I "won" this on ebay the other night after a session of drunk bidding last weekend. As you well know, drinking and ebay don't mix and I've learnt the hard way many, many times. The term "winning" really doesn't apply to this auction, even for £2.99.
What a piece of shit! If I saw this at the time (1991) I really hope I thought it was shitty then, I like to think I've always had SOME degree of taste. The video is made up of footage from vert comp after vert comp with a ton of Powell warehouse and terrible "street" contests thrown in. The only actual street footage is kind of sparsely peppered throughout the video at irregular intervals - just when you finally get to see a glimpse of someone like Ocean Howell and think "Yes! Here we go!" he swiftly disappears to be replaced by yet another vert comp.
It's from a time when vert was really flogging a dead horse and boy does it show here. It seems almost all the tricks are varial-y revert-y airs that were too hard to do high so they just sort of crouch in the air just above the coping. No wonder none of us kids were into it, it looked stinking. When Hosoi makes an appearance somewhere after the halfway mark (I think it was about then, I was drifting off) he sticks out like a sore thumb with his big airs and powerful style. Vert had gotten stale and I'm pretty sure this vid did it no favours.
The street comps are even less interesting. Everybody is in pretty much full pads and lids and the 1991 idea of a street course was a bunch of quarter pipes and a slider bar. Basically it's bollocks. Bear in mind in that this video came out in the same year as 1281, Not The New H-Street Video, Now 'n' Later and fucking VIDEO DAYS and you'll see how shitty this really is. None of the charm of 80's vert in luminous shorts on gnarly old boards and hardly any of the cutting edge early 90's street skating that was shaping the way we do things now.
Not to mention the fact that I had to perform open heart surgery on my VCR for 2 hours prior to watching this - eventually giving up and pronouncing it dead and transplanting its power supply into the one I found on the pavement last year that's been cluttering up the hall much to my wife's annoyance. At least I now have a working VCR, albeit without a remote and there's no rewind button so I'll have to let every tape play to the end so it auto-rewinds back to the start.
OK, so - don't buy this. Not even if you're drunk and it's on ebay for 99p (what cunt pushed the price up to my max bid of £2.99!?). It's terrible. I also "won" that old Thrasher video Playing In Traffic so fingers crossed it's a bit better, I don't remember watching that one either.
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