You know, most of these examples actually have a board of some type.
"I just surfed a Robo-Dracula from the Moon so all yalls can just take it."
Conventionally there's surfing, skateboarding, snowboarding, and sandboarding. Fiction expands the boarding to all sorts of media, and even with improvised boards.
See also Cool Board, Shield Surf, Body Sled and Lava Surfing. Sky Surfing is much cooler than what it is in real life.
Examples:
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Advertising
- The TV commercial for the Shaun White Skateboarding video game has Shaun White boarding down a skyscraper.
Anime & Manga
- Eureka Seven: The series is ALL about surfing, with the protagonists surf on Trapar, a mysterious energy spread in the air that comes and goes as it pleases. With enough trapar in the air, you can even surf inside your Humongous Mecha. It is eventually revealed that Trapar is the thought energy of the Coralian, a giant living (but sleeping) being that engulfed the planet.
- Pokémon Adventures has the finale of the Yellow Arc, where Yellow lavasurfs during the final battle and creates a massive whirlpool of lava that engulfs Lance.
- Code Geass has a Moment of Awesome from the second season where Lelouch, in a knightmare, causes the plates that make up Tokyo to collapse, then uses a police mecha's riot shield to surf to safety. Among his feats, we get him grinding on the wires of another mecha's Grappling Hook Pistols, decapitating it as he jumps off. It might be in the Knightmare's programming.
- In Gintama, Gintoki and Hijikata end up using the Shogun and Kondo as makeshift snowboards after a mishap at a ski resort. They soon realize their boards have makeshift "brakes" that can be utilized by pulling on their underwear, but they end up breaking them before long. Later in the same arc, in a rare instance of Shinpachi not being the Only Sane Man, he willfully lets Otae use him as a snowboard, as well.
- So much in Sk8 the Infinity, mainly via the snowboarder Langa who's now skateboarding...in "soaring through the air" snowboarder style through the illegal skate park S, thanks to his Gadgeteer Genius friend Reki. Later in the series the implausible part starts becoming more obvious, as there's characters like Joe, who mainly downhill longboards by muscle, even torpedoing off a boulder by smashing it with his leg (and then a steel beam), and by episode 11, Reki, likely inspired by Langa, "rock-boards" down a surprisingly sheer cliff.
Comic Books
- There's a bit in the Star Wars Legends where one of Luke's childhood friends, Fixer
, is tired of Luke and Biggs beating him at racing and the various other sports, so he invents sandsurfing. Trouble is, the moment they pick up on the sport, Luke and Biggs start to surpass him, so he ramps it up. Eventually he tries to jump over the Sarlaac pit. And fails, meaning that his two friends have to save him from a truly horrible fate. After that, they agree that Fixer's the king of sandsurfing, but somehow it doesn't feel as good as he thought it would.
Fan Works
- Soul Eater: Troubled Souls: In their pursuit of Eruka and the Mizunes, Tsuji and Caius are falling down the outside of Cobra Island's snake monolith. To slow their descent, Tsuji breaks off a large piece of rock and surfs down the rocky exterior with Caius clinging to his back. Their landing involves Tsuji expertly maneuvering through the trees and grinding on branches like rails. He repeats these boarding skills with a different rock by surfing down a river in hopes of capturing the crystal ball needed to turn things around for the heroes.
- RWBY: Reckoning: during the highway chase scene, Darrel is forced to use a disconnected car door as a board, whilst being dragged along the highway by a hostile mecha.
Films — Animation
- Tarzan slides across moss-covered branches and lianas in a manner not unlike surfing (as pictured above). Supervising animator Glen Keane was inspired by watching his son skateboarding and snowboarding to include this.
- Tony Hawk himself mentions in his memoir, "Hawk - Occupation: Skateboarder", that he was personally contacted by Disney to be mo-capped pulling a few tricks, so they could get Tarzan's movement and balance just right.
- In Robots, Bigweld surfs on a giant domino over a cascade of falling dominoes.
- In Hoodwinked!, Granny Puckett surfs down a sky bucket cable on a muffin pan. Awesome when you consider how chairlifts have a standard 4.8 meter rope gauge, which makes you question whether or not this is plausible in real life.
Films — Live-Action
- The Back to the Future trilogy:
- In Back to the Future, Marty makes a skateboard out of a soap-box derby car.
- In Back to the Future Part II, Marty steals a little girl's pink hover-board. It's OK though, the little girl he stole it from ends up with a way more badass hover-board that belonged to the villain, so she tells Marty he can keep the pink one.
- Herbie is a car, but he surfs in the movie Herbie Rides Again and in Herbie: Fully Loaded grinds on a guardrail after watching Maggie do some skateboarding tricks.
- In the Mr. Magoo movie, there's a scene where a chase down a mountain combines with a ski event. The good guys and the bad are on skis and snowmobiles and—Mr. Magoo is on an ironing board? He rides it like a scooter and wins the competition.
- In xXx, Cage pulls off a boardslide on an enormous handrail using a stolen serving tray. He even manages to jump between handrails. And later he snowboards in front of an avalanche on a wave of CGI.
- During The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and the Battle for Helm's Deep, we get a short but memorable scene of Legolas using his elven agility to surf an uruk-hai's shield down a staircase, firing arrows until he reaches the bottom and sends the shield into one foe before stabbing another with a spare arrow. This was only surpassed in the third film when he slid down a dying mûmak's trunk after single-handedly killing it and its riders.
- In The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, Bard pulls off some similar (though less cinematic) surfing down the roofs of Laketown.
- James Bond:
- In A View to a Kill, Bond uses the front ski from his wrecked snowmobile as an improvised snowboard to escape from the Russian ski troops pursuing him.
- Die Another Day: In one of the most derided scenes in the Bond movies, Bond uses an improvised surfboard made from the hull of a wrecked ice yacht to para-surf an unconvincing CGI tsunami.
- Paying homage to the source material, Sonic the Hedgehog 2 (2022) has Sonic snowboard down the Siberian mountains using a piece of metal broken off of one of Robotnik's robots, with Knuckles following suit.
Literature
- During the second Alex Rider story, Point Blanc, Alex crafts an improvised snowboard out of an ironing board. The book does not gloss over how horribly dangerous this is — the narration points out that it is too wide and flat and has no nose, and Alex has to improvise straps by tearing up a bedsheet.
- In Jean Johnson's A Soldier's Duty, Ia grabs a part of a roof shed made of corrugated metal, to help her surf the massive wave which is the result of a dam breaking. Telekinesis and incredibly accurate short-term precognition help her survive.
Toys
- BIONICLE:
- Lava Surfboarding, and it's even a sport, on the island of Mata Nui.
- In BIONICLE: The Game and Mask of Light, Kopaka's Ice Shield is used as an improvised board.
- Disk Surfing in Metru Nui, which Exactly What It Says on the Tin ... in chutes.
Video Games
- Alligator Hunt have you playing a kid on a skateboard taking on alien invaders. You spend entire levels (those which doesn't involve flying spaceships, at least) skating all over the place while shooting at alien enemies with massive expertise, even summersaulting on your skateboard to avoid projectiles and explosions without falling off your board.
- [PROTOTYPE]: the Body-Surf attack. Kick over (or up) an enemy (i.e. any living being) and use your momentum to ride their body down the street (or through the air, or other people). You know, just in case you didn't have enough sadistic ways to kill people already.
- In the spiritual predecessor by the same developers, The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, you can use a bus as a skateboard.
- Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3: the opening movie has Deadpool surfing on Phoenix Wright's OBJECTION speech bubble trough an explosion.
- The Snowboard Kids games have the kids snowboarding in all kinds of places, in many of which there is no snow to be seen.
- Chosokabe Motochika from Sengoku Basara surfs using a frickin' rocket-powered anchor. ON DRY LAND OF ALL PLACES!
- In Dynasty Warriors 7, Sima Zhao is able to surf on people. This also carries over to Warriors Orochi 3
- Devil May Cry:
- Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening: One of the skills Dante can use against downed humanoid Mooks.
- Devil May Cry 4: Nero does this in a cutscene against some Scarecrows, and he actually revs them with his sword pinned into a body.
- In Mega Man X, if you charge the ice weapon, it will turn into an ice platform, which you can ride on. This feature returns as Model L's ability in Mega Man ZX.
- In Bayonetta, at one point Bayonetta forces an enemy onto his knees, and uses him to surf a massive lava river.
- While most Skate or Die games have (comparatively) normal boarding, the platformer-based games have this, particularly the Game Boy game where you skate on floating platforms, dodge spikes, and outrun sawblades and cement barrels.
- In Sonic Adventure 2, Sonic rips off a piece of a G.U.N. helicopter and uses it to skydive down to the first stage, where he boards down a hilly street! He does it again in Sonic Generations. In Generations, some of it is even more spectacular, as one optional mission requires riding a board vertically up Rooftop Run's clock tower.
- This seems to be Sonic's forte besides his Super-Speed as other games have proven. In Sonic and the Secret Rings, he surfs on logs multiple times in Dino Jungle, and in Pirate Storm, uses a CANNON BALL LAUNCHED FROM SHIPS to travel between them.
- Dirk the Daring uses one of the playing cards as a surfboard while riding the wave on the ocean of tears and avoiding the Jabberwock and oncoming teapots in Dragon's Lair II: Time Warp.
- In Phantasy Star Online 2, a special skill Ride Slasher exists for weapons of the sword class is the ability to surf on a sword-like rocket-powered board with one of these weapons being a giant tuna allowing for some amusing fun.
- In Final Fantasy X, it's how they get from the Airship to Bavelle.
- The World Ends with You: Daisukenojo "Beat" Bito uses his skateboard to fight Noise - and is a surprisingly effective partner when he does.
- At the end of Metal Wolf Chaos, President Action Michael Wilson destroys the orbital space station and uses some debris as a surfboard. He slides down the station wreckage and safely reenters earth's orbit.
Web Original
- Whateley Universe: Riptide, who is an aquakinetic, has a deviser hoverboard that runs on her own wave power, so she appears to be surfing across the sky on a little cloud. Thrasher is a skater boy who has PK powers and so his skateboard is a PK construct that can slide across anything, and go uphill.
Western Animation
- The Karate Kid: In the opening sequence, Daniel surfboards using a torpedo.
- The Secret Saturdays: In "Twelve Hundred Degrees Fahrenheit", Drew cuts a shield-shaped slab of wood from a tree and uses it as a makeshift snowboard. Doyle uses his jetpack for the same purpose.
