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.
