The Bones Brigade Video Show DVD

The Bones Brigade Video Show was the first real skateboarding video made - and now it's available on DVD. in the early 80's, skateboarding was comming out of a dark age. Powell and Peralta teamed up to form the Bones Brigade team with members like Tony Hawk and Rodney Mullen. The Bones Brigade Video Show is full of old school skating, and tells the tale of skateboarding's earlier years.

This movie features everyone – twenty years ago! Most of the video follows Lance Mountain through a day of skating around different skate spots in LA. Lots of old school street skating, low to the ground full of bonelesses, no-complies and slides. Lance hits all kinds of places, like Venice beach, where he watches Per Welinder do some awesome freestyle. The video is clever – Lance stops and looks at a magazine article about Rodney Mullen, and the video fades to Mullen doing his awesome freestyle. Later, Mountain goes into a skate shop and sees a Tony Hawk deck, and the image fades to Tony in the big pool at the Del Mar Skate Ranch, shredding the place much to the delight and amazement of the audience (who seem to be mostly elderly people).

The other sequences include the “Downhill Slide” with Stacey Peralta bombing down a hill to 80’s guitar riffs, a backyard halfpipe session with hilariously cheesy shots of hot girls watching, and “The Amazing Mr. Mullen” pulls out his usual what-the-heck-was-that freestyle. One of the goals of the video was to show new skaters what had been going on during those dark years. For new skaters today, you get to see what your heroes were doing back when they were your age, and what skateboarding looked like two decades ago. The Bones Brigade Video Show is fun and refreshing. It came out before the punk attitude really took hold, and you can tell that these guys are just having fun. The style of filming is totally different from what we have today – the Bones Brigade videos are all about capturing the action and spirit of the skaters.

And finally, about the technical features of the DVD version. The DVD is well put together. The DVD only has one extra feature – a cool video starting with super old footage of Stacy Peralta skating from 1972-80 that blends with a background collage of old graphics, boards, and stickers. The background pans by with clips and dates of all the Peralta skate videos sliding by. It’s very cool to watch – Stacey Peralta is a filming genius and an incredible service to skateboarding with his work on these videos.

Make sure to check out the reviews of the other Bones Brigade DVDs (Future Primitive, The Search for Animal Chin, and Basic Training Plus). The soundtrack to the Bones Brigade movies is also available.