One doesn’t exactly have to travel far back in time to encounter the often-outrageous world of performance gimmicks in athletic shoes.
Just two years ago Adidas introduced the Adidas 1 as the first “smart shoe” equipped with a microchip that is said to automatically adjust the cushion as you were wearing it. Around the same time, Nike unveiled a shoe that works in conjunction with your iPod to track things like distance, pace, calories burned and presumably figure out which song from the Rocky IV soundtrack best compliments your workout. Shoe manufacturer Dada has released their Code M model which actually is a freaking mp3 player.
With industry giants battling to discover the next big thing, we’re probably only a few years away from a company introducing a shoe that can go out jogging on its own while you lie on the couch and eat Fritos. (For the record, I’d be all over that)
Gimmicks and shoes have been around since Chuck Taylor first endorsed the canvas Converse All Stars in the 20's, but luckily for those of us who grew up in the 80’s and 90’s, we were able to witness a time when it seemed as if the major players in the footwear industry were engaged in a heated battle to see who could create the most ridiculous fad in shoes.
Gullible kids during the era were left to believe that for the right price, we could buy kicks that would make us jump like Mike, play short like Ozzie and shed tacklers like Walter Payton.
Now that all of our dreams have been shattered, at least we can count on the Sports Delorean to take us on a chronological trip through the time when questionable gimmicks filled us all with false hope…
1980
KangaROOS brand releases what may be the most functional of the gimmicks of the era when they produce a shoe equipped with a zipper or Velcro pouch (get it, because kangaroos have pouches!).
The pouch wasn’t large enough to hold anything of any significance, but unlike some competitors ROOS didn’t claim that their shoe could turn a slovenly couch monkey into a world-class athlete. It was just supposed to hold enough coin to buy a $0.35 snow cone at the concession stand after your grade school soccer game.
Athletes like Ozzie Smith, Walter Payton and Clyde Drexler eventually spent some time on the KangaROOS payroll when the company looked poised to become a dominant player in the industry.
A couple of years later, ROOS cranked it up the hyperbole a notch when they released the Dynacoil walking shoe which they claimed was researched and developed by NASA. Because as you know, if there’s anyone who you can trust to develop a walking shoe, it’s the people whose primary function is to study a place where there is no gravity.
By the late-80’s they were pretty much out of business, leaving those searching for NASA designed shoes equipped with storage space large enough to hold two quarters shit out of luck.
1984
The proverbial bomb is dropped on the shoe industry when floundering niche running shoe company, Nike, joins forces with a young NBA rookie named Michael Jordan and unleashes the Nike Air brand on the public.
Frankly, no one even gave a crap about the supposed technology involved in the “Air” design, all we knew was that Jordan dunked on people’s heads and that’s what we wanted to do.
Throughout the duration of and even after Mike’s career, the Air Jordan’s established themselves as the standard of comparison for gimmicky, athlete-endorsed shoes. The unveiling of the newest model each year became akin to a national holiday for people who had no qualms with forking over $100+ for basketball shoes that would likely never be worn on a basketball court.
Other Nike Air brands such as the Nike Dunk and the Nike Terminator (yeah really) came and went, but names like the Air Jordan, Air Max and Air Force Ones became icons and triggered imitators from all the major competitors.
1985
The Goonies is released and American kids everywhere see Data’s oil spewing slick shoes. Had Nike ever decided to take them to market, Data might have rivaled MJ as the king of celebrity spokesman. (side topic, Data’s last name in the movie was Wang. Ha.)
1989
Perhaps the most significant challenge to the Nike Air empire is born when Reebok introduces their Pump technology capitalizing on the long-standing desire amongst the shoe-buying public to have an internal inflation mechanism on the tongue of their sneakers.
The Pump explosion was helped along by the fact that one of the lone competitors for Jordan’s throne as most exciting NBA player, Dominique Wilkins, wore them from the start. Celtics guard Dee Brown added to the mystique when he famously used them as a prop on his way to winning the 1991 Slam Dunk Contest.
Suddenly kids around the country were convinced that all you had to do was squeeze the tongue of your Pumps a few times and just like that you increase your vertical by 10 or 12 inches and gain the ability to dunk with your eyes closed.
Soon after, Reebok started stuffing pumps in everything. They put them in hockey skates in 1995 with disastrous results (although they re-released them in 2006), they teamed up with Rawlings to create pump baseball gloves and for some reason decided to hitch their wagon to the Michael Chang Express for their tennis shoe.
As a matter of fact, I’m writing this paragraph on a pump-enhanced keyboard.
1992-1994
After the Pumps, it seemed like every shoe company that dabbled in athletic equipment was required to try at least one gimmick to see if they could strike gold.
British Knights had the “Dymacel” that featured a green silicon diamond on the sole that was made for “maximum biomechanical impact absorption” which is exactly what 12-year old kids were dying to get their hands on. Making matters worse was the trio of advertisers that BK decided employed – Nike had MJ, Reebok had Dominique and BK had Derrick Coleman, Xavier McDaniel and MC Hammer.
LA Gear tried anything and everything that their R&D department threw out there to try to become hip. They had the Regulators serving as their answer to the Pumps, the Karl Malone-endorsed Catapult as their answer to the Air Jordans (because who wouldn’t want this fashion icon pitching their product) and for those interested in red blinking lights containing toxic doses of mercury in their heels, they had the LA Lights. Of course not even the most innovative design could overcome the fact that if you wore them, you were sporting the same shoes as Paula Abdul.
Puma’s “Discs” line featured a dial on the tongue that controlled the tightness of the shoe in place of thosy pesky traditional laces. The fad hit with a thud in the marketplace perhaps due to the fact that it appeared as if there was a thermostat on the front of the shoe. Puma has been forced to go with a gimmick for their gimmick to try to draw some interest, recently releasing Tetris and Goonies themed versions of the Disc.
And the prestigious award for “most ridiculous gimmick” might be reserved for the Converse “React Juice”. The React Juice briefly breathed life into the flailing Converse brand riding the popularity of Larry Johnson’s Grandmama character and convincing morons such as myself that the shoe actually contained a “responsive gas-charged fluid” in the sole.
Heaven forbid if the React Juice escaped the chamber in the bottom of the shoe, the guy wearing them might be shooting spider webs out of his wrists hours later. Who cares that the fluid looked like it was radioactive enough to serve as fuel for the Sports Delorean, shit helped you cut, man.
As the years went on, the gimmicks kept coming. Sometimes they were kept behind the scenes and sometimes, as was the case with the Nike Shox, they were the centerpiece of a massive ad campaign to spark interest in the shoe.
For most of the ones that went by the wayside in the 80’s and 90’s, they have since comeback in some form as part of the “retro” craze and/or made available by the magic of eBay.
Who knows what direction they will go in next. Perhaps some day we will see a combination NASA designed, air-soled, pump-enhanced shoe that lights up when you run and has a zip up pocket on the side to store your radioactive react juice.
Sure it might be overkill, but get Michael Chang to shill for them and they’ll fly off the shelves.