When Thrasher Magazine Did Snowboarding

Some poor intern at Thrasher Magazine has been busy scanning every page of every back issue and uploading it onto the internet. That's an incredible administrative feat from a very unlikely source. Good thing for us though is that we can now see the brief period when skateboarders thought snowboarding was cool. Here are all the interesting appearances of snowboarding in Thrasher...

Well probably not all, because we've got no interns here so we may have missed a few. With that admission out the way, here's a graph of the number of editions of Thrasher (that we found) which featured snowboarding in some way which accurately(ish) charts the exact(ish) amount of shits that skateboarders gave about snowboarding over time...

Let's take a look at the best bits.


The first appearance we found was this advert/review of a Slicker snowboard/snurfer in the November 1982 edition...

(click on the images to embiggen them)

December 1982. The next month Slicker were back and throwing some advertising budget at the mag, apparently advertising the Slicker as some sort of penis enhancement product.

January 1983 saw the first proper article about snowboarding.

"Hey, wait a minute. What's this? This ain't skateboarding."

November 1983 and now a bunch of other snowboarding companies also started to advertise...

That penis enhancement approach again

Flight's sponsored rider was the perfectly named - Lance Mountain.

"When it comes down to WINNING, Tom Sims dominates snowboarding."

"Only SIMS boards have stainless steel thrusters and other steel edges." Steel thrusters? Where do I get a set of those bad boys for my snowboard. 

January 1984 Snowtech produces the world's dullest snowboard advert.

January 1985 Burton and the slinky onesies

November 1985 and somehow Burton suits get even tighter 

and also they've introduced some sort of  cock leash. Looks painful

November 1986 and now we've got four pages and we're in colour.

May 1988 Snowboarding's first and only Thrasher cover marks the point that snowboarding went from obscure to really getting a lot of coverage. In this edition there was also a six-page article inside the mag. (click on the date if you want to see that).

That's Rob Roskopp who was a pro for Santa Cruz skateboards.

January 1989 Colour hit the inside of Thrasher just in time for the neon era of snowboarding...

Terry Kidwell

Damian Sanders 

George Pappas

A snowboard brand that must of only existed for all of five minutes in 1989

And some old bearded fella.

Please also take note of the skateboarder on the far right.

February 1989 Another four page article.

Note the abundance of silver duct tape.

April 1989 A six page article on the including interviews with Craig Kelly and Shaun Plamer (click on the date to see the full thing)

July 1989 nice Burton ad.

November 1989 Craig Kelly's camp got four pages

Bert Lamar gets the contents page

And an add for Look snowboards

and Kemper opted for the most straight-forward ad message ever

Decmber 1989 A five page article...

Which starred George Pappas' impressively hirsute belly

and an ad featuring Noah Salasnek, who it turns out was the inspiration for Shaun White's entire look.

January 1990 A whole load of snowboard ads, but I particularly like this cartoon cautionary tale.

February 1990 and six more pages of snowboard promotion.

Which included this picture of a snowboarding David Hasselhof

Classic Damian Sanders bedecked in Ocean Pacific

And a bloke in a thong

November 1990 A listicle article raging against the recent over-commercialisation of snowboarding. It's basically all today's internet articles in just four pages.

"Snowboarding has crossed international borders, transcended seasonal barriers, cracked the big resorts, garnished mass media exposure and been commercialized, incorporated and bastardized."

December 1990 Burton ad featuring a neon Karate Kid

February 1991 An article looking at the controversial new concept of the "snowboard park". Do snowboarders really need it and is it just a way to segregate snowboarders?

Also another set of awesome 90s snowboard shop cartoons

December 1991 Snowboarding gives something back to skateboarding

November 1992 A strange article about snowboarding adopting skateboard tricks. It's hard to get the point of it because it's both pro and anti snowboarding in some ways, but it seems it's mostly raging against the renaming of skateboarding tricks by snowboarders and it does seem to indicate a shift in Thrasher's interest in snowboarding.

"Without skateboarding, snowboarders wouldn't have jack."

Followed by an interview with Craig Kelly.

The picture on the bopttom right is Craig and Adam Yauch from the Beastie Boys

December 1993 A year later and it's a similar point introducing an interview with Jeff Brushie 

"Tricks that were born on the streets, ramps and bowls of the world have been taken from skateboarding and bastardized into the snowboarding vocabulary. Some have risen to stellar heights and others have slumped to hideous lows. Sno pro extraordinaire Jeff Brushie explains..."

A new album by Hootie and the Blowfish on the right there

From that point on snowboarding turned into a regular two-page column called Cold Snap (you can see them all here). Although the coverage was steady for a while here it was minimal and formulaic and we can't find any stand-out interesting articles or ads from December 1993 onwards.

June 1997 This interview with some lad called Greg Goulet was the last appearance of snowboarding we could find, but it the back issues of Thrasher aren't so detailed from about this period onwards so there could have been others.

This sequence was directed M. Night Shyamalan

And there you have it. Snowboarding had it's moment on the front page and generated a whole lot of interest for a while, but it was eventually relegated to the back pages, before being quietly dropped. Along the way though they managed to capture lots of interesting moments and if you fancy having a browse though their impressive archives here's the link.

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