Top 5 Most Influential Street Parts in Skateboarding History

There's a VHS tape sitting in an attic somewhere in France with a label scrawled in marker. The film is worn out in the exact same places from being rewound so many times. You know those places by heart, because that's where the trick lands, where the sound of the impact snaps to the beat of the music, where you understood for the first time that skating could be something other than a sport.

Five videos did that harder than the rest. Not five among many — five that changed the direction of street skating for everyone who came after. Every trick that drops in a pro video today owes a debt to one of these parts. Usually to more than one.

Video Days - 1991: Gonz invents the future at a garbage spot

Video Days - 1991. Blind Skateboards. Mark Gonzales skates sidewalks, busted walls, a half-welded chunk of rail. The camera is handheld on the shoulder, the sound is the sound of the spot — stone, plastic, wind. And in a setting that looks like any street in any American city, Gonz pulls stuff that doesn't have a name yet.

What hits you about Video Days - 1991 is the flat-out refusal of TV heroics. No slow motion on the landing. No dramatic music. Gonz's part plays like an improvised walk where the tricks show up the way ideas do — naturally, without announcing their own importance. He skates the street like the street had always been a skatepark, and like nobody else had noticed it before him.

Jason Lee is in the same video. His part is foundational too — a technical fluidity that's a solid ten years ahead of what street skating is about to become. But it's Gonz who stuck in the collective memory, because Gonz skates like someone who thinks with his body. Every line is a sentence. Every spot is a word.

Gonz wasn't doing street skating. He was writing poetry with concrete and four wheels. — Video Days - 1991, the video that changed what the word "spot" means

Questionable - 1992: Plan B drags the technical bar into another dimension

A year after Video Days - 1991, Plan B drops Questionable - 1992. The difference hits immediately. It's still street, but something has shifted in the standard — the tricks are sharper, more complex, the combinations more ambitious. Mike Ternasky, running Plan B at the time, wanted to show what street skating could become if you pushed the technical side all the way.

Mike Carroll's part in Questionable - 1992 is a lesson in style. Clean, efficient, not one wasted motion. Rick Howard's reinvents what you can do on a ledge. And Rodney Mullen's part, shot on flat, is technically off the charts — tricks nobody but him ever invented, landed with the consistency of a machine that somehow has feelings.

Questionable - 1992 asks the question street skating will keep asking itself for the next twenty years: how far can this go? Plan B's answer in 1992 is that nobody's hit the ceiling yet. And that answer set a whole generation of riders loose.

Menikmati - 2000: éS Footwear and the art of filming street like cinema

Menikmati - 2000. éS Footwear. The handoff between the 90s and the 2000s happens right here, in this video, and you can almost hear the click. Eric Koston skates with a precision that makes your head spin — every trick placed exactly where it belongs, with exactly the force it needs. Not an ounce of wasted energy.

But Menikmati - 2000 is also Arto Saari. The Finnish side of the video is brutal in a way street skating hadn't shown yet — massive spots, tall rails, total physical commitment. Arto skates like every trick could be his last one. That tension between Koston's finesse and Arto's raw power sums up on its own what street skating can be: technical AND raw, never one without the other.

The filming in Menikmati - 2000 changes the rules too. You go from a documentary language to something that looks like cinema. The spot gets staged, the angle picked, the light worked. Skating starts thinking of itself as an image, not just an act.

Koston in Menikmati - 2000 is 5 minutes that redefined what "technical" means in street. — The moment éS turned a shoe brand into a cultural legacy

Sorry - 2002: Flip Skateboards brings Europe up to world level

Sorry - 2002. Flip Skateboards. The video that proved top-tier street skating wasn't a California exclusive. Geoff Rowley, Tom Penny, Arto Saari again — riders out of Liverpool, out of Bristol, out of Finland. People who learned to skate on wet concrete with ledges that fought back, in cities where skating got tolerated on rainy days.

Tom Penny's part in Sorry - 2002 is the one people are still talking about. Penny skates with a nonchalance that's the exact opposite of what you'd expect at that technical level. The tricks land like accidents that took years to prepare. A nollie heelflip on some random curb says more than most switch flips down a fifteen-stair.

Sorry - 2002 is also Ty Evans's filming hitting maturity. The edit is tighter, the music choices own an aesthetic, the video has a personality that isn't just the sum of its parts. Flip Skateboards isn't a European brand trying to do it like the Americans anymore — it's a brand with its own voice. And that voice has plenty to say.

Stay Gold - 2010: Emerica closes one decade, opens another

Stay Gold - 2010. Emerica. If the four videos before it defined street skating in the 90s and 2000s, Stay Gold - 2010 is the one that documents the end of an era and cracks open something new. Brandon Westgate, Andrew Reynolds, Bryan Herman, Kevin "Spanky" Long — a team skating monumental spots with a raw honesty that refuses anything comfortable.

Brandon Westgate's part in Stay Gold - 2010 is still one of the most physically insane in street history. Ten-stair rails, staircases most riders wouldn't even look at, impacts that hurt to watch. Westgate doesn't "style" his tricks — he forces them into existence on willpower alone.

Andrew Reynolds does something else entirely. At that point in his career he could have coasted on a solid part. Instead he goes after spots that would have put him in danger at 20. Reynolds's part in Stay Gold - 2010 is an answer to everybody who figured hardcore street had had its day.

Emerica closes a loop. Stay Gold - 2010's references run straight back to the videos of the early 90s — same commitment, same refusal of the easy spectacle, same conviction that street skating doesn't owe a panel of judges any justification. Just the trick, the spot, the camera. Nothing else.

Stay Gold - 2010 is the last great video of the pre-Instagram era. After that, everything changes. — Emerica, 2010, the end of a world we never saw leaving

What these five parts have in common — and what we lost

Every one of these videos was filmed on real asphalt, at real spots, with real constraints. Not some artificial plaza signed off by a committee. Not an outdoor park designed so the camera gets a nice angle. Streets, curbs, rails found by accident on a Sunday afternoon.

What they also share is time. Questionable - 1992 took months. Sorry - 2002 was spread across two years of filming. This is the pre-social-media era, when a video is an event, not a piece of content you push out before the end of the week. That slowness shows up in every shot — the spots are chosen, the angles thought through, the tricks tried hundreds of times before a camera was ever there.

Three-minute YouTube clips today can be technically better than any part on this list. The tricks are crazier, the spots bigger, the image quality isn't even in the same universe. But something got lost along the way — that feeling that an entire video is an argument, not a collection of highlights. That every trick exists inside the context of a crew, a city, a moment.

Rewind. Watch Video Days - 1991 one night. Watch Gonz skate that street like nobody's looking. And remember why you put a board under your feet in the first place.

What about you — which one of these parts made you realize skating was something other than a sport? Drop it in the comments ↓