My old skate videos reviewed.

SO MY PLAN WAS TO WRITE AN ARTICLE about old skateboard videos that I had in my collection. I thought I d grab a six pack, disconnect the DVD player, hook up the VCR, and kick back and watch a bunch of old videos back to back (many of which I lost the covers for years ago). It seemed like it would be pretty fun.

BLIND, TIM & HENRY'S PAC OF LIES

This was the first video I threw in. It's only a few minutes long, so I thought it would be a good one to get the night started. This video was as good as I remembered. Henry Sanchez skates to a great Sabbath song and does a shitload of tricks that most pros still can't do. And he skates pretty fast which was a rarity when this video was made. And at the beginning of the video there's a teaser for a full length video that never came out. Guy Mariano does a switch 360 flip down some stairs which makes me wonder what kind of tricks he'd be doing now if he were still skating.

411 ISSUE #2

Is 411 still making videos? I don't think I've seen one in years. If they are still making 411's, do they still start out with that Bum Bum Bum Bum Bum Bumm? This one did. And there were rad dudes like John Cardiel and Rick Howard in that slow motion intro thing. The evening was off to a great start. About 20-minutes later I was bored. I had a hard time giving a shit about the early '90s European concert series set to the Bad Religion soundtrack. About 25-minutes later I turned off the TV. So I guess I made it a half an hour into my article idea before I threw in the towel.

MAD CIRCLE, LET THE HORNS BLOW

I thought about coming up with a new idea for an article, but my deadline was the following day so I thought I should stick to my original idea rather than trying to brainstorm something new. Most of these videos I haven't seen since they came out. Like this Mad Circle video. All I can remember about it is a dude named Mike Cao that could ollie really fucking high. When I skated street all the time, all I could do was ollie high. That's probably why I remember that dude's part out of all of the other parts. Because he reminded me of me. And I'm like, totally into me right now.

FINALLY ... AN FTC VIDEO

Truthfully I can't really remember a damn thing about this video. But I remember that when it came out I totally tried to dress like these dudes. It was kind of hard to find cool skate clothes in Seguin, Texas though. So I'd end up buying factory second shit from Ross Dress For Less in the Big and Tall section and totally trying to get my EMB on. And I remember this was around the same time that everybody was trying to dye their hair blonde. I know I tried. But my shit turned out all yellow like a Ken doll. Damn. I'm glad I don't have many photos from those years.

THE DALHSTROM EXPERIMENT

You've probably never heard of this video, right? It's a video I made with my friend Damian Rodriguez in 1999. It's pretty much just Austin dudes skating ditches. There's a skit in it that involved renting an animal costume and it rides Spike Jonze's nuts so hard that I'm surprised he doesn't walk with a limp these days. It's a mediocre video, but I thought I'd include it since I look for any opportunity to promote myself. I do that because I'm a shallow self-obsessed person. I'm OK with that though. At least I'm not riding around on a skateboard with my own name on the bottom of it.

SANTA CRUZ, A REASON FOR LIVING

Santa Cruz made a couple of seriously awesome skateboard videos in the '80s (Streets of Fire and Wheels of Fire). If you skated during that time you know they were completely the shit. This video was made in 1990 and as far as I can remember it pretty much isn't the shit. It's just kind of shit. But if you can sit through about an hour and a half of vert ams you'll get to see Natas, Tom Knox, Jordan Richter, Jason Jessee, and Andy Roy. My guess is that if Santa Cruz had just focused in on those five dudes they could have made a video that rivaled Video Days. And speaking of which, who the fuck stole my copy?

ANTIHERO

All I can say about this video is that anytime I see a photo of one of those huge concrete parks in Oregon I picture myself skating that shit and flying all over the place and getting super radical and just being totally bad ass. When in actuality, if I went to Oregon and skated one of those huge parks all I'd do would be to carve around and inch in little micro grinders and be scared to the max. But from what I remember about this video, all of these Anti Hero dudes are the guys who really would roll up to one of those parks and rip it a new butthole. And if you ask me, that's kind of cooler than being a giant vagina like myself.