairly typical, I thought it might be a funny idea to copy
the plot line from the '80s B-movie North Shore and pass
it off as my own experience. In theory, the majority of
kids who actually read the article will think they have just
come across an especially bad piece of "creative writ-
ing," but the few North Shore savvy readers (the top two
percentile of Thrasher fans in their mid-to-late 20's to
whom I tend to aim my material) will appreciate the
irony and cleverness of me substituting myself for Rick
Kane, the Arizona wave pool surfer whose experience
North Shore is based on. It's at this point, an hour before
deadline, where t seems appropriate to bail out.
For quite a while I've been tossing around an idea for
an article on the connection between North Shore and
two other alternative-sports oriented films of the same
period-Rad and Thrashin'.
For those not in their mid-to-late 20's, Thrashin' was
a cheesy skateboarding movie and Rad was its BMX
equivalent. Along with North Shore, these films were
virtually interchangeable, save their respective sports
element. They're practically the same movie.
For North Shore, the best facet is probably the highly
quotable Turtle character (so quotable in fact, that when I
mentioned the film to the Natural Koncept team, a couple
of the guys actually offered lines of Turtle dialogue).
Thrashin' is best known for its infamous JAKS scene,
where a member of the evil skate gang, the Daggers,
tosses little metal spikes beneath the wheels of Corey, the
Valley-dude lead, during his pool run resulting in a
comically horrific shoulder injury.
Rad, however, is my personal favorite. Its climactic
romantic bit includes a slow motion school dance scene
where the lead and his love interest (who later starred
opposite John Stamos in TV's Full House) gyrate lovingly
around one another on dueling BMX bikes. The close-ups
show them gazing into one another's eyes beneath the
sparkling ball, while the bikes inexplicably maintain perfect,
360 rotating wheelies. And in the far away shots, you can
catch glimpses of the girl's male stunt double's mustache.
Where exactly, an in-depth article on these films would
be published remains questionable, but the darker
recesses of the World Wide Web seems a likely spot. In
support of this, I discovered four North Shore-the movie
websites when researching this article, ie, trying to
remember what Rick Kane's name was.
Several people who heard that I was going to Hawaii
with the Natural Koncept team asked me questions
regarding the likelihood that NK rider Caz Helmstetter
was going to recreate his harrowing barn to tractor jump
that was featured in an NK ad this past year. I can now
report that the barn jump was a one time deal, (occurring
lan Okui snatches a frontside shove to lein at Kale's North Shore, hesh-
intensive compound.
SK88OR
The sky's the limit for Kale and the money grab-
blasting in Maui.
THE HAWAIIAN
MONEY GRAB
Completely taboo in the high-flying, air-intensive days of the
1980s, the between-the-legs-slob air, or Hawaiian grab, has
gained increasing popularity as the number of board-grabbers
dwindles. It's a certain breed of skater who refuses to split hairs
about keeping the board on his or her feet. For these utilitari-
t matters naught if the mode of attachment is attractive-
only that the board stays put, the air is caught, and the bros
are duly stoked. Mark Gonzales manages to squeak the most
style points out of this awkward handle, but Kale Sandridge
wins for overall usage. Of the 20 or so photos I shot of Kale,
about 18 were the Hawaiian money grab. Chaka brah!
ans,
128 THRASHER
129