Tony Hawk Pro Skater 4 Ollie The Magic Bum
Raingarda Krzynowek
Ollie the Magic Bum is a homeless man featured in several games in the Tony Hawk series. He is presented as a poorly dressed man with a beer bottle and hand-made skateboard, typically wearing a green bomber jacket and brown pants; in THPS3 & THPS4 he sports a black cap.
He uses a hand-made skateboard (nailed wooden planks) that has a "Will Skate For Food" sign on the underside. He's known for his "I'll open up a can on your butt!", "You get out of here you, creep!" and "Aight! You gotta change?" exclamations.
Ollie first appeared as a NPC in THPS2 in Venice for a goal where the player had to jump (ollie) over him as he moved mysteriously (magically) from one spot to the next. In THPS3 he became a playable character, and is unlocked by completing all goals and collecting all three gold medals in Career Mode seven times. Later he appeared in THPS4 as an NPC again, where he gave several goals on different maps (like "Collect the Pink Elephants"), in Kona the player was tasked (by Tony Hawk) to ollie over him once again, in this goal it is revealed that he can also levitate. In THUG he appeared again as a NPC, giving a goal in New Jersey to collect boxes that were parts of his "house" in exchange for a train ticket (and half of his candy bar). A custom skater resembling Ollie can be created by using parts such as his coats, face, trousers and shoes. He returned as an unlockable character once more in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater HD.
Think about it. As a real-life pro skater, you might spend three hours out of every day practicing. Three hours trying new tricks, screwing up and the ground abruptly slipping out from under you. Imagine living your life in that fog of frustration, embarrassment, adrenaline and pride. Now let's imagine you got really sick, swallowed, like, nine Paracetamols and passed out in bed.
You're fastened to your skateboard. There can be no leaving the skateboard. Do not leave the skateboard. You are alone in an empty school, skate park, or maybe someplace more surreal - an airport hangar or Spanish bull-fighting arena that's full of rails and half-pipes for some reason. There isn't a soul to be seen, yet when you pull off a trick you can still hear the roaring of the crowd. Where could they be? Maybe Tony Hawk knows.
There are objectives, of course. Not that anybody tells you them. It is simply very important that you crash through barrels, collect floating letters, do tricks, score points, jump this gap, grind that rail, wallride the bells, drain the fountain, collect the secret tape. You want to be a pro skater? Then you must ollie over the magical bum, five times.
"Of course," you say, no longer sure if you're controlling the skater or the skateboard itself, which would make the human on your back some unknowable, silent burden who (if the dream scientists are to be believed) probably represents your mother.
But there is more dream logic to THPS2 than its cavernous levels and strange objectives. At odds with the bland, real-looking world, the way the game controls and your skater's velocity are exaggerated. It's more like what a pre-teen skateboarder thinks is possible if they just believe.
It starts off slow, with reality maintaining a half-hearted grip on you. Your ollies are little things, and your grinds and wall-rides end quickly. But every half hour that you invest furthers your Karate Kid-like mastery of the controls, and all those points and dollars that won't stop tumbling in are hoisting up your skater's stats.
In a twisted interpretation of the fact that the best part of real-life skating is learning to do something you couldn't before, THPS2 ends up pushing you so high it's ridiculous. By the end of career mode you're capable of getting 25 feet of air off the tiniest quarter pipe, and stringing six or seven different tricks together before landing. You're not skating, you're soaring, and the few objectives in your list that seemed laughable at first are suddenly within reach of you and your magnificent talents.
Not only does THPS2 let non-skaters skate, it lets skaters and non-skaters alike push against the envelope of what's possible in reality. If real-life skateboarding can be compared to a hopeless battle against friction and gravity, THPS2 uses the fact that it's a videogame to actually let you win.
Like Rodney, Tony was a gifted school student with the determination and energy to do everything as well as he possibly could. For him this meant learning all the new skateboard tricks as they were developed, but there were only so many of those back then, so then it was up to Tony and his friends to invent more tricks, to explore every imaginable possibility to find out what was possible, and essentially give birth to skateboarding as we know it. From being a scrawny kid at Del Mar getting laughed at for wearing elbow pads on his knees, to going on to do things that no human had done before, that was quite something.
We got three solid days in. A lot of the time when you go on those trips you have to wait out the weather and I just got lucky. When I flew in, we had three clear days, so I was able to cut the trip short and came home.
I remember all the Kemper ads in TransWorld. Both mags covered snowboarding when it was new and TransWorld did their own snow mag. How important were magazines when you were coming up?
You were more known for having a TransWorld allegiance, especially as a Del Mar local who skated for Tracker, but you had the centre pages of the first issue with a Thrasher sticker on your helmet.
I was doing backside ollies when I was probably eleven or twelve, in 1980. I remember that being the only ollie I could do above the coping. I could do frontside ollies but I felt like my backside ollies were my key to doing something unique.
It got to the point where I felt the judges were judging me against what they thought I was capable of and not against the other riders. I think that came from monotony, almost like they were sick of me winning and they needed to be a little more cynical of my riding. Ha!
Yes. Exactly. It was pretty big for a while, and we were asked to do a demo after one of these games. I believe it was in Louisville, Kentucky. After the game was over, our crew came in and started putting up the Huck Jam ramp, and the crowd waited while they assembled our ramp. And that took them 45 minutes. Then we skated. It was such a strange dichotomy of fanbases. Haha! All these kids that came to the Arena Football game that really had no interest in the Arena Football game, they really just wanted to come and see our demo.
We also got to go to Ireland on that trip, which was unreal. We took the ferry to Ireland and we did a demo in Dublin, and you could just feel the excitement, and how thankful people were that we made that trip.
But the reason I was riding a Real board is that we all had our boards manufactured at the same place, at Taylor Dykema in San Diego, so we were just getting whatever was hot off their press. And to us it was all the same. It was like World and Blind.
I think the only skater that did not come to Birdhouse who I was really hoping would, was Colin McKay. Like I said, I had such huge respect for his skating; he was always super innovative and a funny dude. We used to hang out a lot. I did not know that Plan B was forming at that exact same time.
When the MTV event came around, that ramp was so much bigger and had such a big landing zone that I managed to do it there, and making it there gave me the confidence to keep doing it afterwards. So I went back to Mission Valley after MTV and got a sequence of it.
I think one of the most iconic projects that we did was funding the Compton skatepark. Compton is so associated with being a challenged area in an inner city and the fact that we were able to fund that park completely was a big deal to me. That was early on in our days. Beyond that, working with Skateistan and helping to fund their projects in South Africa and Cambodia. I would never even have imagined that there would be able to be a skate facility in Cambodia, so I think those ones stick out the most for me.
I just think this is the best time to be a skater. There are more facilities than ever, and say what you will about the Olympics and sponsorship but it just allows more support for the people who have devoted their lives to it.
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Back in 1976, Alan "Ollie" Gelfand -- a nervous, fast-talking kid with bulging eyes, long brown hair, and heat-inviting corduroy pants -- was flying with buddies Kevin Peterson and Jeff Duer in a chartered plane, their eyes hungrily scanning the landscape below. The fourteen-year-old friends had pooled their allowances and meager savings to collect the $75 necessary for the flight, and now, low over South Florida with a pilot and plane from North Perry Airport in Pembroke Pines, they strained their eyes looking for swimming pools. The boys had grown frustrated by the lack of skateboarding options and were too broke to keep paying to skate the same parks over and over again, so they had decided to take matters into their own hands. Their goal: finding empty pools, preferably ones outside of uninhabited houses.
Inside the plane, their teenage faces pressed to the windows, Gelfand and his friends paid careful attention to any and all landmarks and made a list of where they thought the empty pools were located. Later, with a friend old enough to drive, they went back through the neighborhoods to search for the exact locations. Most of the empty pools still had several feet of murky green water standing in the deep end. "We'd have to bucket-brigade them," Gelfand remembers. So they called all their skateboarder friends to enlist help. Then everyone skated the pools until the homeowners or the police made them leave. "We didn't do anything else back then," Gelfand says. "We skateboarded. That's what we did."
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