Madrid Skateboards has something Groovy Lined Up For Evil Dead Fans This Fall! by Matt Boiselle
The incredible design team at Madrid Skateboards are no newbies when it comes to putting out awesome products along the skate-line when it comes to horror films, already dosing out prior collections such as “Halloween” and “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” (both of which were incredibly popular sellers). This fall, they’ll be cranking out an all-new product line in conjunction with the 45th anniversary of the 1981 horror classic, “The Evil Dead”, and we here at HorrorNews were lucky enough to grab a few minutes with Eagle Barber, who is the Art Director and Brand Manager (and self-admitted horror junkie) to discuss the latest plans.
HorrorNews.net: Thanks for chatting with us for a few – what can you tell us about The Evil Dead drop?
Eagle Barber: So, it’s the 45th anniversary this year, and The Evil Dead is probably in my top 5 or 10 horror films, so this is a pretty killer thing for us to do, and we springboarded off of last year (50th anniversary of TCM), and with that release we managed to pick up a lot of new customers, not just in the skating society, but in the fan-world as well. That opened up to a lot of comments and questions about “what are you going to do next?”, and while we definitely had ideas I couldn’t let on about anything at the time. I’ve been a horror fan since I was a tiny kid, and I’ve always wanted to try to put these kinds of things together, and it’s just an incredible privilege to be able to do that. So we have a collection of decks coming out (including a custom limited-edition cruiser), and we’re also partnering with someone who is putting out a whole new soft-good lineup for us.
HorrorNews.net: Can you see these decks as something that people will be more content to hang on their walls or slap some trucks and wheels on them to thrash out in the streets and parks?
Eagle Barber: I think for the most part, the collectors will view these as art pieces (wall-hangers), but with our company having been around since the mid-70’s (their own 50th anniversary), we have quite a few traditionalists that have been with us since then, and what we did with the TCM line was use old-school shapes (pool shapes), which are bigger than today’s sized-decks (popsicle-shapes), which are more geared for the younger, more contemporary skater, who likes the graphics but also wants to set these up to ride. We actually had a chainsaw-shaped bard for the TCM drop and we had a lot of people that set those up to ride.
HorrorNews.net: How much narrowing-down of design was there necessary to get what you wanted for this specific drop?
Eagle Barber: It was pretty easy, and going back to the TCM guys – they were super easy to work with – we just put out some rough sketches and forwarded to them and they were like “yeah, go for it”. We had very little revision requests – you just have to make sure that the legal line is legible, but it was relatively simple and both of these partners have given us a lot of creative freedom and let us run with it, which definitely makes it more interesting. Anyone can just slap an image from the film on a deck and be fine with it, and that’s okay, but with me being the Art Director I’ve always got a kind of slant on it. We’ve really only got one board in the Evil Dead drop that has an image taken from the film, and it’s off the original poster with the hand coming out of the ground, but everything else has been custom-designed.
HorrorNews.net: Will we be seeing limited runs here, numbered editions, etc?
Eagle Barber: Absolutely – we’re going to have one based off of the Necronomicon, and that will be limited to 100 only, and 7 other designs which will be limited to 250 decks – it’s a very exclusive, limited-edition collection for sure.
HorrorNews.net: Any further licenses that you want to get your hands on for design?
Eagle Barber: There’s probably several for me, and I like to sync things up with years that make sense (i.e. a film’s anniversary), so next year I’m going to be looking for films from like 1982 to around the 50th anniversary – banner anniversary years. Now with that you can kind of do the math as far as what’s been out with 1987 milestones, and it’s too early to say what we’ll be able to do, and a lot of it is trying to go through the red tape of these licensing deals, but I can definitely agree that there will be more of these in the future.
HorrorNews.net: So, how deep does the love for horror run for you?
Eagle Barber: Well, the first movie my family ever owned was the original Friday The 13th, and we had it on Betamax before VHS took over the industry. I go far back and I was definitely an 80’s kid with the VHS boom, and my Friday nights and weekends were spent in the video shops looking at all the cover artwork, and I’ve got a massive leg tattoo with all my favorite 80’s icons. My dad was a huge Universal Monsters guy – my Venn diagram would be skateboarding, horror movies and punk music – it’s been in my DNA as far back as I can remember.
HorrorNews.net: Where’s the best place for people to keep up on the latest news about the drop and your other products?
Eagle Barber: They can check us out on Instagram @madridskateboards or at our main site, http://madridskateboards.com or http://fullcircledistribution.com – pretty soon we’ll be sending out some teaser images of the graphics. Our pre-order date was originally scheduled for April 16th, but we just moved that out to July – we had a lot of pre-orders for the TCM series, and since everything here is designed and created here, we needed a wide-window for the pre-orders, and that helps us to gauge what kinds of numbers that we’re looking at as far as production is concerned. We’re looking at around a 6-week pre-order window, and we’re going to start that in July – that way when people pre-order their stuff they won’t have to wait as long. The actual product release date is October 15th, which is the actual date of the original movie premiere, and for anyone local to the area, we’re going to be hosting a screening of the film on October 16th at a local independent movie theater.
Eagle was also generous enough to provide us with a sneak-peek of one of the board designs – not shown anywhere else but here, so we’re extremely thankful for that – check it out!
