Monday, March 24, 2008

Cooler in the 70s: Loony Motorcycle Stunt Riders

In these days of extreme sports, you'd be hard-pressed to find some kid who hasn't ridden something over 16 buses, but back in the day, man... Evel Knievel would do it and everyone would skip school to watch.
Sure, we were watching to see if he crashed, and if he never did, it would be boring. These days we expect our stuntmen to be perfect. 70s stuntmen routinely clipped the last bus or dropped thousands of feet down the Grand Canyon, and we would love them all the more for it. Seriously, this from the tribute article in the New York Times: When he was 27, he became co-owner of a motorcycle shop in Moses Lake, Wash. To attract customers, he announced he would jump his motorcycle 40 feet over parked cars and a box of rattlesnakes and continue on past a mountain lion tethered at the other end. Before 1,000 people, he did the stunt as promised but failed to fly far enough; his bike came down on the rattlesnakes. The audience was in awe.

“Right then,” he said, “I knew I could draw a big crowd by jumping over weird stuff.”
See? His first stunt was techniocally a failure, but we continued not just to watch in awe of him, but also his son, and the amazing regular failures to clear unusual objects performed by the line of Evel Knievel toys, such as the cycle, chopper, skycycle and touring van. Those things were being held together with staples, super-glue and sheer force of will by the end of the first week of ownership, as they were made of 100% pure fail - and yet we loved them. To add insult to injury, if you were to place a Stretch Armstrong or a Steve Austin action figure on the chopper, you'd barely make it off the ramp, yet Imperial Stormtroopers would fly about 40 feet. Say what you want about the Empire, man, they knew how to jump a bike over row of 5 six-year-olds, yessir.

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