KRYPTONICS Doug “Pineapple” Saladino, 1978.
h t r i b e R The Photos by JIM GOODRICH Interviews by JACK SMITH
More than 35 years ago, Kryptonics wheels hit the skate world. Their urethane formula was revolutionary, and a sea of red, blue and green wheels appeared almost overnight. The company’s marketing was brilliant, too — color-coding each durometer, measuring wheels in millimeters instead of inches, even selling wheels in a canister — and its print ads in SkateBoarder magazine caused millions of skaters to drool over them. But times eventually changed; the brand was taken over a number of times, and its products ended up being sold mainly in discount stores. But through an interesting turn of events, Kryptonics has relaunched. We wanted to share with readers the history of this brand because the people who were associated with it had a dramatic effect on skateboarding.
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D. DAVID MORIN INTERVIEW July 2013
How did you originally hook up with Kryptonics? D. David Morin: I originally hooked up with Kryptonics while I was attending the University of Colorado in Boulder, circa 1975. I had met Duane Hermanson, the then VP, and he told me about their wheel development. Jimmy Ford was in the shipping department and was busy pushing Kryptonics to expand their product line from deadening formulas to reduce industrial machine vibration to more resilient compounds for the burgeoning skateboard wheel market. We went up against Road Rider wheels and OJs. I rode for Krypto while finishing college as an R & D guy, and started meeting a lot of the early street racing guys. Randy “R” Smith was a local favorite on the cool-looking Turner skates. I skated as a kid in Hollywood and used to go to the Teenage Fair at the Hollywood Palladium and watch the Hobie team. My early skateboards were Makaha decks with Hobie wheels with Chicago trucks.
S. Alba, D. David, Vicki Vickers and M. Alba (sticker on face)
break into it. I was driving 100 miles a day while attending law school in San Diego just to hand out wheels, stickers and T-shirts to skaters like Pineapple, Steve Cathey, Dennis Martinez, Ellen Oneal ... and also up around Venice and all the way out to the Inland Empire. I was everywhere and had a cool Porsche 914-6 that got me around until George Powell totaled it one day. What about favorite skaters or crazy stories from that time? As far as great skateboard stories, the whole era was epic. Capitola, the Catalina Classic, the Hester Series, the skateparks and all the characters ... Rich Novak and the Santa Cruz guys: John Krisik; John Hutson; Fausto; Steve Olson ... Signal Hill, La Costa ... there’s so many people and places. It was a whole world. Gregg Ayres, Neil Blender, the Bones Brigade guys: Lance; Cab; McGill; Tony Hawk; and so many more like Ray Allen, Vicki Vickers, [Dave] McIntyre, Bolster, [Craig] Stecyk, [James] Cassimus, Glen E. [Friedman], Mullen, it goes on and on. Lots of favorite skaters — Jay Adams was one of my faves, as unpredictable as he was stylish.
The big skating boom was over in the early ’80s and advertisers were dropping like flies. We couldn’t survive so we adapted. We expanded our editorial base in the hopes the expanded advertising base would follow. We were covering all the extreme sports well before that phrase was invented. You’ve heard of the X Games? We started X-Journalism back in 1980, combining all the radical action sports, aka extreme sports, into ACTION NOW: BMX, snowboarding, skating, etc. I guess we were too far ahead of our time.
D. David at the first Hester Series pool contest, Spring Valley, 1978.
What was your title at Krypto? I was a sales rep and all of California was my territory. I paid my way through law school selling Krypto wheels. Were you involved in wheel design or designing the great Kryptonics ads? I was never involved in the wheel design or the advertising. That was all Jim Ford back in Boulder. He was brilliant. I thought our ads really stood out, and I couldn’t wait, like everyone else, to see what was next every month. Jimmy was really clever, and the production was top notch. My job was promotion mostly, starting with giving wheels to skaters like Gregg Weaver, Rodney Jesse, Stacy Peralta, the G&S team, Jim Muir, Jay Adams, Tony Alva, David Hackett, Duane Peters ... Then it was the Krypto team during the Hester Series with Steve Alba, Micke Alba and Scott Dunlap. I think I sponsored Bobby Piercy also. The street racing scene was hardcore. Krypto tried to
When did you leave Kryptonics? I left Kryptonics in 1980 when I took at job at Surfer Publishing Group. I had been announcing professional skating for years (and surfing) and freelance writing for SkateBoarder quite a bit. When I graduated from law school Dave Dash asked me if I wanted to be publisher of SkateBoarder, as he was moving on to a newer mag at Surfer Publications and needed a replacement. I said yes. Then I became editor-in-chief after it broadened its scope to become ACTION NOW.
Why did you kill skateboarding? That’s so funny and ludicrous that people think I killed it, but they do. I was at a rehearsal dinner a decade ago and some guy married to the bride’s sister got drunk and figured out who I was and came after me because I killed skateboarding. Why would I kill the hand that fed me so well for all those years? Skateboarding was very good to me. But it’s cyclical. SkateBoarder first came out in 1964. Then after four issues it died. It came back in the early ’70s. Then died.
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At its zenith, SkateBoarder was a 200-page glossy monthly, chock full of ads. Everyone wanted in the market and the magazine. By 1980 we were at 84 pages and nearly unsustainable. Everybody had gone away. All the big boys ... gone. We were forced to expand or die. We tried. But to say I killed the sport is pretty aggrandizing. I was a reporter. That’s like saying I killed Lincoln if I reported Lincoln was dead. I somewhat recall our editorial staff talking about the upcoming issue and what the cover should be. Paul Haven, Cassimus, Stecyk and myself always tried to put a clever spin on our covers. The mag tone was very tongue-in-cheek, and like any publication, we were in the business of selling newspapers, or in our case, magazines. I don’t even remember the exact cover — it was so long ago — but we had a long story about “is skateboarding dead and can it survive?” We were poking the sacred cow. The readers were outraged, but the once mega-industry was already gone due to lack of sales ... yet we were to blame. What was your life and career like after Kryptonics? My mom was an actress and my dad was a lawyer, but me and law never got along. Stacy Peralta got into acting and was doing guest-star roles on Charlie’s Angels and movies and stuff. He encouraged me to pursue it. After ACTION NOW I went to Saddleback College and hosted a cable show for two years and acted in a student film. I sucked. So I picked the thing I had the least amount of talent at and moved back to Hollywood to pursue that. I went on to do more than 200 national commercials, 40 guest-star roles, 40 films and a couple of sitcoms as a series regular. My credits are on IMDB.com. I also trailed directors and was making short films. I ended up writing and directing two features, Cold Play and Johnny. At that time I was living in a loft in downtown L.A. and got a film acting gig in Kenya, Africa. After a month in Nairobi, I decided to move there. I bought a one-way and sold everything I had and flew to Kenya Oct. 1, 2011. What are you doing these days? Currently I’m teaching a seminar series on the cinematic arts in Nairobi (Slingshot Seminars on Facebook) and a nine-week Hollywood acting course. I own Slingshot Productions and have numerous projects in various stages of development. Otherwise, I live on the coast on the Indian Ocean near Somalia in Lamu. My current life credo is “teach art or make art.” Kryptonics was the halcyon days for a lot of us. I know it was for me. So many memories, too many to remember.
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JIM FORD INTERVIEW
When did you begin working at Kryptonics? Jim Ford: I think it was early 1975. I moved to Boulder from the East Coast in late ’74, worked a few jobs for a short time, then got hired at Kryptonics to work in production. That was before they got into skateboard wheels. What did you do before the Krypto job? Before moving to Boulder I was a lab technician at a big chemical company near Washington, D.C. I was still going to college part-time then. In Boulder I tried being an oxygen tank deliveryman for a week and had a random assembly job for a few months before getting hired at Kryptonics. What was your title? At first I didn’t have one. The best description would probably be factory worker. I did production spray-painting of rollers they later coated with urethane, some welding and various other equally unexciting production related jobs.
Did you skateboard as a kid? I did, home-made. A friend and I deconstructed his sister’s old steel-wheeled roller skates and screwed them to boards we cut out on a band saw. We could only ride them on sidewalks because the streets were too rough. I remember using black electrical tape to put a racing stripe down the middle of mine. Who was hired first, you or D. David? It wasn’t until I convinced the president and VP of Kryptonics to get into the skateboard wheel business that D. David was hired as a rep, so I preceded him by a year or two. What was the first wheel(s) you were involved with? Were you involved in wheel design? It’s a long story. The very first wheels were prototypes that were developed clandestinely by me without the knowledge of Krypto’s management. I designed a wheel and got a friend who worked in the machine shop to make a steel master. Then we rigged it so the doors wouldn’t lock after work, snuck back in at night, made a mold from the master and started pouring different formulas we found in the lab into the mold. Nobody knew about it but us. We made a lot of bad ones, but eventually we came across this really soft and bouncy material. They came out white, and I almost threw them in the trash because they seemed way too soft to work or even hold the bearings in place. Jim Ford tests out the magical Krypto red formula, 1978.
Darren Ho, Wallos, Hawaii, 1978.
Just for fun, I put them on one of my boards just to try them out. It was unbelievable. At the time I had a few boards; one had Road Riders, one had Power Paws and I think one had Bennett Alligators. They all performed about the same. In the flat parking lot at Kryptonics, any of those wheels would glide about 20 feet before you had to push again. I got on the wheels we made in the lab and went all the way across the parking lot and out onto the street. That’s not an exaggeration. They were so fast and quiet it didn’t seem possible. What did you do next? At the time there were some local slalom and downhill races in Boulder on Columbine Avenue. There was no way I was going to ride those wheels standing up in the downhill because there was no runout at the bottom of the course. So I gave them to this kid who rode lying down on his board. He could stop by dragging his feet. There were a lot of spectators at that race, including the VP of Kryptonics. The downhill race was about two blocks long. The guy riding those white wheels won the race by about a block. Nobody could believe it. The VP went up to the kid and asked him about the wheels. I forgot
to tell him they were unauthorized. He told the VP he got them from me and I was busted.
Ellen Oneal freestyling in Mission Bay, California, April 1978.
Did you get in trouble? I got in some trouble initially, but soon after I told them how much I paid for a set of wheels at a local retailer, Kryptonics decided they would get into the business. They even gave me a title, something like Consumer Product Manager, because all they produced was industrial parts for mining and computers. I got to move up from the factory to an office and started marketing and selling wheels. It was a big step up for me. I was selling wheels to shops and distributors, designing all the wheels, producing ads and skating almost every day either at the local park or on mountain roads. When did you start designing the ads? Right from the start. The first ad was in 1976. It was a small, lame, black-and-white ad because I didn’t have much of a budget. Later that year, we had an ad agency come up with a logo that the VP approved but I wasn’t crazy about. It was a circular logo with the Star-Trac written big through the center of the logo. Actually, I hated it. We ran
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Jim Goodrich displays some of his iconic images.
it a few times in the first few ads and then I exerted my influence and ditched the Star-Trac. The new logo used the same shape but Kryptonics was now the only word and it was encircled by three colored rings that represented the color coding of our wheels: green = hard, blue = medium and red = soft. I got a budget to do color ads and the creative juices started flowing. It was fun because I loved skating and I knew we had a product that was clearly better than the competition at the time. Any favorite ones? Yes, lots of them were favorites. The one titled “Fast Relief” is one of them. I had a friend back on the East Coast who worked in a plexiglass company make a giant pill vial and lid. Then we printed an equally big label from a local pharmacy. We laid the vial on its side with wheels spilling out. There were a few other ads that I really liked doing. One was titled “It’s Only Natural,” when we started making wheels with plastic cores for the bearing seats. It had a wheel cut in half sitting beside an avocado and a peach, also cut in half. Another one was titled “Tired of Playing the Name Game?” It didn’t even show our wheels. Instead it had all these different objects that represented the names of our competitors’ wheels. There was a “Weed” (no, not that kind of weed), a toy “Flying Saucer,” a toy railroad “Tunnel,” some dog “Bones,” a glass of “OJ,” a toy “Snake” (slithering out of the tunnel and around the glass of
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OJ), a toy “Alligator” crushed under the flying saucer, and a “Yo Yo.” Along the same lines, we kind of burned Sims Pure Juice and OJ wheels with an ad titled “Tired of the Same Old Juice?” It showed one of our new hard green park wheels sitting next to a lab beaker half-full of green juice with whipped cream on top, a slice of lime and a straw. The ad we did to promote the successor to the white prototype wheels was titled “Rock’n Roll.” It showed a soon-to-be-famous Krypto Red sitting on some rocks. The copy talked about the smoothness and speed and bragged about how nearly every downhill race in 1977 was won on Krypto reds. The other one that sticks out was titled “Faster Than a Speeding Bullet.” We machined big brass casings to look like rifle shells. One was standing up with a wheel on top, so it looked like a hollow-point bullet. The other shell was lying down and had what looked like black powder pouring out. That was it — clean and simple with no copy. Those were my favorite wheel ads. I had other ones when we got into making the high-tech foam-core decks and wood boards, but that’s another story. What was the industry reaction to the ads? It was great. I got a lot compliments and won some awards, a few at the annual SkateBoarder magazine banquet for best ad and best ad campaign. More importantly, though, it created sales for the company that were hard to keep up with from a production standpoint.
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Any great skateboard stories? Oh, yeah. I can think of two incidents in Colorado where the newly developed red wheels created some problems for some friends I gave sets to. We used to drive up into the mountains outside of Boulder and skate down Four Mile Canyon. As the name implies, it was a long ride with hardly any cars and mostly mellow curves and steepness. The problem was when you switched from, say, Road Rider wheels to Kryptos, the ride became way faster and pretty hairy in places. One time a buddy got going too fast, got speed wobbles and tried to run it out. He got in about two huge steps before he went down, rolled and ended up in the ditch on the side of the road. When we went back to check on him, both his feet had gone through the front of his shoes. His shoes were halfway up his shins but they were still tied on. To get them off, we had to pull them down and off over his feet. Another time on the same road, we took a guy who wasn’t much of a skater. He also got the speed wobbles, ejected, but never made it to the ditch. It was the middle of summer and he wasn’t wearing a shirt. Instead of rolling out of the high-speed fall, he opted for a belly flop. When he got up he had the worst case of road rash I’ve ever seen. His entire chest was scrubbed. Both his nipples were completely gone. He was hating life, but we couldn’t hold in the laughs. At the time he failed to see the humor in it. One winter I got to ski with George Powell, Tom Sims and Art Harris (one of our distributors) in Aspen. That was a blast because we all skied well and managed to forget the competitive nature of the business for a short time. There were a lot more stories. I had some great road trips in California with D. David and some fun trips to Europe for trade shows. Favorite skater? I think of all the skaters we sponsored over the years, Stacy is the guy who would rank as my favorite. He was a great guy, a stylish skater and went on to do great things with George Powell and the Bones Brigade. When did you leave Kryptonics? They fired me in 1980 when the skateboard boom ended and sales tanked. It was a pretty sad day for me. Skating was in my blood for a long time, and all of a sudden it was over. Looking back, I get why they didn’t need me, but it doesn’t make that memory suck any less.
I know you worked for Haro. How did that come about? D. David made that happen. When he became the main man at ACTION NOW magazine he got to know Bob Haro, who was just starting to ride his BMX bike in skateparks. He started running ads in the magazine and mentioned to D. David that he was looking for someone to run his company while he went on a tour of the U.S. promoting freestyle BMX. D. David recommended me, and Bob flew me out to L.A. for an interview. He picked me up at LAX in a jacked-up Toyota 4Runner that I think had been recently rolled, and he had a big, gnarly perm that stuck out about six inches. I remember thinking this might not be such a good idea! Turns out we hit it off OK, and Bob offered me a job. Bob left around 1991 after we sold the company to Derby Cycles and I became president shortly after that. I bought the company back in 1993 with a group of investors and ended up staying with Haro for 24 years, so it all worked out pretty well.
Then to have the option to put the wheel on all or some of the completes was a no-brainer.
What are you doing these days? I resigned from Haro in 2005 and about six months later started a new BMX company with X Games legend Dave Mirra. It’s still going strong. I’m not skating anymore, but I still ski frequently and ride a bike virtually every day. I also just celebrated 40 years of marriage to my high school sweetheart. Life’s been good.
What has been reaction from retailers? From the ones that know the brand from the ’70s it’s been amazing. Some retailers I’ve spoken to about bringing back Star-Trac wheels said with a smile, “I sold s---loads back in the day; I think I could do that again!” The others that have heard about the brand but don’t know the history, it presents us with the opportunity to share it with them.
What are you going to be offering to skaters that will ignite their interest? Unlocking the rich history of the brand and bringing back quality wheels. Kryptonics heavily influenced many of today’s wheels. Kryptonics Star-Trac wheels were the original performance wheels. What surprises you most about the re-emergence of the brand? The excitement we have seen so far. I have read posts like, “Wow, I used to ride the red ones. I don’t skate anymore, but I think I’ll buy some and start skating again.” It does not get much better than that. We did a Doors collaboration with Dusters a few weeks back and I was lucky enough to meet Robby Krieger from the band. I was wearing a Kryptonics shirt. He looked at me and said, “I used to ride the red ones.” CLASSIC!
Who would you consider your key customer? Anyone that rolls, really. But that is a great question. We are going to appeal from the start to the 40-plus-year-olds who know the history, and through them we are going to let them tell stories (with our help) to their kids and others. It’s truly an iconic wheel brand, and a huge part of skateboarding. To me, Kryptonics wheels are to smoothness and quality what Independent trucks are to turning, and that’s massive.
INTERVIEW WITH BRAND MANAGER STEVE DOUGLAS INTERVIEW BY MICHAEL BROOKE What were some of the decisions to bring back Kryptonics? Steve Douglas: Once the opportunity to do so became a reality we jumped on it. We have a brand called Dusters California [that] is focused on the late ’60s and ’70s, and we make longboard and cruisers. So to run Kryptonics through Dusters as a pure “play” wheel brand was simple.
Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be. … I wanted to get your thoughts about cutting through the huge amount of product that’s currently available. There is only one Kryptonics. The Star-Trac were game-changers, and with our new technology, new durometers and a new size (75 mm), plus the truly iconic name, this gives us an edge. We are not a new brand trying to break into the market. The brand started in the ’70s and now we are back, better than ever. Sometimes you do get a chance. CW
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