Public Domain DVD Review

The Public Domain DVD is the fourth in the Bones Brigade video series. It’s a bizarre, eclectic collage of skate footage, and boasts one of the largest collections of big name skaters in a team video. First available in 1988, Public Domain rocked the skate scene and raised the bar with its 60 minuets of tricks, crashes, interviews, and randomness. This new Public Domain DVD version has all the original old school footage, plus a little extra.

The new DVD version contains all the footage of the old Public Domain VHS tape. The sound and music are great on modern stereos, as opposed to the first few Bones Brigade movies. The DVD menus are nice and easy to use, and there’s a small extra bonus video that runs through the history of Stacey Peralta’s skate videos. It’s the same short bonus video that all of these new Bones Brigade DVDs feature. It would have been nice to have more extras on these DVDs – perhaps an interview with Stacey Peralta, George Powell or one of the skaters.

The full title of this film is “Public Domain, A Video Extravaganza in Living Color and Drop Dead B&W (Bones Brigade Video Four)”. Nice title. It does a good job of capturing the wild energy behind this video. While the first Bones Brigade video loosely followed a day in the life of Lance Mountain, and the third Bones Brigade video (The Search for Animal Chin) had a full-on story complete with a moral at the end, the second video of the Bones Brigade series (Future Primitive) was loose and disjointed. Public Domain takes the same route as Future Primitive, only even more crazy, with ADD flashes and random imagery attacking your senses between segments. For someone with a short attention span like me, this was a plus. The music is a fusion of the funky comic Johnny Rad style music of the first three videos, and regular rock. I think this video would do a good job holding the attention of today’s young skaters the same way it did back in the late 80s.

One huge thing that the Public Domain DVD has going for it is an army of skaters who are big name pros today. You see Tony Hawk, Rodney Mullen, Lance Mountain, Steve Caballero – all these guys that are featured in the previous Bones Brigade videos, but Public Domain also has Bucky Lasek, Danny Way, Chet Thomas (who’s hardly more than a kid in Public Domain), and Mike Vallely (who runs as super speeds through a cemetery, and skates all over the nation’s capitol).

The video also features the skating skills of Mike McGill, Tommy Guerrero, Colin McKay, Casey McKay, Rich Grassett, Frankie Hill, Jim Theibaud, Rob Washburn, Doug Smith, Jake Bradley, Eric Sanderson, Chris Borst, Kevin Harris, Mark Sato, Steve Saiz, Ray Barbie, Sofie, Brandon Chapman, Anita Tenneshon, and Lori Rigsby– that’s 28 skaters on the Bones Brigade team. The only video with a larger team that I’ve seen is the Red Dragons video, but that’s something a little different. The list here doesn’t include Stacey Peralta, who we get to see skate more the Public Domain DVD than the other Bones videos. He is incredible – with strong ties back to the days when skateboarding was really “sidewalk surfing”, Peralta cuts and carves the roads, dragging his paws like he was slicing waves.

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