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Friday, November 28, 2008

snowboards

The other day I was driving around, i think going to the store, I am not sure but the talk radio guys where talking about the new Burton snowboards that feartures playmates, and shockingly the nude butt of the playmates.

I would have never heard of these board without the radio show, and so I did a google search. I found this article

Racy Snowboards Banned From Slopes


Know what cracks me up about this? I don't know how many of you snowboard or ski, but the reason I ride the board I do, Is that it was one of the few boards in the size I wanted a couple years back that didn't feature either violent imagines or drug references or both.

I went to Burton.com and looked at their mens boards, most have plain graphics that look like graffiti to me, but I am not sure there is anything you could comment on.

On board has skulls on it, the Jeremy board features what looks like a pigman with a bloody machete raised above his head. The Fix board looks like a pill and says 55mg on it. the primo board shows a comic of someone frame by frame cutting their finger off and sewing on the big number one foam finger. and the CONdom board looks like the condom tip on either end with DOM in big print in the middle.

Just for fun though I went to another snowboard site, K2 was the company i picked, mostly cause i know they make them, I am not even sure what kind of board I own. hehe K2 had a bunch of boards most of them pretty boring, but they did have one that showed a skeleton breaking through a wall, kinda.

It took some thinking but I think I ride a Neversummer board. They have some pretty tame boards too, but the evo board has a really busy random bottom I counted 5 skulls and one grim reaper.

If i wanted to take the time, I could find boards with images of nuclear explosions, gun, blood, mary jane leaves, skeletons, graves, headstones, other boards with sexually explict words, tanks, war planes. Mostly just images of violence and drug use.

I don't care either way, but Burton is by far the biggest of the 3 companies (in snowboarding, K2 might be bigger if you add skies) I choose to look at, they had the most sexual images, the most drug references and about the same amount of violent images. I count skulls as violent.

I think there is a less than a small relationship between the success of burton and the anti establishment images they sell.

Burton probably is smiling all the way to the bank about this attention.

1 comment:

Abby said...

I heard about this ban too. Snowboarding has that rebel connotation, thus the violent/sex/drug imagery. Yes, I'm sure it's an effective marketing tactic for Burton.

I like how you say the nude playmate butt images "crack" you up. har har.