VHS gold right here!
There’s a whole era of epoch-forming skateboarding out there relegated to low resolution, badly compressed, purgatory due to a combination of music rights, and a slackness of behalf of certain brands to catalogue their pre-Internet video output.
And, as VHS tapes sit rotting in boxes across the world and the availability of VHS players becomes more scarce, unless we’re careful, some of the greatest video releases in our history will not be available to the next generations.
Happily, Crailtap appear to be bucking this trend by finally beginning to upload their own video back catalogue, in high quality, to their own dedicated Crailtap Vimeo account.

For whatever reason, this process seems to have been undertaken with virtually no fanfare whatsoever, (with us discovering that it was happening almost by accident) so we figured that somebody probably ought to make a bit of noise about this archiving project, and if nobody else was going to, that we would.

Paco-720×480-Vimeo-H264 from Crailtap on Vimeo.

Released in 1995, a year after the Girl Skateboard brand‘s inaugural video ‘Goldfish‘ (which incidentally you can also view in full over at the Crailtap Vimeo), ‘Las Nueve Vidas de Paco’, or ‘Paco’ as it’s more commonly referred to as, was the first video from the then newly formed sister company to Girl, namely Chocolate Skateboards.
Featuring sections from all the original team riders: Ben Sanchez, Chico Brenes, Daniel Castillo, Gabriel Rodriguez, Keenan Milton, Mike York, Paulo Diaz, Richard Mulder and Shamil Randle, and with a Spike Jonze Western movie skit running throughout – Paco set the tone for all Chocolate videos that followed.

This is a strong favourite of ours, and of all students of mid-90’s street skating, so if you’ve never seen it, or you haven’t watched it in an age, then take this opportunity to sit back and wallow in 32 minutes of VHS nostalgia with skateboarding that 100% still stands up in 2018.
Bracketed with Keenan Milton’s opening part (complete with cameos from Gino Iannucci and Eric Pupeki) and ending on Gabriel Rodriguez’s last proper section – if this doesn’t have you rushing off to Gap to buy some over-sized biege chino’s then there’s something wrong with you, (or me, potentially).