Originally published at: Watch Natas Kaupas tear it up in 1989's skateboarding classic 'Streets on Fire' | Boing Boing
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This has long been my favourite skate clip. Natas’ style, that spin, and Brave Captain by Firehose (Mike Watt and George Hurley post Minutemen, with Ed from Ohio on guitar) as the soundtrack. I’ve loved this since I first saw it 25+ years ago. The video is still in my loft - can’t bear to part with it!
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I saw a clickbait video on YouTube the other day that asked whether Frankie Hill was a better street skater than Natas or Gonz. I did not click the thumbnail, though, because the answer is a huge hell no.
It’s amazing how much more I enjoy watching skatboarding on video than in real life. Watching someone do street skating tricks IRL feels like watching a staccato series of near disaster set to the accompaniment of much clattering. Like community theater, more fun to do than watch. But with low-angle filming and slowmo, it really is a beautiful ballet.
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0:34 I like where he turns the muffed jump on to the fire hydrant in to a big leap on to his board. That’s some quick thinking.
I cut my teeth skiing in Tahoe, and watching extreme skiing videos. Street skating videos seems so so so tiny compared to the vastness of a great ski run. It’s just a sidewalk and a wall, for like 30 feet. For some reason I never had access to the videos back in the day, and the magazines made all these moves look so epic. But it’s just like a fancy jump off a curb.
This is not a dig, it’s just my thoughts as I watch. I was a bad skater back then, and still am a bad longboarder now. I say it with love.
That’s the appeal of it to people that are into it. You’re taking a dull urban environment and transforming it into something exciting. When the 90s started to focus on the Xtreeeeem side of things, everything started to come across as highly skilled party tricks, and lost a lot of the appeal for me.
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