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2 Anti Hero questions:
1. When did the Eagle series as a whole first come out? I remember occasionally seeing a black and maybe a blue one as a kid, but not in the modern sizes.
2. When did the brand become so revered? I grew up in the SF Bay but only remember seeing a Gerwer deck in a shop. I only saw a few people at bowl centric parks on them pre Tony T. Maybe I was just too focused on Pier 7/3rd and Army and missed another contingent of Bay Area street skating?
Quoting this because I'm also a interested in this, especially the second question. As a kid I thought Anti Hero was a brand more or less like any other. Coming back into skating many people regard it as one of the apex companies. How did that happen? I'm not hating on it, just curious.
You'll notice that this is true for most of the DLX brands, and I don't think it's a coincidence that DLX more or less runs the skateboard industry. But for Antihero specifically, their team has always been stacked with some of the heaviest riders in the history of skateboarding and many of their videos, instead of being assembled from clips filmed over the course of a year or two, were ~45 minute tour videos, where you spend two weeks travelling throughout some corner of the world with these guys as they skate massive pipes or crusty backyard ramps. They found an excellent little niche which they've been able to grow over time, and it has stayed a much more coherent brand that most other companies who cropped up around the same time, even the ones which are still going.
Although the eagle graphic was the first one done for AH by Todd Francis pretty much the same time as the company started around 1995, I think it wasn't until about 2001 or so that they had a few different options for those boards, as per a paper DLX catalog I still have from that time. It was a toss up between the eagle and the pigeon for the main graphic at one point, but both have their place in AH graphics. Check out his instagram for some good pics / info:
https://www.instagram.com/toddfrancisart/The eagle range didn't really firm up until a few years later, with maybe 2010 being one of the first years to have multiple eagles on different back colours for different sizes (also going by some more old DLX catalogs) but I don't have anywhere near the full lot of this sort of stuff, so could be very wrong. Even 2016 or so there were still only half of the options that there are / were around 2020, with ten options, 7.3 yellowish, 7.81 light green, 8.0 olive green, 8.12 black, 8.25 grey, 8.38 dark green, 8.5 dark blue, 8.62 cream, 8.75 white, 9.0 orange in popsicles anyway, plus the shaped eagles - another five or more - raw / natural, black stain, blue meanie, orange crush, green giant, etc. Then the huffer eagle, the beach bum eagle... I should just stop.
As to the brand itself, as said, solid videos, rad team, definitely more relatable and of interest to more people I knew that weren't so into tech skating and more into "fun/gnar" skating, if that is even a term, as well as tours that came through and whipped people into a brand frenzy - Tent City 2003 - was almost the main driving factor for so many people I know to get into the AH way of life.
Edit:
Went looking as I knew it was in there somewhere: