A Review of the Noseslides in Vans’ Propeller Video

Watching a big company skate video in 2015 is like watching a championship game between two teams you have no emotional attachment to. Everything built up to that moment, everyone’s been waiting a long time to see the result, the people involved are the best at what they do, but it’s impossible to go all in on. That’s why most verbal reviews of skate videos are prefaced with “The skating is obviously good…” At a certain age, there’s no point in re-watching any new video that doesn’t have your friends in it — or skaters that remind you of your friends.

…or at least people who clearly skate together.

With every big video, we find something to latch onto. Some watch them for the #fashion. Many watch them to catch sightings of the old guys without active Instagram accounts (these six seconds were the loudest the theater got on premiere night in New York.) Some do have friends that make it into company videos, so they watch it for the hometown heroes (e.g. it was probably loud as shit for the Richmond premiere.) Quartersnacks’ most common lens for discourse on this type of thing is the noseslide.

The Vans roster does not seem loaded with nosesliders — the video is largely devoid of ledges altogether, which are the noseslide’s most compatible partner — but Propeller does boast an ensemble of impressive nasal maneuvers.

Considering the Propeller cast’s most widely utilized maneuver is a long 5050 down a handrail, the last thing anyone expected to see was Tony Trujillo nosesliding a ledge. Even if it’s maybe not exactly T.N.T’s “most hip-hop moment” in his video history (Lord knows that’s impossible), it is the closest he’ll ever get to sharing a spirit animal with Mike Wright when he noseslid off the ten at Whitehall.

It may initially sound weird on paper, but the Andrew Allen-Dustin Dollin double feature works in that both of them are bound by a love for this most sacred maneuver. It is without question, the most noseslide-dependent portion of the video, and both take different approaches to the noseslide’s endless versatility.

Heavyset guys are well known for their reliance on the nose, and Allen’s technique earns extra points as he opts to pop his body weight out and over the ledge in nearly all cases. Dollin edges his nose to more dangerous heights, including a deceptively difficult one down an ultra-beveled Bronx double-kinked hubba (what other ledge already has a decade-old Paul Macnau lipslide and an Eli Reed switch 5050 in its A.B.D. archive, but is only now inputting a noseslide to the list? It’s usually the first trick to go down on that sort of spot, except the size of the bevel on that thing practically makes it round) and a terrifying slide down the inside portion of a shotgun rail. Always fancied Dollin as more of a tailslider, so it’s nice to see a late career focus on the northern side above the forbidden fourteen.

Rowley doesn’t bid farewell without giving his nose some screentime between a half-dozen returns to some bank spot he really likes. There’s no two-obstacle trick as familiar to the nose as dropping down from a higher ledge mid-slide to a lower one, or as playfully nostalgic to one’s mid-teen/mid-2000s ledge skating days as throwing a 270 shove out of one. And there’s no feat rarer in skateboarding than performing a noseslide in the middle of a transition line, which Pedro “Bigger Than Tony Hawk in Brazil” Barros does in his part.

A.V.E, who can usually be counted on for at least a switch front nose, forsakes the trick in his ending opus, but it’s probably okay. (It’s definitely okay.)

Though Governor Gall’s new part, or a repeat of Yaje’s Thrasher section are more likely to get fired up among cubicles in the QS office for weeks to come, you gotta hand it to Propeller for a strong peripheral concern in furthering skateboarding’s greatest building block. After all, propellers are at the nose of the plane.