Snowboarding Celebrities 6 & 7 – The Characters from Star Wars & Michael Jackson

Snowboarding Celebrities No. 6 - The Characters from Star Wars

When the characters from Star Wars aren’t busy chasing each other around with laser swords they like nothing better than a good bit of snowboarding. When I say Star Wars characters I mean the original Star Wars and not the new fangled nonsense. That Jar Jar Binks lad definitely rides snow blades.

Let’s have a look at the Science Facts...

This article is absolutely drowning in references and we start by taking a look back in time. All the way back to last week and the snowboarding LEGO article.

LEGO produced sets for Ross Powers and they also produce a set for another legend of the snowboarding scene - the Stormtroopers. These guys have never got much coverage in the mainstream snowboarding press and I think the reason is that it’s just too difficult to tell them apart. Makes for a pretty dull set of rider interviews when all the riders are clones of each other. Against this blatant clonism LEGO has given these guys a shot so check this bad boy out.

The Stormtroopers took up snowboarding in some down time during the battle for Hoth. Proof...

And here is one of them caught on camera

Does this guy have four eyes? I'm not so sure he's an actual Stormtrooper.

Another legend of the snowboarding underground is Boba Fett. Boba has been steadily plying his snowboarding trade for years and finally it has paid off as he has recently signed with Nike. Check out his signature Nike Zoom Force 1 boots..

Boba Fett. A much smaller guy than you'd imagine.

A while back we had an article on face fashion where we discovered that people still knitted. Well they’re at it again and this time they have been knitting Star Wars inspired head wear so that we can all get a piece of the action.

I guess this is the Princess Leia Skull Candy headphones prototype.

These are the droid hats you are looking for...

An alternative Star Wars inspired headgear and also guaranteed to make you look like a prize idiot is the Ruroc 'Darth' helmet.

This all-in-one monstrosity is Britain’s strangest contribution to the snowboarding scene. Looking at their website it seems that a lot of the Formula 1 teams are now using this helmet. Maybe you can polish a turd after all, if this can manage, even completely inadvertently, to find a market anything can because it sure as hell was never going to take off in the snowboarding world.

Here is a lovely Star Wars inspired jib obstacle at Austrian ‘can’t buy a vowel’ ski resort Ischgl. A resort who rely on the frankly terrifying catchphrase. “Relax. If you can…” which sounds like a slasher movie tagline.

With these two Darth Vadar inspired items you might think the big man himself is a snowboarder. In truth he used to be a regular on the snowboarding scene but in the last few years he has not picked up a snowboard. He couldn’t adapt to the new and more commercial sport that grew up around him and back in 1998, at the time that snowboarding sold out and appeared in the Olympics, he quit in disgust. Nowadays he has become an ice sculptor of some renown.

Darth Vadar sculpts a lovely image of a moon. Hang on a second, that's no moon!

Nothing celebrates the birth of little baby Jesus quite like an image of Darth Vadar decapitating a Stormtrooper.

But this is gem that ties this loosely concocted article together. Here are all the legendary Star Wars snowboarders appearing together in one peach of a snowboarding movie. This has worryingly good production values...

It was made by some guys from a little clothing company called Knife Show who have a great character called Stabby the dinosaur. It would make an ideal uniform for a school in South London

Most shoehorned sedgeway ever coming up...

Of course we all know that for their own safety Star Wars fans have been corralled into geek ghettos. Here's an inside look into one of these encampments. They are definitely putting the camp in encampment. Behold - Dancing with the Star Wars stars. Check out their moving tribute to Michael Jackson 3 mins in.

Which bring us on to our recently expired colleague…

Snowboarding Celebrity No. 7 – Michael Jackson

Yeah, he was a snowboarder. This isn’t just an incredibly cheap way of jumping on the back of the biggest news story of the year, a tardy week after the event.

Well he must have been because one day after his death NEFF were also all over it like flies on shit when they produced these two t-shirts

I wonder why they didn’t use pictures of him in his snowboarding prime?

Michael Jackson will also be remembered in other ways by the snowboarding world.

He invented his own snowboard trick called ‘The Michael Jackson’. He must have been a good snowboarder to be able to invent and claim the name for a new trick. It looks like a pretty simple trick but I spend the whole time waiting for this guy to slip and smash his teeth in.