If you were too young to have experienced the real-time reign of the skaters most synonymous with the nineties — but had already clocked your 10,000 hours of watching skate videos by the time, say, Jake Johnson hit the scene — there’s a decent chance you carry a vivid memory of first seeing Zered in a video (especially if you grew up in the northeast.)
Skateboard videos are fairytales: a solitary skater or chosen crew plus filmer, showcasing the fruits of their labor within a rotation of backdrops. If a pedestrian, security guard or lurker is particularly memorable, they’re sometimes allowed inside of the tale for an interlude. But otherwise, every skate video is its own bubble, cordoned off from any factors that might impede the illusion that skateboarding is the only thing that exists.
Just as Warren Buffett off-loaded his shares in airlines given the foreseeable future of travel, skate companies have began doing the same with their stockades of footage from pre-COVID19 trips. Any clips from far-off lands coming out once we hit the dog days of the pandemic are bound to be dated by default — like, anyone who switched their pants game up in quarantine is gonna have a tough time convincing the skateboarding public that their Euro footage wearing last year’s silhouettes is current ;)
