http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2007/nov/30/evel-knievel-dies-age-69/
An American icon of nuttiness and thoughtless adventurism is gone.
Who can fill the shoes of this man who defied fate in a goofy cape?
Knievel was in his heyday when I was in elementary school and was considered to be pretty cool among my peers.
The last time I saw him was on a 2006 David Blaine tv special, in an interview segment. Knievel was the mentor figure, with Blaine in the student role. I remember thinking Knievel came off like a bizarre cross between Yoda and Eddie Murphy’s Gumby.
…and your point?
Damn. I remember seeing the George Hamilton movie at a drive-in (the pre-VCR version of “direct to video”).
First Elvis and now this. How much can a man take?
I’m pretty confident I don’t need one in this forum. But if I have one, it’s that my memory of Knievel is skewed by this weird appearance of his last year on a magician’s tv special. The point surely wasn’t to offend, and apologies if that’s what happened here.
puts on Letterman hat…
Elvis,Evel…Evel,Elvis
Evel has leapt the building.
sniff
Sydney, 1976…
A young TheLoadedDog is given an Evel Knievel toy - a motorbike with a flywheel drive that you launch from a wind up launch ramp, and a soft plastic Evel figure in a jumpsuit. You can bend the little Evel into different shapes and clip his hands on to the handlebars and whatnot, to make him perform stunts.
Through heavy usage, the jumpsuit eventually wore out and fell off. So, we were left playing with a naked man on a motorcycle, holding on to the handlebars upside down, with his legs spread in the air.
Good. Wholesome. Fun. 
And in a moment of synchronicity, I had the TV running in the background and Wheel of Fortune came on, and the first puzzle?
MOTORCYCLE STUNTS
I had that toy!!!
My parent got it for me as a wee lad because they thought I would play with that rather than keep up the near death expriences on my tricycle. I used to drag it to the top of a hill normally used for sledding in winter, scream “Eveeeeeeel Kinieeeeeeeevel!..” and way I’d go, usually requiring multiple band-aids afterwards.
sniff He was my toddler-self hero.
It was a joke. Alas, it landed somewhere at the bottom of the Snake River canyon.
Very well said. I’m sure he’d approve of that epitaph.
(Actually, I’m going to steal it if the topic comes up at work.)
I think my young brothers had a little Evel Knievel toy with motorbike, but I must have been a bit too girly to notice him all that much.
I did notice the thread title, though. “Eek”, think I, “if something has happened to our member (former member?) Eve, surely that’s a strange way to headline the thread … Ah, I see now”. (Note: go and get new glasses, Celyn)
One wouldn’t have expected Evel Knievel to live to the age of 69 somehow.
While his spirit soars safely and majestically over the Snake River Canyon (and generally, the planet, at latitude 36 degrees north) in the final rematch, let his body be lowered slowly, slowly, and very gently into the earth.
There isn’t room for a whole lot of teachers showing us how to do incredibly stupid things just for the hell of it, but the evolutionary process, in my humble opinion, demands at least one.
For a short time, the man was Elvis at 200 MPH. Good for him.
I was visiting my father last night and we were watching the news with the subtitles for the hard of hearing switched on.
The text came up on screen as ‘evil people, who thrilled thousands in the 70s has died’ But they had his picture up, so I knew who they meant! How the hard of hearing understand half the news, I’ll never know!
Damn, I remember the day of the Snake River jump like it was yesterday. We had a ramp out in the street and were jumping our bikes right and left. I was luckier than Evel was to have survived the day.
The odd thing is I just mentioned this toy in the Toy Crazes of Yesteryear thread (my mom braved a crowd of frenzied shoppers to obtain one of these for my little brother for Xmas). It was the first time I’d thought of Evel Knievel in years, and wondered if anybody remembered who he was these days.
As I walked out of the local Acme this morning, I glanced over at the rack of newspapers. I noted that one had a big splash picture of Evel, but the headline didn’t register until I was already out of the store. I believe it was the Philadelphia Enquirer, but can’t be certain. The headline:
WHAT TOOK YOU SO LONG?
Ahh, gotta love what counts for journalistic taste around these parts…
Add me to the crowd who are wondering if they want to live in a world that doesn’t have Evel Knieval in it.
As an eight year old boy in 1975, I had the flywheel reving motorcycle bendy doll toy. (He actually didn’t bend all that well.) I would rev the cycle up as high as I could, and run it up an album that’s propped up on book for a ramp. We were making bigger ramps for our bikes not too much later.
I think I saw the title of this thread last night, on coming back home, wondered why folk were talking about Evel Knieval – then saw the item on the telly news. There goes part of the background pop culture from the 1960s and 1970s, to be sure. I grew up from the late 1960s with his name popping up every so often on the news. Seems strange because I always thought then he’d get killed by his stunts. Never though natural causes would be the leap that’d get him in the end.