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.

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… 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 ♥

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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!”

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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.

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An Interview With Budapest’s Rios Crew

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There aren’t many videos coming out today that don’t remind you of twenty other videos that came out today. Skaters love to think they’re special ‘n shit, but fall back on formulas just like Hollywood. (Currently kicking an idea around the editor’s desk where we rank the Bronze knock-offs the way NY Mag ranked the Taken rip-offs.)

Last year’s Toló video was something different. Not that it didn’t have it’s influences — the QS post for it made a tongue-in-cheek comparison to New Jersey vids — but it didn’t look like anything else being thrown out on the internet at that time or time since. It helped that it came from a secluded (by skate industry standards) former Soviet-bloc country known as Hungary, via the “Rios Crew.” Their subsequent projects have been frequent and just as fun to watch. They’re on the shortlist of videos left in Hella Clips/IG-era skateboarding that are fairly certain to earn repeat viewings.

These guys speak varying levels of English. Instead of doing a massive group interview, we had the dudes with the best command of the English language mold the crew’s answers into one unifying response. Most of the names wouldn’t make individual sense to you anyway, so here is an interview with Hungary’s Rios “Crew.”

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What is the skate scene in Hungary like? Is Budapest the capital for it?

The skate scene is just as colorful as in the States, but with less skaters. The total population of Hungary is around 8.5 million, which is the same number of people you have in New York. There are maybe a thousand skaters in Budapest and let’s say another thousand spread throughout the country.

Skateboarding has been around in Budapest since the early eighties, but Hungary was still a communist country until 1989, so the first shop and park didn’t open until about 1991. Before that, you had to get gear from western countries. There are stories about guys who were selling H-street boards and other stuff before the first shop opened. There were skaters around back then, but it was never a common thing. The scene got quite heavy in the nineties and 2000s. We even had names like Rodney Mullen, Ed Templeton and Ethan Fowler in Budapest giving demos around in those years.

Every generation had a different central spot and shop. Our generation’s central spot was a square that was surprisingly built for skating around 2003, but after an accident, skating got banned there and it turned into a typical shitty pre-fab skatepark. It’s in the total center of the city and always crowded. We don’t go there.

We always meet at our D.I.Y. spot, Rió.

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