Intro + Interview by Adam Abada
Reynolds has been around a lot of skateboarding and is responsible for putting some of the best of it into the world, be it with his own parts or anyone on his companies. Just a few months out from the release of Baker 4, we hit him up to see what has stuck out for him over the years and what might influence his own videos.
Photo by Ben Colen
Skateboarding has unavoidable surface-level parts that trace back to their modern counterparts, and there are always some “that makes sense” thoughts when doing the Five Faves interviews. (Gino going heavy with the mini ramp skating is perhaps one of the few genuine off-guard ones.) For example, everyone thinks to mention Huf and Reese when talking about dudes who honed four or five things to absolute perfection, but there’s always room to go a bit deeper, e.g. Donger deserves to be brought up in that conversation just as fast.
We’ve pretty much posted every video Cyrus has been in since his Mama’s Boys part went online in 2013, so these all “made sense” — but will say that none of them were obvious ;)
Request line is always open!
Photo by Alex Pires
Past generations of skateboarders outside the U.S. felt like they kept one eye on America, the unavoidable center of skateboarding’s media and industry, and another inward on their native scenes. British skateboarding, on the other hand, felt like it had to look three ways: towards America, around its European neighbors, and at itself, as a place that produced distinctly English skate videos that looked unlike anything else.
It is tempting to call Jacob Harris’ “Atlantic Drift” series on Thrasher the most beloved video franchise coming out of the U.K. today. Except the videos are less an insular sum of their influences, and more a global portrait of a particular brand of skateboarding, as seen through an English lens. It was no surprise that Jacob’s influences came from all over the place ;)
As the amount of skateboard content has grown to uncontainable levels, it has been interesting to watch the reassessment of what people value in a skater, part or video. Everyone has sat stone-faced through a part with incredible skating before, and left without being able to remember a single trick twenty minutes later. Jamal’s Palasonic part was the exact opposite of that. It was impossible to watch without smiling, and carried that “he’s having so much fun that I want to go have fun!”-feeling from childhood in a way that few things do once you clock your 10,000 hours of watching skate videos.
We caught up with the 2017 Q.S.S.O.T.Y., star of skateboarding’s first viral video, and someone whose skateboarding always leaves you with a fuzzy feeling inside to get a rundown of his inspirations.
Circa 2010 photo via the first-ever QS party ♥
If you cite the era surrounding Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater as when you first started skating (we all know nobody started skating in 2000 because they miraculously saw Photosynthesis in their dreams, stop pretending), P-Rod was likely one of your first favorite skaters. He was one of the main dudes in his mid-teens ripping as hard as established pros then, so it’s funny to see that a lot of what he looked for in his favorites back then was …people in roughly the same age group as him, ripping as hard as established pros.
Some of these turned anecdotal, which is obvs what you’d expect from someone who spent the majority of his life in the skate industry e.g. apparently he talked about the Baker thing in his Nine Club, which I missed, but had no idea that was ever in the cards.
