Skyway’s Street Beat bike, built for freestyle BMX with its flashy mag wheels and two-color schemes, promises to make its riders “street wise.” The “Mongoose image” appeals to those with ambitions of “winning a race or cruising a campground in style.” The niche advertising of BMX corresponded with a major commercial turn toward youth subcultures in the later 20th century that went global and determined the experiences of generations raised on MTV and extreme, or “lifestyle,” sports merchandising. The “anodized equipment” of Japanese maker Kuwahara’s KE-1 “will blow your mind and blind your competition” in 1980. We have images of all-male bonding – through competition and team-building – and images of toughness and style. (“Make way for the BMX that grew up!” one Murray ad trumpets.)
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Ideas of playful seriousness abound-promising a way to grow up that doesn’t involve losing the awesome radness of BMX.
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What were the advertisers of BMX selling, besides bikes and t-shirts and BMX parts and accessories? We get a good idea from the selection of vintage advertisements here from the period of BMX’s cultural heyday. The “complex, co-dependent” relationship between profitable mass media, consumer products, and trends like BMX results in fads that far outstrip the intentions of their creators in the selling of pre-packaged identities to consumers. Indeed, the historic rise and fall of the sport with regard to industrial success can be correlated with the appearance and disappearance of disseminating institutions such as particular special-interest magazines.” “The history of BMX,” Nelson writes, “is inseparable from the history of the activity’s mediation. Just as later ‘80s films like Gleaming the Cube exploited skateboarding culture for mass entertainment, the BMX craze cannot be viewed without a corresponding focus on its “historical mediatization,” according BMX scholar Wade Nelson, a longtime practitioner of BMX freestyle and one of its few academics. The bikes were everywhere: in stores, in magazines, on television, in iconic scenes in movies like E.T., The Goonies, and, of course, the BMX-ploitation movies Rad and BMX Bandits (starring a 15-year-old Nicole Kidman!), released in 19, respectively. But if you lived in the early 1980s, there was no getting around the extreme popularity of BMX. Bike motor-cross is back, in a big way, though you might not know it if you aren’t part of a bike subculture.
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BMX soon became a serious sport for grown-ups and, in 2003, an Olympic event. “Born out of the ‘70s motorcycle race scene in southern California as kids tried to emulate the adults on their own dirt bikes,” notes Style magazine, “BMX was a ‘sport created by kids, for kids,’ explained John David COO of USA BMX.” The bikes are made for stunting and soaring – tiny platforms for airborne maneuvers in imitation of moto-cross moves, without the motor. But no one who rides a BMX (and no, it’s not “BMX bike,” since the “B” in BMX stands for “bicycle”) ever sits down on one unless they’re posing for a photo. The odd little bikes don’t look ridable by anyone over twelve years old – and they are, in point of fact, designed for children.