![]() ![]() Twelve years later, director Brian Trenchard-Smith brought the style to Australia in BMX Bandits, which featured a teenage Nicole Kidman in just her third movie role.īut it was around the same time that Kidman and her co-stars were besting Aussie bank robbers, Rad star Bill Allen tells us, that Needham witnessed BMX riders at an equestrian center in California and thought, “Hey, we can make a movie about this.” Rad was definitely the first movie of its kind in the sense that it used BMX racing as the protagonist’s ticket to the big time, as Cru Jones defied his mother’s command to take his SATs and instead competed in the Helltrack race. ![]() That film’s opening featured a shot of children riding bikes on a dirt track, pretending that they were motorcycle racers, and that moment is credited with sparking a national phenomenon. The 1971 motorcycle racing documentary On Any Sunday is believed to be the first motion picture to offer a taste of Southern California’s bicycle style to the rest of America. Needham certainly wasn’t the first to bring BMX – short for bicycle motocross – to the big screen. At least that’s what stuntman-turned-director Hal Needham ( Smokey and the Bandit, Cannonball Run) was hoping for when he made the 1986 BMX film Rad. There are always stories and life lessons to be told through athletic competition, and there is also money to be made by piggybacking on the popular trends of the day, so long as kids with an appetite for something new are willing to shell out a few bucks at the local cinema. Kickboxing in Say Anything…, collegiate diving in Back to School, skiing in Better Off Dead, wrestling in Vision Quest, motocross in Winners Take All, and of course karate in The Karate Kid. In the 1980s, Hollywood had a passion for merging less popular and even unusual sports with teen romance.
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