720 appeared in the mall arcade promising answers to the tao of skating that, alas, remained elusive no matter how many quarters we pumped into it. These were the years before Thrasher showed up in the bookstores but Thrashin' and Police Academy 4 were on movie screens. These were the years when my friends and I slowly and painfully began to realize that those Nashes and Valterras we were riding weren’t going to be enough. By the end of ’87 I had reached the turning point where I realized skateboarding was not going to be just a diversion for me, but a passion.
Thankfully, it's all fueled by a killer soundtrack, featuring a cavalcade of rock from The Clash, The Sex Pistols, Echo and The Bunnymen, Joy Division, Pavement, Oingo Boingo, New Order, and more, so there's plenty of energy to spare.For me 19 were the years of a sort subliminal indoctrination into skateboarding. That might sound like a weird complaint for a documentary about the world's greatest skateboarder, but with a 135-minute runtime, you start to feel the length after seeing so much sick skateboarding. In fact, there might be a little too much skating footage. Whether it's from his family's home videos or the underground tapes of The Bones Brigade, the first crew that Hawk joined as a teenager, you get to see this lanky kid pissing off older pros with his upward ollie, which he pioneered only because he was too skinny for inertia to give himself enough height above the bowls to properly do tricks. Since Hawk's career was rising alongside the increasing availability of camcorders and VCRs, there's an endless amount of footage of Hawk skating in his early years. Despite finally finding something that he loved, he was an outcast in his own sport. His lanky figure and unique approach to pool bowl boarding put a target on his back, especially when he started winning competitions and signaling the beginning of the end for the old guard of skaters. But despite Hawk's success, to those skateboarders who came before him, he was a nuisance. Even Hawk's father got in on the action by creating the National Skateboarding Association to regulate competitions. "Until the Wheels Fall Off" begins in the 1980s when skateboarding was enjoying one of several peaks in its popularity in the past 40 years.
0 kommentar(er)
