You’re right lol. I saw the funky hat, glasses, and cigarette hanging out his mouth and my mind went HTS.
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I was going on “beloved” for my opinion. I’ve said it before, I think it’s a perfect combination of current era 1a unresponsive play and nostalgic, old school yoyo (something along the lines of an Imperial—not that it is one, but evokes that feeling). I think years from now it will be one of those gems that everyone is looking for. May not have made any history or pushed the game forward, but it’s been universally loved for its nostalgic charm. An instant classic.
On a side note, I would think the Imperial is the most iconic throw of all time. It’s widely recognizable, sold a gazillion, and that shape is usually associated with historical photographs of the yoyo boon.
As a close follow up, the Butterfly is probably the most recognizable by name by the average person. How many times have you been asked, “Is that a Butterfly? I had one when I was a kid.”
Both were instrumental in making “walk the dog” the most asked for trick, too.
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2 things missing in the picture that
( if they had been in the picture ) could have sold me that it was Hunter S. Thompson
Missing thing #1 Cigarette was not in the long holder thing and #2 thing he did not have a 357 in the other trying to shoot the yo-yo.
Not condoning the Hunter S.Thompson life style but on the genius of Hunter S. Thompson it is very difficult to have that good a time for that long before the fun runs out. He made a good run at it most do not make it past 27… in the end the grand comedies of life, the last act is sometimes a tragedy.
Oh yea I am no detective the person that posted the picture said it was Dean
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Hahaha this is completely on point. I always wanted one of those fancy cigarette extenders.
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Iconic Yo-yos
Imperial
Butterfly
No Jive
SB2
888
Superstar
Ti Vader
MechaBapezilla
Chief
Summit
Kuntosh
Sudo
Panorama
12 I can not read
I need to get another SB2….
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I’ve been thinking more and I feel the magic yoyo n12 brought down the price of aluminum throws significantly and changed the market we have today
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100% agree. It’s a really solid throw.
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M1 did that back in 2008. Budget metal was just not a thing prior to it. What the Shutter did was bring in budget performance after the budget and performance models drifted apart greatly in price. Always nice when a company checks inflating prices like that. Massive props to YYF and Gentry with producing the Shutter and getting it into so many new hands.
@sparhawk Same thing as the Shutter, manufacturers take turns resetting the pricing of baseline models and this time it was MYY’s turn it seems. Heavily considering one for my young niece as soon as she gets the hang of her ONE.
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Hmmm. I’m a bit of a moron but, I think, in no particular order:
- Imperial
- Butterfly
- SB2
- Dark Magic
- Bapezilla
- 888
- 54
- Ti Walker
- Shutter
- Draupnir
If’n I have to choose that is. Covers the bases of what makes modern yo-yo.
Edit: if I had to choose modern classics:
- Küntosh
- Sudo
- Accelerated
- various Grails
- the Edge
- Bowl MG (or any MG recently made really, just shows a new material choice)
Also: RBC. That was a wild time! Between everyone loving it and the hunt for the mysterious Unknown editions.
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Shutter came out after the n12 most manufacturers considered budget at the time around $60-70
N12 at $20 blew everyone away
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I’m hoping the RBC qualifies here, but realistically, I don’t quite think it does.
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I knew I was forgetting something important. 100 percent would consider the RBC a modern classic.
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I think the RBC is too young to meet this requirement.
But with that said, it will be a Icon in the future.
It is King of the Hill when it comes to Modern Responsives. There have been others that have attempted this style. Some come very close. The RBC is the Benchmark that all others are compared to now.
Its bearing and responce are killer. It also uses a easy to find bearing. A bearing that comes in multiple widths to tune to your desired play style. From fixed (Locked Bearing) to Unresponsive with a 5mm wide bearing, and other widths in-between.
We have already seen this system in a new production yoyo. I am also privy to another yoyo Prototype that uses this system, and its amazing.
My guess is in the years to come, these will have the reverence similar to the Tom Kuhn yoyos that we talk about now.
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Was trying to word a similar response. A tad too new to call it iconic but has already spun off others in its image and is best in the space it sits in.
I could argue the weekender/daytripper are also top of the 0A space but with a different shape and guts they live in there own worlds apart.
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For sure, that’s actually why I mentioned the M1 in my original post.
I would argue that while the M1 may have be the first one to have a $50 price tag, the shutter was more instrumental in the widespread adoption of that price by other companies.
A while ago I actually had a lengthy discussion with another user on which was more important in bringing about the $50 price point we see today, the Shutter or the M1.
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I’m kinda surprised the Shutter isn’t on everyone’s list. Seeing it took until @nightshadow to chime in about it is odd.
It’s the single most popular yoyo of the past 10 years. Easily.
As for other releases;
YYR Draupnir
CLYW Peak & Chief
YYJ Dark Magic 2
YYF 888
OneDrop M1
Duncan Freehand
Outside of the community just the imperial or some wooden yoyo probably. Idk.
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Yeah, I mention that I think it’s odd that the Shutter isn’t on most peoples lists in my lengthy post.
But, after (once again) considering what much of the forum demographic is, it makes sense in some ways.
(Don’t worry, this isn’t a tirade on why you should yo-yo more. I’m not about that life no more 
)
This has been discussed at length, but I think we can all agree that many users on the form are more focused on the collecting aspects of yoyoing, rather than the skill acquisition or competition parts of yoyoing.
Not weighing in on whether that’s good or bad, just stating that it’s the case.
And the Shutter is definitely a “players yo-yo”. It’s marketed for competition. It’s famously affordable and easy to get ahold of. It’s the signature of the poster boy for high energy and skill oriented throwing. In short, the Shutter is the polar opposite of the yo-yos that usually appeal to most of the middle aged, less skill oriented, users that occupy the forums.
Now, even given this, I still would have thought that most users would acknowledge the influence and importance of the Shutter in an unbiased way, and would have been willing to nominate it on this thread, even though most don’t want one for their collections.
But, as you can see, this is not really the case. These users would rather post about yo-yos that they personally enjoy rather than the Shutter, treating the prompt as if it asked “what is your favorite yo-yo?”
I suppose this is an understandable tendency. People talk about what they like.
Even if the Shutter is far more applicable to be nominated for a complimentary post like this, many users won’t praise it in any way before they’ve brought up their more collectible favorites. Or at all.
This is part of a larger trend that I will (half jokingly) name “Shutter psychology”. If users don’t like the Shutter because it doesn’t fit with their interests, they won’t post about its positive aspects in an unbiased way.
For example: this thread. Users aren’t inclined to label the shutter as “iconic” because they like other, more collectible, throws more. Even though how much influence the Shutter has had is pretty objective, and it’s one of the most applicable yo-yos to this prompt out there.
Another example: the Shutter is often labeled as “bland” or “boring” by many of these same collectors. However, it’s got an uncommon blend of rim and center weight, and a very rare secondary inner ring. By all rights, this is quite an unusual yoyo! But again, it’s not boutique, so much more common and standard designs from more collectible companies are often hailed as more interesting on the string than the Shutter by collectors. Even though, once again, the Shutter is objectively the more unusual yoyo.
It would be a real trick to get many users to bring up the Shutter in any sort of positive light of their own volition.
The idea that the Shutter is not mentioned much on this thread because it’s not in the collectors good graces is further supported by the fact that most of the yo-yos described as “iconic” on this topic before the shutter are collector’s favorites.
Users were willing to nominate A/rt stuff, markmont yo-yos, niche slimlines, heck even SWIRL COLORS, before they were willing to post positively about such a common, affordable, and Gentry-associated yo-yo.
And while these are are all awesome yo-yos, and swirl colors did set the BST on first for a while (and look cool as heck!), it would be an uphill battle to say they’re more iconic than a yo-yo that completely changed the game, has been bought by over 300,000 new throwers, was used to win the world championship in the routine that single-handedly established the current competition routine construction, and is one of the most applicable yo-yos to this thread’s prompt.
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We could swap gentry for shu and shutter for loop , weight distribution for gap width and maybe remove the jab at the collector community and I think I can steal your argument and be just as valid.
Honestly your argument is contradictory stating everyone’s list is subjective based on the yoyo they liked growing up but then describing a yo-yo that’s popular and cheap and appeals to people just starting out. Kind of like many on others lists at the time……
Iconic means venerated or classic. but what that means to you will shift based on your geographic location and when you where born. Some yoyo are too expensive or unobtainable in certain countries and your she will shape your views. I believe this is why the Myy V3 will easily make an iconic list in like 5-10 years. The global young yoyo community will see that yoyo as the most accessible of its time.
Also we are ignoring there are 5-6 core play styles and a bunch of sub play styles that will further shape what this means to you. A 2A player is going to look at this prompt very different from someone more into 1A or someone more into 0A etc…
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Uhhhhh…no, not really. Loop 720 was more part of a new generation of 2A yoyos, along with the updated Hornet and Initiator that Duncan and C3 put out around the same time - it isn’t as innovative or as unique as the Shutter was in its heyday, it just matches it in terms of recognizability because it is similarly tied to a player who brought hype and took worlds. It’s also super easy to get ahold of and came from what was at the time a more established brand - at the time of the 2nd gen Initiator/Hornet/720, C3 hadn’t really made a huge presence in the western market yet, and Duncan was still playing catchup in terms of design around then. Not that the Shutter didn’t have its contemporaries, of course - YYF had the Horizon at that time too, and immediately after began pumping out budget monometals…but the Shutter had the design flair to do so, the double rim as nightshadow mentioned.
I don’t think nightshadow’s argument is contradictory - your average yoyo player who is here to play and not look into history and/or collect will not have heard of at least half the yoyos mentioned in some of the first ten posts. More on this in a bit.
Iconic means venerated and classic, sure, but it also means recognizable. As such, I highly doubt the V3 will make it onto an iconic list any more than the DV888 will - we all know it exists, we’ve all probably played with one, a lot of us probably started on one…that doesn’t make it iconic. It just doesn’t have the marketing nor the unique traits to become an icon. As for yoyos being expensive and/or shaping views, that really doesn’t seem to have mattered much as much as the yoyos themselves. At least in the past, given how expensive yoyos were just two decades ago, and how inherently lacking their presence would be in other communities. Something like the Draupnir, which was infamously not sold in the US because of the yoyojam patent, is still heralded as the progenitor of modern bimetals because people paid attention to it.
With regards to yoyoers having heard of yoyos - lots of American companies don’t get their yoyos out to the smaller Asian retailers (i.e. dailythrows barely has any YYF, and doesn’t have any Duncan, OneDrop, etc…) except…those places still had a yoyo scene, back in the eras lots of these iconic yoyos come from. They didn’t have access to those yoyos…except those yoyos still were mentioned way earlier on this list than the Shutter was, despite the shutter being so infamous that it got picked up by some Asian retailers. Inversely, there are lots of Asian companies that produce absolutely bonkers designs - for example, the AceYo Victorious Fighting Buddha (Alu body, then Ti rims wrapped with PC that holds SS rims.) Ultimately, you are correct in that yoyos are iconic based on which ones you can get - but the most iconic yoyos in the biggest communities? Those are the ones that ultimately end up iconic.
As for styles, I don’t think we are ignoring them? The YYJ Aquarius was listed, same with the Raider - I’d also include the Flight for being infamous rather than famous (great price and just good enough performance to take over the market in a time where there weren’t really cheap 4a options yet), and the Kamui for introducing the concept of POM to 4A. There’s a couple contenders for potential future classics, like the Turning Point Hades (an 80 gram 3a yoyo?) and the Loop 2020 and Loop Up (customizability and tuning), but given the ratio of xdiv players to 1A, I would hardly expect them to show up - especially on the forums, where the primary xdiv seems to be 0a, so it was no surprise to see the RBC mentioned.
Altogether, this is to say:
- The shutter argument is far more valid than the 720s, given the no. of players in the 1a vs 2a community and how each yoyo actually changed the market,
- nightshadow’s argument isn’t really all that contradictory - he demonstrated awareness of his point by keeping to the Shutter’s context and providing subjective fact regarding the shutter’s unfortunate iconoclastic nature, despite the barbs thrown at collectors,
- There is absolutely merit to the geographical location and the time period, as well as the accessibility aspect, but we should be applying those to the yoyos we’ve listed already before thinking about what yoyos might be iconic in the future (ethnography - how do we know what we know?), and
- We’re not really ignoring it as much as we are playing out the ratio that exists of xdiv to 1a players. Also, the x div players aren’t really going to look at it differently. As someone who primarily plays 2a, it would be very strange for me to presume that 1a yoyos simply aren’t iconic because they’re not from the style I play.
…just as it would be very strange to presume a yoyo isn’t iconic because I don’t like it and/or it’s associated with a player I don’t like.
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Any of you other “middle aged, less skill oriented players” getting flashbacks of the early DV888 fanboys?
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