Naturally there was usually someone filming this insanity, with the subsequent social media video ending with the hapless free-runner (that's what they called themselves) dangling by his fingernails from an architectural extrusion 20 metres above a hard city pavement with no safety net in sight.
It seemed the next - unposted - scene was deemed too graphic even for social media (and if that was the case, it must have indeed been innocent past times).
But these were fads which died premature deaths through participants often meeting the same fate. Like car surfers, and the same with the brief fad of maniacs in little batwing suits seeking to freefly through small holes in mountainous geological formations. Pretty soon, hole-surfers got to be pretty thin on the ground, but thick under it.
We have to be grateful for the intrinsic ephemerality of fads. If not for their transience, we'd still be stuck with Davy Crockett hats - though, come to think of it, if we could kick the craze off again but this time using possum instead of coon skins, it might be the saving of our forests.
We'd also still have the spectacle of cars with long, whippy aerials festooned with gaggles of vivid little felt pennants - souvenirs of how well travelled one was, some having even made it as far afield as Waverly. They also marked sundry other life achievements such as belonging to the local indoor bowling club.
And don't forget the back-strap dangling from the rear of your vehicle. It was, you may recall, meant to act as a conduit for the release of nasty electrostatic build-up - rumoured to be the pernicious cause of car-sickness.
The reasoning was that the car's rubber tyres prevented this dispersal from occurring naturally, hence the need for the strap bypass direct to the road. Hmm... wasn't the bituminous road surface itself also conductivity resistant?
Popular, too, were the fluorescent lime green, burnt orange, or shocking pink socks for the fashionable young buck to wear with his winklepickers, together with Ivy League pants and their invaluable rear cinch for ensuring a perfect hip fit.
And we won't even begin to mention the vagaries of female fashion. Suffice to reference the very brief tenure of the daywear, high side slit, voluminous ankle skirt.
Many women quickly developed osteoarthritis in their left forefinger and thumb from pinching the slit together to prevent it doing what is was designed to do. The suffering of windy Wellington's ladies was terrible to behold.
But, thankfully, many other drongo fads have gone the way of the dinosaurs - water beds, the limbo, toga parties. The shoulder-mounted outsize ghetto-blaster. The dog-deterrant water bottle for the front lawn. Incredibly annoying zip-zap sound effects of remote car locking gizmos. The boom-bass car audio system. Street-front windows full of ranks of crazed aerobic prancers.
Who knows ... even sleeve, ankle and butt tattoos may prove temporary fads every bit as much as stick-on wheel mags.
Oh yeh ... and planking. Or was that plonking?
