Thursday, January 27, 2011

If you ever happen to find yourself in Tokyo and you’re looking to buy snowboard gear you will end up in the district of Kanda, because every single snowboard shop in Tokyo is in that district. In fact every single snowboard shop in Tokyo can be found in a small area of Kanda called Jinbocho, all one on a single street called Yasukuni Dori. Go there and you’ll find 40 snowboard stores all right next to each other, all selling snowboard gear at exactly the same, suspiciously high prices. The one other thing all these stores have in common is that they all stock the same snowboard gear that you’ll find if you walk into any snowboard shop anywhere in the world, a selection of US and European brands dominated by Burton. Great news for the established brands but not so good for diversity, and as a result if you run into a snowboarder from any country in the world they might look different, talk oddly and eat very strange food, but they will be wearing and riding pretty much the same stuff as you.

There is however one country that does things different, a country that has a whole array of snowboarding brands producing some pretty unique gear that you’re not going to find anywhere else...South Korea

Thursday, January 13, 2011

We’ve looked at a few of Hollywood’s attempts to produce a snowboarding themed movie before, but today we look at every single one.

Here are a few of the things you should know about before we get stuck in:
  • We are only including movies where snowboarding is an important part of the plot, so we’re not including things like James Bond in View to a Kill, XXX and Jackie Chan’s Police Story 4 all which coincidentally have a short scene involving a snowboarding spy.
  • Art is subjective, but because we like to impose order and objectivity we’ve used ratings from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) to compare the movies and to categorically determine if snowboarding themed movies were getting better or worse over time.
  • Keep an eye out for the one movie on the list is so bad it appears on the list of the worst 100 movies of all time on IMDb. That’s pretty good going because there are now over 755,000 films and TV shows on the site. Still at least surfing did worse because they have two on that list.
  • There have been 20 snowboarding movies over a 24 year period how many have you seen?...
 
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