cesimpson

I was looking for Wikipedia’s page on Rapid Application Development and somehow ended up on the Rad page instead.

I’d kinda half-forgotten about that movie. It was a favorite in my kid-hood. Our family was one of the first to move into this new neighborhood, around the time that movie came out. There were lots of empty lots and we used many summer days and after-school hours shaping those lots into bicycle race tracks with ramps, berms, moguls, ‘tabletops’, etc.

There was one we built on two adjacent lots. It was basically a big loop, but we built a shortcut that would allow you to cut out about a third of the loop. The catch? It had a huge ramp in the middle, made of three 4′x8′ pieces of 5/8″ plywood nailed to 2″x4″s. It was about 6′ tall at the peak. If you had the balls to go off the ramp, you could take the shortcut.

Few did…more than once. =)

Wow. I haven’t thought of these things in a long time. A good 30 minutes of reminiscing. Best accidental Wikipedia stumble I’ve had in a while.

There are three scenes from that movie that really stick out in my mind.

• The Send Me an Angel school dance-turned-freestyle show
• The training for the big backflip, when Cru yanks the matresses off the ramp, and then finally hits the flip. To a 10 yr old kid, that was real guts.
• The backflip out of the Kix bowl to win the race. Rad!

I wonder if that movie is still available somewhere….