Skateboarding
Skateboarding
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Skateboarder Magazine shaped skate culture in the 1970s and beyond. See how in The Original Skateboarder, playing now on Red Bull TV.
Skateboarder Magazine was the Bible of skateboarding during the culture's first really golden era in the mid-to-late 1970s. Started as a sister title to the world- famous Surfer magazine, Skateboarder bore sole witness to the birth of the now in skateboarding and by 1978 was selling a staggering 300,000 copies per issue (for purposes of comparison, Thrasher at its peak circulation could claim 200,000).
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Having first surfaced as the short-lived Quarterly Skateboarder in the mid-60s, Skateboarder established the first truly legendary skate photographers: Warren Bolster, Craig Stecyk and Glen E. Friedman all cut their teeth there and the magazine's undoubtedly surf-inflected style lent a romance and danger to this nascent lifestyle, which still reverberates today.
Jimmy Plumer – Backside Wheeler
© Glen E. Friedman
Tony Hawk – Indy Air
© Red Bull Media House
The Original Skateboarder
© Red Bull Media House
Eddie 'El Gato' Elguera
© RBMH
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By 1980, skateboarding had tanked in popularity and Skateboarder in this incarnation was gone with it, creating this single time capsule during which skateboarding rode its first wave of enormous, widespread popularity as a subculture- and you can see it just by clicking on the link below.
As a footnote to this remarkable story, Skateboarder later re-launched in 1997 and was regarded by many aficionados as the greatest magazine of the 2000s before it closed down again in 2013. Skateboarder's archive was later acquired by Transworld Skateboarding, where you can see every issue of the original Skateboarder magazine archived for posterity. Dive in.
