Klunkerz: A Film About Mountain Bikes is a 2006 documentary about mountain bike history during its formative period in Northern California. It examines the relationships of the Marin County hippies, athletes, and entrepreneurs who were directly responsible for popularizing off-road cycling. The film includes many interviews with those present during the embryonic stages of the sport, including Gary Fisher, Charlie Kelly, Joe Breeze, Tom Ritchey, Mike Sinyard, and Otis Guy, and covers "the treacherous old Repack races."[1] The film was written, produced, and directed by independent California filmmaker Billy Savage[2] and released on October 8, 2006.[3]
\n \n \n \n \n \n\n \n blank\n \n \u00a9 Wende Cragg\/Rolling Dinosaur\n \n\n\n \n \n \n\n \n blank\n \n \u00a9 Wende Cragg\/Rolling Dinosaur\n \n\n\n \n \n \n\n \n blank\n \n \u00a9 Savage\n \n\n\n \n \n \n\n \n blank\n \n \u00a9 Dustin Brady\/Shimano\n \n\n\n \n \n \n\n \n blank\n \n \u00a9 Dustin Brady\/Shimano\n \n\n\n \n \n\n\n\nKlunkerz, a film from director Billy Savage entertainingly answers that contentious question by telling the story of the evolution of what we now call the mountain bike. Savage has plenty of help: he seems to have found just about every one of the surprisingly large number of people who were involved.\nSavage uses interviews with the Marin County, California riders whose scene begat the mountain bike to tell the story, combined with archive footage and photos by Wende Cragg, the only woman in what Charlie Kelly admits was a testosterone-laden group.\nPersevere past the slightly cheesy graphics in the opening few minutes and you get to the meat of the tale. A bunch of road racing cyclists, counter-culture types and their friends discovered the fun of riding old fat-tyred bikes down and then up Marin\u2019s Mount Tamalpais. The bikes broke, so they fixed and improved them, and eventually started building custom frames for them. That was the point at which the \u2018klunkers\u2019 that give the film its name became mountain bikes.\nSavage tells a great story, and there\u2019s a lot more to it than the bits you may already have heard. Sure, Gary Fisher was a major player, as his marketing department is fond of telling us, but plenty of others were as important.\nYou probably haven\u2019t heard of Alan Bonds, but he assembled many of the very early Marin County klunker bikes. Based on stripped-down Schwinn frames, with painstakingly grafted-on gears and drum brakes, these were to the mountain bike what Australopithecus is to modern humans.\n\n \nVanishing pioneers\nThe man responsible for one of the breakthrough ideas that led to the klunker and then to the mountain bike was Russ Mahon of the Morrow Dirt Club. Mahon and two friends turned up at the 1974 West Coast Cyclocross Championships on clunkers with gears and, most importantly, thumbshifter gear levers. After finishing mid-pack and showing their bikes to the Marin klunker crowd, Mahon and his friends vanished.\nThey were found 20 years later and inducted into the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame for their contribution.\nMeanwhile, Bonds, Fisher, Charlie Kelly and others perfected the geared klunker, and tested them (often to destruction) on the legendary Repack downhill, the first timed mountain bike race.\nCustom frames\nWith the pre-war Schwinn frames becoming hard to find, Kelly turned to framebuilder Joe Breeze to build some custom klunker frames. Shortly afterwards, Fisher also commissioned some custom frames, from a local builder called Tom Ritchey. With their relatively light weight chromoly tubes, Breeze\u2019s frames were the basis for the first modern mountain bikes.\nBut Ritchey was a far more prolific builder, and when the time came to set up a company to build and sell these new bikes, Ritchey was the builder of choice. The combination of Ritchey\u2019s frames and Fisher and Kelly\u2019s construction and marketing was known as Ritchey\/Mountainbikes: the first mountain bike company.\nAdventures\nAlong the way the mountain bike pioneers had adventures. Breeze, Fisher, Kelly and Cragg turned up in Colorado for the second Crested Butte to Aspen Pearl Pass Klunker Tour. But for the presence of Wende Cragg, that event that might not have happened. However, if a woman was going to have a go, then the firefighters in this tiny mountain town certainly weren\u2019t going to be shown up.\nThen there was the business adventure of Fisher, Kelly and Ritchey\u2019s companies, and relative newcomer Mike Sinyard of Specialized. This was the point at which it all got a bit serious and for a few years there was considerable uneasiness between the various mountain bike pioneers. Twenty years later, though, they\u2019re all mates again.\n\n \nThe inventor\nThe answer to the original question is that no one person really invented the mountain bike. Joe Breeze built the first modern mountain bike frames, but without the ideas and innovations of a whole bunch of other people, he\u2019d have had nothing to hang on them, and no inspiration to build them in the first place.\nThe right people in the right place at the right time spawned the mountain bike, and Klunkerz does an excellent job of letting them tell their story.\nThe DVD of Klunkerz is distributed by VAS Entertainment (www.vasentertainment.com)\nUK distribution by X-treme (www.x-tremevideo.com) and Shock Therapy.","image":"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/21\/2019\/03\/Photo-76-of-100-e821dbb.jpg?quality=90&resize=768,574","width":768,"height":574,"headline":"Who really invented the mountain bike?","author":["@type":"Person","name":"John Stevenson"],"publisher":"@type":"Organization","name":"BikeRadar","url":"https:\/\/www.bikeradar.com","logo":"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/21\/2019\/03\/cropped-White-Orange-da60b0b-04d8ff9.png?quality=90&resize=265,53","width":182,"height":60,"speakable":"@type":"SpeakableSpecification","xpath":["\/html\/head\/title","\/html\/head\/meta[@name='description']\/@content"],"url":"https:\/\/www.bikeradar.com\/features\/who-really-invented-the-mountain-bike\/","datePublished":"2007-10-19T00:00:00+00:00","dateModified":"2019-04-10T16:22:52+00:00"}] Who really invented the mountain bike? A review of the 'Klunkerz' DVD
Klunkerz A Film About Mountain B
Have you heard about this mountain bike documentary? The film is being screened in Park City, UT this week and is set to play in Santa Barbara, CA and Durango, CO later this year. Klunkerz follows the history of mountain biking and has interviews with all the big guys: Breeze, Richey, Fisher, et al.
In 2017, Eric Barone broke 141 miles per hour or 268 km/h on a mountain bike. This was done in the French Alps on a snowy ski slope. The 56 year old broke his own record of 138 mph set in 2015. Compare this to the thrill of a modern downhill MTB race of about 40 mph (65km/h).
My inspiration for digging this amazing fact up was thinking about those relaxing back of the mountain ski runs. You know, those meandering long runs that a whole family can do together. Instead of an adrenaline filled black diamond downhill and calming 5 minute saunter.
Life Cycles is a true adventure film. Over 5 years in the making, and using the bicycle as the vehicle, Life Cycles takes you on a journey through natures most beautiful, dramatic, and sometimes unforgiving landscapes. Some have called it the best mountain bike film of all time, but however you stand on that debate, this movie unquestionably changed the course of bike filmmaking.
C.K: As far as I know, almost no one in the United States is aware of this claim, much less has an opinion about it. Certainly these riders did not have any influence over the Americans who developed the concept on their own. Although cyclists all over the world have experimented with off-road bicycling for a hundred years or more, the sport of mountain biking as we know it today is a California invention, just like BMX and skateboarding.
Using archival footage, still photographs, and interviews, KLUNKERZ tells the story of the earliest days of the sport from those who were there. Some of the biggest names in the industry, as well as some more obscure characters, recount the people and events that gave birth to the modern mountain bike. You can get the DVD at www.klunkerz.com and in the mean time here's just a taster... After all it's good to know where you came from... 2ff7e9595c
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