The State of BMX Videos in 1990

Eddie Roman's Aggroman (Mat Hoffman clip above), was like a movie and it was awesome when it came out.  But after a couple views, we treated it like a porno, fast forward through all the sketchy acting to get to the good stuff.  This was the best known rider-made video when I released The Ultimate Weekend in 1990.  Mark Eaton's original Dorkin' In York came out around then, too.

At an AFA Velodrome contest in 1986, I was hanging in my hotel room with the rest of the Off The Wall factory team.  Off The Wall was a really crappy bike made by some Taiwanese company.  It's a long story, but it eventually turned into the Air/Uni and then the Ozone, which were good bikes.  Anyhow, Eddie Roman walked into our room with a VHS tape in his hand, and said he had something to show us.  It was a video, I think he made it for a class in school, and it was called "Aggro Riding and Kung Fu Fighting."  It was funny and had some good riding in it, but the technical quality wasn't very good.  But we didn't care.  It was a video made by an actual BMX freestyler, and not just any freestyler, Eddie Roman, Skway factory guy and street riding legend.  THAT was the beginning of the rider-made video movement.  But we didn't know that at the time.  After Eddie showed us the video, he ran out to some other room full of riders to show it off again.

The next year, 1987, I produced six videos for the American Freestyle Association.  They were real simple, and all contest footage.  In 1988, Ron Wilkerson called on me to edit the 2-Hip season video, which you can now find online as 2-Hip BHIP.  I was working at Unreel Productions by that time, the video company owned by Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear.  Eddie Roman got a job at a local video production company around the same time.  Meanwhile, across the U.S. in Pennsylvania, Plywood Hood Mark Eaton (we called him Lungmustard then) started making VHS videos of himself, Kevin Jones, and the rest of the Hoods.  All of these videos were pretty sketchy technically, but they had great riding.  That's what riders around the country, and around the world wanted to see.  There was no internet then, we only had magazines to learn about freestyle, and the occasional, completely over-produced BMX Plus!  or Vision video, where everyone was wearing leathers and helmets, even riding flatland. 

That was the environment when I decided to completely self-produce my own video in 1990, which, of course, was The Ultimate Weekend.  None of us considered rider-made videos a movement yet, we just wanted something that showed "real riding."  Nobody was making videos like that.  Our punk rock, D.I.Y. influence led Eddie, Mark, and I to make our own videos.  Little did we know, it was the start of a revolution, not only in BMX, but in all action sports.