History of Mongoose – Know your roots

This is a fairly old documentary now, but I hadn’t seen it and just have, so thought I’d post anyway.

Always a heavy emphasis on heritage with Mongoose, and that’s certainly true. I remember being in awe of riders like Andy Ruffell  when I was a kid. There’s some good stuff about mountainbiking in it too, with John Tomac and some Chris Akrigg.

Funny thing these days though is Mongoose are just never really on my radar when I think about mountain bikes, nor on the radar of anyone I know really.

Funny when they dominated so much of the off-road riding scene of the past.

Anyway, it’s quite good if you’ve not seen it… 👍

After my snapped falcon steel bike, my first proper mountain bike was a mongoose – an Iboc Comp. I had a link to the importer so got a framed shipped. It had an alu frame with bonded lugs and looped chain/seat stays like a proper mongoose. I built it with a P2 fork, lx/stx/dx combo with zoom finishing kit. It weighed naff-all and climbed brilliantly. Awesome.

Nice. Ta for posting.

I’ve never had one but often covetted them.

Does Mongoose these days have any relation to the original or s it just a brand name to be bought, sold and exploited?

Mongoose BMXs were not really that good. The Supergoose was okay but when compared to other BMX’s at the time they were heavy and not very exciting. Realise they were a mass producer but other mass producers made better bikes (i.e. GT, Diamond Back) with smaller scale producers making much nicer bikes (i.e. Robinson, Hutch)

Yeah, fascinating that.
The last Mongoose bikes that registered with me were the Teocali and Canaan… lordy those things were hideous. Probably killed them in the MTB market.
But as the brand has always been purely about FUN… we know what type of bike they’re gonna return with, don’t we… 😆

Thanks! As a child of the early 70s I remember the BMX craze very fondly. Loads of us kids rode, made our own jumps and spent every spare moment practicing tricks. I remember the names in they video, they were gods of cool!

Yeah. Have to say, it’s kind of saddening to see Andy Ruffell as a bit of a podgy middle aged bloke. 🤔

Comes to us all in some way I suppose…

I’ve got two mongoose bmx’es. Cheap later ones though.
Loved their old 80’s bmxes . they were exciting enough to me. They were race inspired as opposed to trick inspired.