Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Dave Crabb #2.



A Kiwi grinds in the Aloha State.

I'm calling an audible at the line of scrimmage and changing what I had planned for today after yesterday's Toxic post raised a bunch of questions, some of which I have answers for.

I checked a few years worth of Toxic ads in Transworld last night from 1988 - 1992 and this is what I found.

The pros included Dave Crabb, Bernie O'Dowd, Ken Fillion, Denny Riordon, Darren "Moose" Menditto, Danny Mayer, Jim "Murf" Murphy, Eric Conner and Kyong Kim. The amateurs that were featured in ads in that time included J.T. Merphie, Kevin Colin, Charlie Thomas and Jeremy Rentaria.

I'm going to make an educated guess that the company started sometime in 1987 or 1988 and lasted until 1993 or 1994. Modern street skating definitely took Toxic out.

They had two videos. Oddly Enough was from 1990 and A Toxic Thing from 1991. They also gave away a free video with each board in mid 1991. I'm not sure if this was A Toxic Thing or something different, like maybe a short vid of the pro to go with the board. I haven't seen any of these videos and I can only assume that they exist.

I remember that Toxic had ads in Thrasher in 1992 or 1993 for a 39 mm wheel. I didn't check my Thrashers. Their ads in TWS were right at the front of each magazine so they were easy to check.

Grant Brittain was the photographer.

Transworld - August 1990 Volume 8 Number 8

4 comments:

Skate Nazi said...

Rad A'ala Park photo!
Super weird layout but cool ad nonetheless.

Justin said...

So many of the Dave Crabb ads had something weird like that going on in them - squiggly lines, odd compositions, etc. Otherwise Toxic ads were about as straight forward as you could get.

Unknown said...
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Justin said...

That's cool to hear. Isn't he running a bed and breakfast in New Zealand now? I think I saw the website. One of the entertainment options is to go skating with Dave. He was in one of the first videos I ever saw. I still do those nollie/slappy tailslides on curbs because of him.