It is the oldest joke ever told — older than the one about martinis and boobs, or the one about American healthcare.
“How many skateboarders does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”
Ha ha ha! “One to do it, one to film it, and another ten to say ‘Yeahhh!'” Ha ha ha!
But what about during a global pandemic? Suddenly, in the era of social distancing, those ten friends plus filmer cease to be C.D.C-compliant.
We all agree that conversations about Instagram are an egregious insult to our short time on earth. Yet, we cannot help ourselves. How do we crack the algorithm? How do we attain #maximum #exposure? How do we make a million dollars doing not that much, or at least get a follow-back from @emrata to give us a reason for getting up in the morning?
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.
Before we let this year — let alone decade — go on any further, we felt it necessary to purge the office harddrives of any B-roll, raw files, extras, outtakes, etc. from the past ~18 months so we can lay the decade’s footage to rest.
Of all the peculiar trends to afflict modern skate videos, not putting skaters’ names is one of the most annoying — especially for anyone who came of age in the latter days of the “video magazine.” (We’ll forget the name of the person who introduced themselves to us five seconds ago, but will remember the name of the dude who did a nollie tailside bigspin in a Logic video 16 years ago…)
