In the movie "Back to the Future", Michael J. Fox's character  Marty McFly gets around by skateboarding and holding onto the back of moving cars or pick up trucks.  Where kids really that dangerous and reckless back then?

I mean what do you do if the car suddenly hits the breaks?  You'd be thrown off your skateboard and probably forward into the rear window of the car.  Or what if the car suddenly accelerates?  Imagine trying to skateboarding while going 50 mph?  

How many kids were killed in the 80s by trying this type of skateboarding?  

I think its called skitching or something like that. Me and my friends tried it a year ago, but skateboards arnt built the same way they were 17 years ago.

It's called Skitching. You can do it if you play Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4.

I did that back in my skateboarding days. We also hopped cars in the snow. That was fun. It's obviously dangerous but at the time when your a kid all you think of is fun. My brother actually hopped the back of a cop car. What a knucklehead.
Just so you understand, we were doing that before Back to the Future was out. Not a whole lot of our childhood actions are brought on by being influenced from movies, t.v. or music.  

TimRATT-n-ROLL

Speaking from personal experience (or stupidity) I did that and plenty more, still have the scars to prove it. And just to concur with Tim, our brilliant minds came up with all of it without "Real TV", sports blooper reels, etc...

When I was in junior high (or middle school these days) in the Late 80s, I remember one kid DID GET KILLED doing that.  This was around 1989, when being a skater was the coolest thing to do.  It seemed like all the cool people were skaters back in the Late 80s.  Lot of children and teenagers around today think they are so original and cool when they are doing the flimsiest of tricks with their skateboards.  Anyway back to the kid that was killed, this kid that got killed back in 1989 was like 12 or 13 years old and he was skitching and lost control of himself.  He wound up in the middle of traffic and was hit by another car.  The car that hit him was going very fast, like about 70 mph, and this kid was thrown a good 50 feet off his skateboard.  It was big news around my junior high, especially for the kids who saw him get killed.  Some kids were laughing at him for being so stupid, and I remember fights broke out over his death.  

By the way, skateboards now aren't THAT different from the ones that were around in the 80s.  Come on, whichever teenager it was (I just know it was some teenager that thinks he's living in the ultimate high tech world) that said skateboards are so different now from back then acts like we already have Back to the Future styled hoverboards around or something.  

There was a regular Nintendo cartridge called "Skate or Die" that came along during this fad.

I too knew a kid who was killed while skitching back in the 80s.  Not a pretty sight.