Budapest HD — Rios Crew’s ‘BANDASZELLEM’ Video Is Live

📷 Headline Photo by Macsu Feri
📸 All Other Photos by B. Bence

We’ve been posting Rios Crew edits since ~2014ish. Like, when Cyrus was on Polar and Fetty Wap dominated the airwaves …a longass time ago. In the time since, they’ve established themselves as one of the most productive video franchises, and ambassadors of a scene that few people know much about.

Thanks to a lucky cheap eBay find, their latest video finds them working with skateboarding’s current camera of record, sans fisheye. (Lucky eBay finds on that one are damn near impossible, as you well know.) After hitting play on an early version of the edit, it was hard not to wonder how they’re going to keep their frantic, low-def look — marked by camerawork we once described as practically inside of the skaters’ wheel — with the P2 look of your average modern skate video.

About two minutes in, after a guy falls seven feet onto his face off some roll-in made of medieval rock, another ollies a set of railroad tracks mid-line between two sets of stairs, and another dude gets shoulder checked by an angry Hungarian at the top of some steps — I forgot all about that thought.

More »

Seven Steps To Tompkins

Jenkem has an interview with Trung Nguyen, the architect behind last year’s most talked-about trick, and Big Parody.

“We are sad. People can say we are overreacting and that this spot will likely be liberated, but there is a gross feeling seeing the city prioritize something like this.” Village Psychic made a tribute to their local curb on the occasion of… the city knobbing a curb — appropriately titled, “Sadman Plaza.”

The QS office favorite Rios Crew out of Budapest just dropped a new video, entitled Uccsó. They’re as atmospheric and third-eye-open with the spots as ever, but it’s the filming that truly took on a new dimension in this one.

More »

… And Then There Was X

“Took this at the corner of 3rd Street and 2nd Avenue almost eight years ago to the day. DMX was stopped at the intersection waiting for a red light. I nervously fumbled to get my phone out, framed him up, snapped one off and gave him a nod. He smiled, nodded back and told me to buy his record. The light turned green and he was off… R.I.P.” — Keith Denley, 4.14.13 / NY, NY

Not often that you see such an expanding brain take on skating the Courthouse Drop :)

The Skate Media™ loves Hungary’s Rios Crew. They’ve kept it interesting and evolving for so long. Just take it from Live’s lovely write-up on Mátyás Ricsi’s new Rios part, or the corresponding Grey interview with him about it. Budapest and Marseilles — that’s the post-pandemic travel wishlist, and that has everything to do with watching random skate edits on the internet ♥

More »

A Frantic Pleasure — Rios Crew’s Toló 2 is Now Live

Now that we have been anointed as the people who shout the loudest about the Rios videos, it is only right to inform you that their latest, Toló 2, is online in full.

Spot envy has long been an attraction of European skate videos. Thanks to those first three Flip videos, our younger selves came to imagine Europe as this mystic, open place where Le Dome and MACBA were down the street from one another (or as Frozen in Carbonite put it, “football-sized marble plazas [between] Louis IX-era office buildings.”) This allure of Euro videos has continued today, but honestly, the Rios videos never had that. It’s tough to think of a spot they skate that incites an immediate, “Damn! I want to skate that!”

More »

Rios Crew — Viktor Turcsik’s Toló 2 Part

We first became aware of Budapest’s Rios Crew around the time they released Toló. Here were these skaters in a country with the population of New York City, producing something that looked nothing like any Euro scene we had encountered at the time — almost if they were partitioned off from that current moment in 2014, and only had a dubbed VHS mix of Quim Cardona parts as a reference of skateboarding in the outside world.

More »