Are plastic cruisers still a thing?

[Wizard Fight]

I expect people to hate on this automatically, and I'm not trying to promote them, but I was thinking I got real curious: are plastic cruisers still a thing?

I remember being in Boulder, Colorado in Fall 2012 and that season basically every college longboarder had switched over. Penny and Stereo were the ones I most commonly saw, but apparently Globe made and bunch and I just found this Creature one (below).

As a young teenager in the early 2000s small-town Utah, I picked up a vintage one from a garage sale and thought I was super rad for riding my "old school board" wearing navy blue Authentics. Pretty silly. This was after "Dogtown and Z-Boys" had come out but before "Lords of Dogtown". That board had big and soft, clear red wheels and loose ball bearings, which I replaced with BBs when I took one of my wheels off for no reason. My feet grew over the next couple years and I lost the board in a garage somewhere.

Obviously shaped boards have been trending for a while but a lot of people think of shaped boards primarily as "cruisers" and just a novelty. I'm with Welcome on this issue (they responded to a social media comment once by stating "we don't make fucking cruisers"), but as far as I've seen, shaped boards, or maybe just more longboards, seem to have replaced the tiny plastic cruisers popular a couple years ago.

Are people were still rocking tiny plastic cruiser boards in any other part of the U.S.? Are they or were they ever popular abroad, Europe or elsewhere? And what's enjoyable about having a board that is barely big enough for 1 adult male human foot, let alone 2?

Here is an X-Games article about them from 2012, which fits the timeline of my personal observations and helped keep me thinking that this trend came and went primarily in that year.


http://xgames.espn.go.com/skateboarding/article/8269716/seventies-inspired-plastic-skateboards-new-hipster-trend-board-guide

[Noble Experiment]

I see them all the time down here. Not sure how people even ride those things. I've tried to ride one before and could barely keep my feet on it because it was so small and the top has no grip at all.

[Prince Nelson]

I see people riding them down the street all the time.

[JB]

i work on a college campus and i see people riding them, but about as many as i see riding skateboards. id say more than half the people i see riding some kind of board ride longboards though. the funniest is when i see someone in their early 20s cruising across campus on a razor scooter or a rip stick, which happens a lot more often than you would think.

[Paco Supreme]

I think the popularity of them has died down somewhat, that said, it's almost summer here and I expect too see every mongo pushing kook come out the woodwork again,slowly making their way down hills and jumping off when they actually get speed, I actually bought one  too impress this girl I knew who thought they we're the coolest thing out it has since collected dust under my bed, as JB said, I've seen more people on scooters now, the funny ones are when they're a reasonably tall person clutching one of those non adjustable handled scooters, and leaning way over the handles

[Tracer]

Those Penny boards are gay as fuck, that lasted about 2 years

[Kinch]

Regrettably still a thing in the UK with kids/people that don't skate. They also all seem to be described as 'penny boards' here regardless of the brand that actually made the board in question.

We had one that we all fucked around with in the shop I used to work at, and we discovered that we could do a fair few flip tricks on them, but that no-one could actually manage a straight ollie up a curb on one. This is a problem which in my eyes at least kind of makes them useless as cruisers here     

[256 Ply]

NHS & Lance Mountain tried to get in on it with Gold Cup Skateboards, but looks like it's now out of business. No new product in months, and nothing on NHS Fun Factory.

[2thick]

Pretty much dead in my area, the shop I work at has had one for a few months that hasn't sold

[tom]

a lot of people in NYC still ride them. They're obviously lame but I don't hate seeing them as much as long boards or scooters.