![]() ![]() There were a majority of people that couldn’t afford shit back then either but they grinded and hustled and did whatever they could to build their idea of a dream car. “I don’t have the money to afford baller stuff” wasn’t an excuse either. A lot of people spend more time trying to justify why they rock fake shit these days instead of spending their time building their cars. Now you have an endless variety of options and the enthusiasts of the past have paved a road for the future generations. They made the most of it and created whatever else didn’t exist then. The scene was very different back then but that is what people had to work with. At least back then people used creativity to stand out and didn’t take short-cuts to make themselves “cool” and subsequently call everyone “haters” if they didn’t agree or called people out for the short-cuts they took to be the next bandwagon trend hopper. ![]() Sticker-bombing cars, fake parts, and unused bike racks are a bane to the import community. Thinking back now, I would still take the ridiculously over-the-top body kit era over any of the garbage you see today. ![]() The closest thing we had to anything that was a replica, knock-off wheel came from Axis and Konig. Even with the crazy body modifications, basically everybody had real wheels and parts. ![]() People did whatever they could to acquire quality products and though you will see all kinds of crazy body kits in the photos to come, make note of what wheels these cars were on. Nobody had fake garbage wheels and faux-JDM parts because there was no such thing as a mainstream “JDM” scene. There was no flood of knock-off parts either. The more wilder the conversion, the better. The show scene was all about being flashy and doing what you could to stand out. If they did only a small group of people would recognize the parts that these people had. “JDM” was not a household name yet and there were very few people that had full-on Japanese-spec builds. People shelled out all kinds of money to do these conversions and though they may be totally ugly and gaudy by today’s standards, that was the trend that was pushing the industry. Back then there was no such thing as blogging and web car forums were limited to a handful or less…īack in 1999, the bodykit era was just huge in the import community and headlight/taillights conversions were all the rage. Man, if I knew then what I know now, I would have tried to take better photos and more detailed shots of stuff. I carried a backpack like I do still today but instead of it being packed with camera gear, it was the same backpack I used for school and I used it to carry all the free stuff I would get at shows. I guess I wasn’t too different back then, just a lot more naive. My buddy Jose and I would go to car shows and just take photos of whatever we saw and grabbed whatever free shit was being handed out. I was already driving by then but I didn’t have a Honda or anything to really modify. Everybody was worried about the whole Y2K scare and President Bill Clinton was busy getting in trouble for getting a blow job from Monica Lewinski. You had to be a baller to have a digital camera TV shows like Dawson’s Creek and 90210 were still on the air. I was already very interested in the import scene and the cars that were a part of it, and so I went to as many car shows as I could. 1999 was a very different time… I had no cell phone, I had a spikey head of hair, and in ’99, I was still a junior in high school. The last couple weeks, I’ve been taking you back a couple years to show you some photos I re-edited from 2009 but today, we are going to go WAY back….13 years to be exact, to take a look at some photos I took when I was just a kid at various car shows I attended. Today we are going to take a special look back for Throwback Thursday. EDIT: This was originally meant to be posted on Thursday but it took so long for me to put it together that I didn’t manage to get it posted until Friday. ![]()
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