What about new users? There now seem to be more people coming than going on this forum…
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Oh yes a regular influx of new people is critical to the health of any community. Otherwise it calcifies into the cranky old folks home 
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I’m not cranky, I’m cynical…and cranky.
Get off my lawn!
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I was heavily active with yo-yos in the late 90s-early 2000s, but fell out of it. I’m just starting get back into it. I always played with my yo-yos around the house, but wasn’t ‘active’ at all. I’m now in my mid-40s and have a 5 year old, so that sparked me to get back in.
I think the thing I see currently is, lack of any real style. It’s mainly a lot of really fast tricks tied together. I started seeing this in the mid-2000s when I left the scene. The skill level is mind blowing, but style, at least to me is lacking.
There’s an old man’s 2 cents worth.
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You should check out the young whipper snappers on the YYF team
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Wait, seriously, isn’t yoyoing just a series of tricks strung together? What constitutes style? I am in no way being sarcastic either. Do you mean like showmanship like Tommy Smothers playing to the audience? The other day at work I was throwing and a 14 year old guest walked up on me and I showed her what I was using (N12) and explained unresponsive and showed her the hardest front tricks I learned and would have let her try it out had she not seemed utterly uninterested. I was doing the tricks slowly so she could see what was going on. Just no interest. Her family visits the same week every year. Next year I will bring her a new yoyo and offer it to her and ask if she’d like to learn some things. You never know…
Each subsequent generation feels as if it’s a successor has less style (or at least a different style). It’s certainly true in painting, music, skating, surfing… It is extremely difficult once you are initially inspired by a thing to evaluate it in a different chronological context.
So if you had a glimpse of yo-yoing back in 2000, the current generation might seem really strange. In those days tricks had a different rhythm, they were judged differently, they were shared differently. Before YouTube, different geographical areas had specific styles. But that’s not to diminish the style of the scene today. The only way to appreciate its context is to really dive into it.
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It might be my being away for so long, and the level of play advancing so much; I realize that yo-yo play is a series of tricks. I guess, I mean, by style is, if you saw just the silhouette of the player, you’d know exactly who it is. (and I don’t mean because of their body) Now, I’m probably thinking this because I don’t know many of the new tricks, players, I’m overwhelmed by the shear speed, etc.
I’m not complaining, just stating an opinion.
As far as showmanship goes, there is not much opportunity to see them work a crowd unless you are attending one of their demos. So in that realm, I have no idea.
Tommy Smothers was a special animal. He had a variety show that he played a schtick where he was the naive one of the two.
In my opinion, Tommy was and is the best yo-yo showman of all time.
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This is a really cool DVD, some of these guys were pretty good demonstrators too:
and who can forget these girls?
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How could they be having fun with such low-performance yoyos? Crazy.
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I’m just curious when (like, roughly what year) 1A eclipsed 2A as the predominant style of play.
All those old commercials show looping tricks, which probably isn’t surprising given that Imperials were the dominant, if not only, shape yoyos had for quite a long time. But at some point wide-axle butterfly designs with long sleep times became the norm, allowing string tricks to overshadow looping as the “face of yoyoing”.
When did that happen? Is there a particular year that is recognized by yoyo historians as the year when looping gave way to string tricks as the most popular form?
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You don’t know what you don’t know. They’re so dumb, they they don’t even know how much fun they’re not having.
/s
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Well, in a way I sorta did. When I was a kid, I gave up on yoyoing because looping just became kinda boring to me.
On the other hand, I find the contemporary string trick repertoire endlessly fascinating by comparison. 
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There is definitely a reason people switched to wide gap. I’m still clawing my way up the evolutionary ladder, having gotten to the Pro-Yo 1 and 2, plus the Turbo Bumble Bee – which I swear to god is still quite excellent even by today’s standards and sooo clearly the first real modern yo-yo.
… but it’s still narrow gap. 1997, not there quite yet.
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From The Yonomicon by Mark McBride, 1998. This book covers a lot modern play with these shapes and the at-the-time, new, transaxles and he illustrates all the complex moves that are still the foundation of modern horizontal / sidestyle. Trapeze and shortly thereafter, double or nothing is probably what sparked all of what we know now as in, beyond just looping. I dunno, just chiming in.
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Between 1999-2000 a lot of the foundation of modern 1a were laid. I look at the SuperYo Kickin Tricks video as kind of seminal, which was shot in 1999. By that point Steve had unleashed 5a and 3a and 4a were gaining steam, all of which further wrenched the focus away from 2a. You had Escolar and the Longorias (among others) active at that point, and so many of those tricks ended up being the classics which influenced the next creative wave.
edit: Also if you never saw it, have a nice day at school!
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And I would argue none of that would have been possible (or even happened) without the Turbo Bumble Bee… and its brother the GT + Cold Fusion.
This is where worship at the altar of wood starts to break down, for me. Don’t get me wrong, I think wood is pretty cool but it clearly limited what people could accomplish with yo-yos.
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Clearly. Man, got me again. I’ve wasted so much time and energy on these inherently limited materials.
Then again, wood is less WHAT I worship as opposed to what I USE to worship. And in that regard, I don’t really find it inferior to any other medium.
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I like wood for what it is … but holy padoodles man, fire up a Turbo Bumble Bee after an hour of throwing a No Jive 3-in-1 and it is a mystical, religious, transcendental experience. I know… because I’ve done it myself. 
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Response that actually works 100% of the time, totally consistent, completely reliable with no futzing around or “well, you gotta factor in…” excuses involved.
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Ludicrous spin speeds and spin times with a metal ball bearing, on even the most average of average throws
Wood yo-yos were holding the field of yo-yo back, and the explosion of the Turbo Bumble Bee + beyond is what enabled all evolution in Yo-Yo after 1997.
I mean heck, the “mini Flores yo-yo nestled inside a plastic rim weighted container” approach of the Pro-Yo 2 was indeed a big step forward but fire up that Turbo Bumble Bee and … it’s like touching the face of God. 
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