Weekend Viewing: Ronnie Bertino in Second Hand Smoke

ronnie bertino

What did you think this @ 3:28 was a homage to?

In Alex Olson’s “Five Favorite Parts,” he mentions how Video Days was a “myth” growing up. It was the video all the older dudes would rave about, but it’s not like you could go to the skate shop and buy a copy eight years after it came out.

Questionable was the other “myth” video from that time. Like any kid who loved Rodney Mullen because of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater and the Rodney V.S. Daewon videos — judging skateboarding based on how many times the board flips — you’d hear about all the crazy shit he did in Questionable. Rodney’s 540 flip was one of the first three-second skateboard clips you could find on the internet in the nineties. But again, it’s not like you could easily find the full video. You had to get creative.

My first eBay purchase ever was a $19.99 Buy-It-Now listing for “ALL 4 PLAN B VIDEOS VHS L@@K.” The item arrived three weeks late, and “All 4 Plan B videos” meant that they were dubbed onto one tape in chronological order. Rodney’s triple kickflips and the real version of the San Francisco level from THPS2 were cool when you’re a tween, but in the YouTube-ized society of today, the only part from any of those four videos that gets routinely revisited is Ronnie Bertino’s. (Yeah yeah, Jeremy Wray obvs has the best part in the video.)

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