Hover Board



"Ulrich: Whoa, how does Odd manage to pilot this thing?

Aelita: (shrugs) He's not afraid of falling..."

- Code Lyoko, "Bad Connection"

A Sub-Trope of Cool Board, the main recreational device in the future is the Hover Board. Like an all-terrain skateboard, the Hover Board is totally awesome and likely gained popularity with the movie Back to The Future Part II. Many Speculative Fiction series set 20 minutes or further into the future will have these things fly through the streets. Or even through the air, when it really shouldn't because that's when it stops being hovering and starts being Sky Surfing.

The characteristic that determines whether you have a Hover Board or are Sky Surfing is the altitude range each has. A Hover Board has to stay within a certain distance of the ground. In Sky Surfing, the vehicle can be used at any altitude.

May be accompanied by hover bikes, scooters, and skates as well. Hoverboards are very, very popular in Video Games. Usually a large part of the gameplay in a futuristic platformer involves riding and acquiring these vehicles, although they're just as likely to be temporary power-ups.

Anime & Manga

 * Eureka Seven, where even some of the Humongous Mecha use Hover Boards. Unlike most though, they're more analogous to surfboards than skateboards.
 * Curiously, they do have wheels - just one, though, and the axle runs the same direction as the board itself. They seem to be involved in handling, since Renton mentions that a bigger wheel limits the rider's capacity to make sharp turns.
 * Wendi's Riding Board from Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, which triples as a cannon and a large shield in addition to its Hover Board capabilities. Subaru's rollerblades are basically this trope combined with Rollerblade Good.
 * Death the Kid has a flight-capable skateboard, whom he named "Beelzebub". Technically though, this is more an example of Sky Surfing, because he generally uses it to outright fly.
 * Van from Zoids: Chaotic Century has one.
 * Jean in Transformers Victory has one that allows for some degree of levitation -- handy, since most of his friends are giant robots.
 * Used with disastrous hilarious results at the beginning of Manabi Straight! when two of the girls are Late for School.
 * Owned by Psy in Heroman.
 * Technically, the wave-rider of One Piece is this. Powered by air dials and thus floats above the water/sea cloud the rider is riding on.
 * Shinku from Dog Days has Tornada.

Comics

 * Marvel's Rocket Racer. And Nighttrasher. And Gaylord.
 * The V-Wing used by the Thunderbolts is a rare multi-person hoverboard.

Films -- Animation

 * In Jetsons: The Movie, Elroy plays basketball on Hover Boards.
 * Daniel has one in Transformers: The Movie, but he crashes it almost straight away and then rides in Hot Rod instead.

Films -- Live Action

 * Back to The Future Part II, as noted above. The hoverboard also plays a major role in the climax to Part III.
 * But they don't work on water... unless you've got POWER!
 * I'd imagine that without power they won't work anywhere
 * The Future Sport movie.

Literature

 * Scott Westerfeld's Uglies series features these quite prominently.
 * Uglies play around with them recreationally -- they really can't hurt themselves because the boards are magnetic and adhere to the magnetic grid underneath the city, and they wear a device to track their center of gravity and special "crash bracelets" that will pull them back onto the board if they fall off.
 * Interestingly, the center-of-gravity device clips onto their belly-button rings, a fact that the characters all seem to take for granted. Apparently belly-button piercings are mandatory for young people in the utopian/dystopian future.
 * Pretties generally can't ride hoverboards due to their reduced reflexes . Zane and Tally, however, are able to ride hoverboards as pretties when they consciously try to "stay bubbly" and.
 * When Tally is sent to perform her undercover mission in Uglies she is given a special hoverboard that has lifter fans that enable it to function away from magnetic substances for a period of time and solar cells to provide power for the fans. This type of hoverboard is later used by the Cutters when they turn into Specials.
 * In Extras hoverboarding is again presented as a recreational activity. It's actually the extreme hoverboard-riding known as "mag-lev surfing" (in which participants use their hoverboards' magnetic properties to surf atop a mag-lev train outside the city) practiced by the clique known as the Sly Girls that attracts Aya to them and gets the plot rolling.
 * One of the Sinthians, slug-like aliens in the Phules Company series by Robert Asprin, solves his mobility problems by riding a kid's "glideboard". The other main Sinthian character, who is from a higher caste, can't get the hang of the board and declares it undignified.
 * As an obvious homage to Back to The Future (see above), the water makes the boards to move more quickly.
 * Not quite a hoverboard, but Y.T.'s skateboard from Snow Crash is the next best thing, using "smartwheels" made up of dozens of tiny pad-footed spokes to glide down staircases, through potholes, or over grass without a jolt. Plus, it's equipped with.

Live Action TV

 * The secondary mode of Kamen Rider Agito's Cool Bike, Tornador, is a hoverboard. Then, thanks to Kamen Rider Decade, Agito himself is transformed into Tornador.

Video Games

 * Sonic Riders has "Extreme Gear", which is usually these.
 * However, sometimes it's other various things like shoes or brooms. . The main defining trait of Extreme Gear seems to be that it floats and can go fast enough.
 * One gear in the "board" category is actually called the Hoverboard (well, Hovercraft). It looks like a cloud.
 * Kirby's Air Ride.
 * One of them, Dragoon, appears as an item in Super Smash Bros Brawl.
 * Super Paper Mario
 * Kid Chameleon
 * Airblade: A PS2 skateboarding game which is basically Tony Hawk without wheels. It's also got a story, but that's very much beside the point.
 * And on that note, most of the actual Tony Hawk games feature a hover board cheat that simply takes the wheels off your board. Also, unlockable character Iron Man in THUG rides a hoverboard anyway.
 * Rayman 3: Hoodlum Havoc featured one of these.
 * Jazz Jackrabbit
 * Ratchet and Clank and the Jak and Daxter series (where it is called a Jet Board) use them. In Jak and Daxter, the hoverboard is used in several Tony Hawk style missions where the player has to get a set number of points.
 * Zell uses one in Final Fantasy VIII in a single scene, after which it's confiscated. Later however, when you're allowed into his room, one of the characters comments that he has another to which he replies he's got several.
 * Appears both in Final Fantasy XII, sort of (more like a hover-motorbike), and weaponized in Final Fantasy XII Revenant Wings.
 * Mega Man Star Force 2 combined this trope with Pure Energy.
 * Not to mention the Rush Jet and Item-2 in the Classic series.
 * Unreal Tournament III: Every player has an un-losable one of these in the vehicular game modes, allowing players on foot to get into the action reasonably quickly. Weapons can't be used while riding it and any damage will make you fall prone (and vulnerable) for several second, but a tether can be attached to friendly vehicles, allowing you to be towed around faster.
 * Subverted in Backyard Skateboarding. The developers said there would be a hoverboard in the game, and Dmitri says in-game that he wants one, but there is none.
 * Q*bert has a few in every level.
 * City of Heroes has this as a purchasable item. It is very useful at low levels.

Tabletop games

 * Warhammer uses demonic hoverboards called disks of Tzeentch. These days they are more like sky surfing as they actually fly, but they once had a lower flying speed and it was called floating or hovering. And in the MMORPG based on Warhammer, they follow this trope to a T.

Web Comics

 * In this Sluggy Freelance strip, during a parody of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Torg "inherits" an enchanted serving dish that is essentially a hoverboard.
 * Dave's brother from Homestuck has one.

Western Animation

 * Ben 10 has a Petrosapien ("Diamondhead") bounty hunter named Tetrax who usually uses these (In fact, he was originally credited as Hoverboard in his debut episode). Ben received one from him as a gift, and has used it several times during the series.
 * Kit Cloudkicker's "airfoil" on Tale Spin, sort of.
 * In Futurama, Amy gets her hoverboard converted into a ironing board when her parents find out that her boyfriend Kif is knocked up.
 * Code Lyoko gives us the standard (Overboard), hover-scooter (Overwing) and hover-bike (Overbike) varieties.
 * The Overbike isn't a hoverbike.
 * The 1990s teenage version of Flash Gordon.
 * In Thundercats, WilyKat and WilyKit have hover boards which are constantly getting demolished, to Panthro's chagrin. This is resurrected in the 2011 reboot.
 * Manic the Hedgehog owns one in Sonic Underground.
 * Ratz has ratboards, which are basically flying racecars seemingly made out of looted mousetraps.

Real Life

 * It happened. It's also a Back to The Future replica.
 * On the show Myth Busters, the gang actually created a vacuum-propelled hoverboard that once levitate about 2-3 millimeters or so off the ground. Here's a fan's recreation of the device.