EPICLY LATER’D

By Patrick O’Dell

I called Ty Evans to ask if he had any unused Guy Mariano footage and he said, “You know what I have? Twenty raw tapes that Spike filmed for Video Days.” Holy shit… I raced over there while making frantic phone calls to Spike to see if it was cool to dub them. To me, these are the Dead Sea Scrolls of skateboarding. I honestly believe that Video Days is the greatest skate video ever made. It captures the best in skateboarding—technical progression, artfulness, style, fun—and even 18 years later it doesn’t look dated. There is no other skate video ever made that I would like to sit down and watch raw footage from.

These tapes had been sitting in various closets and storage spaces before finding their way to Ty’s house. At one point in the late 90s, the tapes must have been in Mark Gonzales’s possession because there are parts of the footage that are dubbed over with footage of Mark for Real’s Non Fiction video. I sat there watching tape after tape and couldn’t help feeling like I was in a time machine. There are so many tricks that were never even used in the final cut, and many of the tricks that did make it into the video were just done spontaneously or on the first try. It was amazing watching Mark invent a trick that would forever change skateboarding in real time.

Anyway, don’t worry—I am not going to hog these tapes just for myself. In the Guy Mariano episodes of Epicly Later’d we are pillaging the fuck out of them, and I hope at least some skaters will be as excited as I am. Thank you Ty and Spike!

Watch Epicly Later’d on VBS.TV.