Happy Skate Shop Day everybody. Oh that was a month ago? Then I invoke the trite and often empty expression that “every day is skate shop day” since every day is indeed a good day to support your local skate shop, is it not? Now, don’t you feel silly?

So, here I am. Tapped by the golden hands of Jenkem to espouse on the glory of the shop video by highlighting ten of the best that have ever graced a sticker emblazoned VCR/TV at a skate shop. As always, this is a scientific, peer reviewed essay and is absolutely the be-all-end-all list of worthwhile shop videos.

Compiling this list, I realized that while shop videos exist all over the country, and yes, the world, shop videos are not a big thing in California. At least not Southern California. Being in close proximity to the industry meant skaters would prioritize their footage for their sponsors’ projects over a shop video. “Company” videos had a bigger distribution, so why “waste” footage on a video that only a fraction of the people would see?

Regardless, a handful of videos slipped out and Santa Barbara’s Church of Skatan churned out a doozy. Wild in the Streets was out around the same time as Fulfill the Dream, so if you were into Shorty’s at all, Church of Skatan felt like they had a whole video of what we now take for granted as B-Sides and Bonus Material. Unlike most of the other videos on this list, this one has a lot more humor, inside jokes, and an unpolished personality, which are all things that can be often lacking in skate filmmaking.

The saying “you have to leave to come home again” comes to mind when thinking about this video. Although Welcome to MIA is loaded with Miami area locs and legends, the bulk of the video is bolstered with a roster of active ams and pros cobbled together by Josh Stewart who’d already cemented his place in skateboarding with Adio’s One Step Beyond and his Static series. With a team like Brian Delatorre, Forrest Kirby, Joel Meinholz, Ed Selego, and Jahmal Williams who’d all ventured off to New York or California to pursue pro skating at some point, Welcome To MIA served as a homecoming of sorts for these guys.

For Stewart, putting this video together had to feel like playing with house money. What other shop could have earnestly gotten this lineup for a shop video without there being significant mail order money behind it? Few, if any, but thankfully MIA got their people together and came through with one of the best produced independent shop videos of all time.

Some things you think are going to last forever, and Pitcrew was one of those things. It was such an iconic, landmark East Coast skate shop that was home to so many incredible skateboarders that it was easy to assume that it would always stay standing. Alas, nothing gold can stay and Pitcrew shuttered at the end of 2017. Although the shop is gone, we still have Where I’m From to remember them by.

Bobby Worrest skates to Simon and Garfunkel. Pat Smith skates to CCR. Zach Lyons to the Cardigans. Pulaski gets its shine. And the world got its first taste of Darren Harper. Where I’m From also had touching tributes to some of Pitcrew’s fallen family. Although the Internet has definitely slowed down the production of full-length shop videos, at least it can serve as a hub to host past projects for everyone to remember and enjoy for years to come.

Every skateboarding video is a timepiece of the era in which it was filmed and produced. Shop videos have the extra focus of being honed in on a specific area, and exist long after the lifespan of even the shop itself. I’ve never been to Fobia and I’ll never be able to either because while they were the well-known Minneapolis shop of their time, they went out of business in 2008 or so.

Despite this, their name lives on through their videos, and the talents they helped showcase to the rest of the skate world. Not only did Fobia give us our first glimpse of guys like Steve Nesser, Clint Peterson, Seth McCallum, and so on. Fobia also offered an up and coming artist by the name of Todd Bratrud his introduction to the skateboarding industry. So for all of that, and more, Hatebreeders gets a spot on the list.

Shops are the tributaries that flow the industry a lot of the pieces that make it function day in and day out. Such is the case with skate filmers and photographers, as evidenced by Escapist’s own Ryan Lovell. Lovell cut his teeth making homie videos then got brought into the fold at Escapist where he helped bring the shop’s Red and Yellow to life. Red and Yellow padded Lovell’s resume and allowed him opportunities that lead him to multiple projects at Vans a la No Other Way, Spinning Away, and Take It Back.

While it doesn’t hurt to have Sean Malto garnering eyes towards your shop video, the whole Escapist crew came together and delivered a video that is uniquely Kansas City. Football commentary aside, KC’s skate scene is unlike any other I’ve ever experienced and it’s safe to say that Escapist is a huge part of all of it. Thankfully, they are still in business today, which unfortunately is not the case for most of the shops that produced the videos on this list.

Every skate video is a passion project, but independent videos in the Internet age are almost entirely fueled by passion alone. Unless you’re selling merch or hoping for an uptick on online sales, where can a shop recoup the investment on an independent film project? As Kyle Beachy put it when writing about the release of St. Losers, “At heart, it’s all product; skateboarding lives and dies by product; its veins course with seasonal releases of constantly updated product. What’s refreshing about St. Losers and other videos like it is the way their only real product is the city itself.”

St. Losers, like most shop videos, is a celebration of the city, its people, and the time in which it was made.Gabe Kehoe did an incredible job capturing the essence of St. Louis and its skaters. Sadly, it may be the last of its kind. Since the release of St. Losers in 2013, there have not been many full-length shop videos that really moved the needle, and there doesn’t seem to be a big push to change that.

But times change and where the full-length fades, quick shop edits sprout up. Like skateboarding itself, skate videos evolve and change formats and mediums and adapt to fit the latest platform. Thankfully we have the shop videos that we do, and skaters and filmers will always want to make videos in some form.

I can already hear the comments on this one, and I get you. Supreme is a skate shop the way that a Big Mac is a “sandwich”, but they are a brick and mortar that has sold skateboards and skate accessories for over 30 years, so they count, whether you like it or not. And while their video production has slowed down in recent years, Bill Strobeck has churned out a bunch of quality edits, and unquestionably Cherry would be their opus.

Cherry inarguably feels like the least “shop” video of this list for a litany of reasons. Strobeck was already a well-established filmer who had an all star ensemble of skaters to work with, music access, and other luxuries not often afforded to your average independent skate shop. But the proof is in the pudding, and Strobeck seamlessly put together a timeless video that brought an ensemble cast of skaters together under one video in a way that only he could.

What Aaron Meza accomplished with Penal Code is something very special. As Thrasher puts it, “Penal Code is canon.” It’s a timepiece for San Francisco skateboarding in an era where the people involved, the spots, and the talent were all firing at peak levels, and the right person was there to capture it all in a way that honored the moment and preserved it for all of us forever after.

Granted, FTC was, and to this day is still, a hub for San Francisco’s world class skaters, which afforded Meza access to the likes of Mike Carroll, Keith Hufnagel, Bobby Puleo, etc, a luxury most skate shops don’t have. Thankfully Meza was up for the task and delivered one of the best videos of all time, which also happened to be for an independent skate shop.

Sub Zero’s Real Life might be the yang to Penal Code’s yin. Similar to FTC, the Sub Zero videos were able to capture a very specific moment in skateboarding’s developing history, and Dan Wolfe was doing it as it was unfolding in a place where it would most likely not be seen otherwise. The spots were raw, as were the skaters themselves, and the skating had a little more grunt behind it. Like Penal Code, Real Life also highlighted an iconic skate plaza in its untapped prime.

It’s arguable that the skating at EMB was captured on video at its peak, while Love Park’s was still on the ascent. While Meza battled losing footage to board sponsor projects, Wolfe might have been able to get this project out quicker because the East Coast had less eyes on it at the time, and less pull away from filming for his one video project. Regardless, Real Life is the golden amber of East Coast skateboarding and gave the world its first taste of several legends in the making.

It’s hard to fully convey what a phenomenon PJ Ladd’s Wonderful Horrible Life was when Boston’s Coliseum released it to the world in 2002. If you were a kid, PJ Ladd’s ending part was mind blowing. If you were a pro back then, it was mind blowing and probably absolutely terrifying as well.

Seemingly coming out of nowhere, the video showcased PJ’s insane abilities and his next level, flawlessly executed tricks. It made PJ Ladd a household name overnight and it lit all of skateboarding on fire. Alongside PJ, the video featured an insane roster of Alexis Sablone, Ryan Gallant, Jereme Rogers, and more. There are only a handful of video parts that quite literally changed the path of skateboarding from that point after, but this one did. And it did it in a shop video.

It’s conceivable that PJ’s part could have ended up in an Element Am video, which was in talks at the time. Although the tricks would still be the same, I’d argue that it would not have had the same impact if an Element video had been the vehicle where the world had first seen it. Something about finding out about an unknown generational talent from a shop video just added to the enigmatic nature of PJ Ladd.

Written by: Christian Senrud
Header Illustration by: Michael Giurato
Brag about your VHS collection on Facebook
Nostalogia-bait on Instagram and Twitter