Video Days Turns 35 — The Blind VHS That Invented Everything

Summer 1991. A 23-year-old kid named Mark Gonzales jumps into a beat-up Oldsmobile with four friends and a camcorder. Spike Jonze is holding the camera; nobody knows him yet. What they’re about to bring back will forever change how skateboarding is filmed.

⏱ Reading: 5 min

The Kid Who Said No to Vert

In the early 90s, the American skateboarding scene was dying. The vert — the giant ramps, the McTwist flags, the neon outfits — was on its last legs. The Powell Peralta kids who filled arenas were now in their thirties, and nobody wanted to be like them anymore.

Mark Gonzales, though, understood before everyone else. As early as 1988, with his part in Streets on Fire, he headed for the street, the curbs, the handrails. In 1989, he did the first known boardslide on a handrail. In 1990, he left Vision and founded Blind with Steve Rocco — the name was a direct jab at Vision. The industry still reeked of polish. Gonz was about to bring dirt, jazz, and a completely off-kilter sense of humor to it.

Spike Jonze, an Oldsmobile, and Coltrane

Behind the camera: Spike Jonze. Not even 22 years old. He hadn’t yet directed Being John Malkovich, hadn’t yet filmed the Beastie Boys in Sabotage, hadn’t yet won an Oscar. He was a BMX photographer for Freestylin’, and he had a simple idea: film his friends like a documentary, not an ad.

The film opens with War’s Low Rider. Five skaters — Mark Gonzales, Guy Mariano, Rudy Johnson, Jason Lee, Jordan Richter — pile into a dented blue Oldsmobile Ninety-Eight Regency and head out on a road trip. You see them hanging out, sliding curbs in California, missing tricks, laughing. Gonz gets his own part, set to John Coltrane’s Traneing In, and 90s Thrasher magazine had never dared to put hard bop on a street part. The choice changed everything.

Project budget: ridiculous. Runtime: 22 minutes. Format: VHS. Number of copies sold: nobody knows, but every kid who walked into a skateboarding shop in 1992 left with the same one under their arm.

The Template Nobody Dared to Break

Watch any skateboarding video released in the last three decades. Girl’s Mouse (1996). Yeah Right! (2003). Fully Flared (2007). The Deathwish Video (2013). Today’s Thrasher parts. They all use the same grammar: a collective road-trip intro, individual parts set to good music, bails left in the edit, absurd skits between sections.

This grammar was established by Video Days. Before 1991, a skateboarding video looked like a Powell Peralta catalog — tricks strung together to hair metal, skaters filmed like gymnasts. After Video Days, a skateboarding video looks like an indie film that forgot it was a sport.

The film also launched careers. Spike Jonze pivoted to Hollywood. Jason Lee abandoned his pro skater career, went to film with Kevin Smith, ended up in My Name Is Earl. Guy Mariano became a technical legend of skateboarding videos. And Gonz entered another dimension — one where he had nothing left to prove to anyone. Even today, his signature board at Krooked sells like it’s day one.

35 Years Later, We Still Film Like It’s ’91

Open TikTok tonight. Type skate. Scroll through a hundred clips. You’ll see cuts to 90s hip-hop tracks, bails left in, goofy skits between lines, shaky fisheyes. The 2026 Reel format has only compressed the language of Video Days into 45 seconds.

Even stronger: Blind’s iconography from that era — reaper deck with the grim reaper, drooling graffiti logo — has become half the graphics you see in shops in 2026. 15-year-old kids buying a Vans Gonz pro model have never seen the VHS. Yet they’re still carrying the legacy on their feet.

If you’ve never watched Video Days in its entirety, you’ve got two hours of your weekend not to waste. The VHS is available everywhere online; those 22 minutes will reset your brain. And if you want to dig into the rest of the story, we’ve written a complete portrait of Mark Gonzales that tells what he’s done with his 35 years since.

The truth is, nothing has surpassed Video Days. We’ve equaled it maybe three times. We’ve copied it a hundred thousand times. We’ve never made it obsolete. That’s probably the best definition of a classic you can write.