Skateboard

As much about culture as sport, skateboarding struggled over the last several decades of the 20th century to maintain its youthful, countercultural identity against more mainstream adult concerns about public order and safety. First invented in the late 1950s, skateboarding initially found a receptive audience among surfers in California. By the end of the 1960s, it was derided as a social nuisance. When the Variflex Company of Moorpark, California, made this skateboard in the 1980s, skating was suffering an image problem once again: some 35,000 kids under the age of 15 went to hospital emergency rooms in 1985 because of skateboarding accidents; in 1986, the figure swelled to 58,000. All the while, skating continued to gain in popularity among younger generations, perhaps as much because of adult opposition as in spite of it. Sales of skateboards and related products rose dramatically in the mid-1980s, generating an estimated $500 million in sales in 1987. Skating entered popular culture with the 1986 mainstream feature film Thrashin' and returned to the spotlight in 1987 with the airing of "The Search for Animal Chin" on MTV.