The 25-Year-Old Video

Sometimes the numbers get to you. 30 years ago, Pat Swayze chased the 50 year storm in Point Break. 40 years ago Iron Maiden dropped Killers, the same amount of time it took Steve Carrell to pop his cherry in 2005, a year when maybe some of you weren’t even born yet but are still better at skating than I’ll ever be.

Part of what comes along with nostalgia is the realization that there are things that tend to get idealized, and others that get forgotten.(1) If you think it’s easy for footage to fall through the cracks in the always-on content flow today, it helps to remember that videos were released by the month (or six), not the minute, with nowhere near the distribution of a YouTube or IG. So many incredibly relevant parts —shit, skaters’ entire careers and legacies — were lost just by merit of our local shops not getting a tape or two.(2) I think everyone saw Questionable and Hokus Pokus, but definitely can’t say the same about A Soldier’s Story.

Last year, @UselessWoodenTrivia ran a survey of best skate videos of all time. Not surprisingly, early favorites Video Days, Welcome To Hell, and Mouse turned conclusive winners. And neither is a wrong answer. Very different sides of a coin were shown, even then, proving that skateboarding was no longer the single-sided Stacy Peralta-vision or even Steve Rocco‘s stranglehold. Things fragmented, and the bigpants-small-wheels-era drew to a close, thanks, in part, to the EMB crew relocating to Los Angeles and the subsequent rise of the Girl/ Chocolate style of plaza and ledge skating. Simultaneously, it was shaped from the other side by the gnarlier, bigger, faster Toy Machine under Jaime Thomas and a return to transition led by Antihero and Creature 1.0. Now we know where this heads, into the glorious mashup of today where wallies, Welcome and Willy grinds are just as much of a thing as Hubbas, hammers, and heel flips.

Somewhere in the middle of this phase-shift was Greg Carroll’s(3) Think skateboards. Their video, Damage, fit squarely between the pure revs of Fucktards and the numbing weight of Mouse’s ten million crooked grinds. As a brand, Think doesn’t have the lasting reputation of its peers due to some latter-years’ obsession with rave culture and other bullshit, but Damage-era Think is something that truly should not be overlooked.

All said, Damage is far from the best skate video of all time. I doubt it even cracked the UWT’s top 10, and it doesn’t make those lists for its malignant Vert Button bump towards the center. However, due to the magic of digital scrubbing, that shouldn’t stop anyone from missing an essential chapter that includes:

• Classic footage at Santa Rosa and downtown Sacramento. • Joe Sierro’s front smiths at The Grind.

• Joel Price: an all-but-forgotten forever-Am that was surprisingly tech and worth a revisit.

• Phil Shao does what very well may be the best frontside bluntslide ever performed on a ledge. RIP the real-deal GOAT.

• Drehobl’s part set to The Dead Kennedys is at once one of the more creative, powerful, fun, and gnarly parts ever committed to tape. If you are of an age to have never seen him in his pre-Krooked prime: blowing it. I’d put money on someone on Polar re-creating Dan‘s part trick-for-trick in 2021 and not even know it.

TL;DR: The opener by peak-Phil Shao and ender by Dan Drehobl bookend a quintessential Matt Pailes part that feels like a stolen chapter from Stereo’s majestic A Visual Sound.

Footnotes

1. Don’t get me started: 1996 was not any more like the long-after-the-fact Jonah Hill version than the one Larry Clark laid out in ’95.

2. I personally didn’t see Brian Lotti’s Now’n’Later part until maybe 2018.

3. Greg, like Mike, was also really fucking good at skateboarding. Just so happens when your brother is a multi-platinum GOAT-y legend, you too might settle for Venture TM or another behind-the-scenery role like running a punching-up third-tier board brand. (That’s an important distinction against, say, Santa Cruz, for example. Once a first-tier brand, it managed to punch its way downstairs, while Think was rising, just never quite got there.)