In this Google Video, IRC and Skate Videos Online savvy age, buying skate videos seems relatively obsolete. Most of them aren’t worth watching more than once, unless you are fifteen years old and still actually care what the newest trick down the Hollywood High 16 is. Following skateboarding became relatively impossible once the whole wave of Evan Hernandezes, P. Rods and Mike Taylors came along, since it was hard to differentiate between which little kid was doing which switch heel down which flight of stairs.

But there are certain things that you simply should have on your shelf. You know, like the dictionary, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, a couple issues of Black Tail stuffed behind The Complete Works of William Shakespere, Young Jeezy’s first album, etc. In skateboarding, most videos don’t really have a shelf-life, because by the time you remember about owning a video after having it sit on your shelf for a couple months, some other new kid already did a better trick than every other person in the video.

If you own no other skate DVDs at all (I personally don’t, aside from shit that was either burned for me or given for free), the new Girl Boxset should be on your shelf. I am by no means one of those skate geeks that flip out on every fifteen-year-old who doesn’t know who Guy Mariano is, or identifies people like Josh Kalis as “That guy from the DC video” – I hardly care about skateboarding on a professional level at all. But this is just something you need to have.

The videos themselves need no introduction, the boxset comes with Goldfish (1993), Las Nueve Vidas De Paco (1995), Mouse (1997), and The Chocolate Tour (1999). That’s three great videos and the greatest skate video ever made. Each in improved quality from whatever shoddy VHS copy you might have, be it dubbed or retail, or some .mp4 or .mpg you found on Google or IRC. Each DVD has scene selections for every part and skit, and each comes with it’s own separate bonus-footage section, which exceeds about ten minutes of unseen footage (with the exception of The Chocolate Tour because it only has a short five-minute section. But that should come as no surprise, seeing as how the most common criticism regarding that video is the short length of the parts). Mouse has a full-length commentary by Spike Jonze, Mariano, Koston, Carrol and Rick Howard, which is basically just random stories behind the creation of all the skits and Mike York pissing in Koston’s Air Maxes.

The bonus disc itself has about two hours of extras. Everything from trade show promos, commercials, unreleased montages, unused skits and tour footage. The Mariano alternate edit is just the part without a song, with the tricks in different order, so there’s no extra tricks in it, although you can catch plenty of Mouse era Marino extras on the video’s separate disc.

The set doesn’t include Yeah Right, because I’m guessing the company sold the rights to the video to a wider distributor, since you can find it in Best Buy and Circuit City stores. But frankly, when looking back at Yeah Right, three years later, it basically falls victim to the same short shelf-life trap that the majority of other hyped-up videos do these days. The four in this set are timeless, with more replay value than pretty much any other skate videos you may want to actually own real copies of. If you skateboard, and aren’t an idiot, this is well worth the $60 they are asking for it. Now all I need is a Photosynthesis DVD, and a Zoo York box set with Mixtape 1, Peep This and Heads, but I have a feeling that is never going to happen.

As far as I’m concerned, this is the most bullshit-free video ever made. Are there stupid flashy intros with people getting drunk and falling a lot with dramatic music playing? No. Is there a strobelight, techno music hippie shit editing with fifty-six cuts so that you see the same trick at three different speeds from four different angles? Nope. Are there a bunch of Modest Mouse and Built To Spill songs to scratch your balls to while you watch the skating? Sorry, homeboy. All these wonderful facts perfectly illustrate that all Canadians, with the exception of RDS a.k.a Shark Face Killah crew, don’t play that homo-thug shit. Baby Steps puts it down for people who want to see real, creative skating, without all the hoo-ha special effects and MTV editing that seems to make its way into this small skateboarding multimedia world of ours.

Every part in the video is solid, and the video’s 25 or so minutes of straight parts tend to cover all realms of skateboard trickery, from the gaps and rails (Jordan Hoffart), to the technical junk (Mr. Leroy Holmes himself), all the way to the creative stuff that nobody else you see is doing (Brad Sheppard). See, in Canada, people have heart. If there’s a huge plot of grass between a ledge and a bank, people skate through it. If there is some slightly upwards rock laying in a park, there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell that you’re not going to see them find some way of utilizing it. Here, in our section of the world, we choose to stay in a basketball court with a flatrail in the middle of it instead of going out and finding something to skate. Baby Steps has some valuable lessons for all of us.

If you are an advocate for skate videos devoid of all the pretentious talk of art, angles and Interpol that the hippies brought into skateboarding, then you owe yourself a favor in finding a copy of this video.

Creator: Rob Butterfield

Year: 2005

Genre(s): Skateboarding

Duration: 33 Minutes

Cast: Jordan Hoffart, Jason Gordon, Dylan Thorstenson, Pryce Holmes, Torey Goodall, Magnus Hanson, Alien, Swell, Sheldon, Brad Sheppard & several others.

Filming Locations: Canada, California, Harlem World, Europe.

More Info: To buy, go to the Quarter Snacks Shop

Trailer: Here

“To all you rats and snitches lucky enough to cop one of these DVDs…I hope you catch AIDS in your mouth and your lips [are] the first thing[s] to die. Bitch.”

Beyond being the greatest cultural phenomenon since the psychedelic age and acid tours of the sixties, Skinny Suge’s low-budget cinematic masterpiece Stop Fucking Snitching Volume 1 is perhaps the ultimate testament to human greatness and intelligence ever conceived [well, aside from this one time where this kid in my junior class during high school told me that he was going to impregnate his thirteen-year-old girlfriend so her mother wouldn’t make them break up].

For those not familiar with the Stop Snitching revolution beyond just the mere sight of the numerous t-shirts you probably encountered last summer, allow me to explain. Stop Fucking Snitching Volume 1 is the spark that ignited the revolution we have all grown to be too familiar with. In an age where every rapper sells kilos of cocaine, this masterpiece has reminded each and every one of them to re-emphasize their severance of ties from all those who may be in contact with the police. Even the great pre-school vocabulary mastermind we all know as Killa Cam marketed his last album on the basis of him refusing to cooperate with police after he was shot by two people in their attempt to steal his Lambo [and the fact that he saw Jay-Z wearing chancletas]. It even went so far as to provoke Baltimore police to release a video called Keep Talking, encouraging the snitches that Skinny Suge insists are asking for “a hole in their head” to come out of the woods and run to the nearest precinct so they could start singing like a fuckin’ bird before Suge and friends catch them. And while this final point may be more of Allen Iverson’s fault in that he single-handedly turned the NBA into a rap video, the Stop Snitching revolution when so far as in making rich people like Carmello Anthony feel they still need to reaffirm their street cred [even though they’re rich and never need to talk to the crack dealers they knew when they were younger ever again] by “putting money on that snitch nigga’s head” and throwing his Olympic medal into a lake.

Now this is the important part…if you read anything, read this. How is this a testament to human intelligence you ask? “Sure, every video you see at Canal Street mixtape spots has a bunch of guys in the hood holding guns and saying nigga a lot, what makes this one any different?” Well, it would seem a bit ironic for the people responsible for making a video called Stop Fucking Snitching to snitch right? Wouldn’t it seem a bit more ironic if they snitched…on themselves. Several months after Stop Fucking Snitching Volume 1 came out, and the revolution was well underway, Skinny Suge and friends were arrested and convicted of a second or third drug dealing charge, and sentenced to ten years in prison. Was there a Wire-esque operation behind the whole thing? No. Did the cops roll up and happen to catch Skinny Suge flipping his packs red-handed? No. What did they do? They happened to indulge in this modest masterpiece right here, where they gathered evidence based on the video showing Suge and friends catering to the fiends and even managed to get his exact home address based on the video camera following him back to his apartment. Rap music has really taught us a lot. Free Skinny Suge.

Creator: Skinny Suge & One Love Video

Year: 2004

Genre(s): Public Service Annoucement, Narcotics, Warnings, Snitches

Duration: 30 Minutes

Cast: Skinny Suge and Baltimore drug dealers

Filming Locations: Baltimore.

More Info: OneLoveUnderground.com, StopSnitching.com