Pokematic Reviews Dogtown and Z-boys

If it's not a good game or catholic...who do you call?...why Pokematic, "hi."

I recently watch the documentary Dogtown and Z-boys, a documentary on the original skate punks of Dogtown, the pioneers of modern extreme skateboarding. Now I myself am not and never was a skater, and never really had any desire to. However, I did love me some Rock Power and Tony Hawk Pro-skater, and wore out my tape of An Extremely Goofy Movie, so it is a bit of an interest for me. Though I must say, I think this is the first documentary I've ever reviewed, so I don't know exactly how this is going to go down.

I guess I'll start with what the movie is about. Dogtown tells essentially the complete history of the Zeffer skate team, and how they pioneered skateboarding to be the main stream hobby/sport that it is today. Seeing that this is a documentary, I'll summarize the complete history that it covers. I'm not sure if this is a "spoiler" per-say, but if you don't know the Z-boys' story from The Lords of Dogtown or skate history and want to get it from this documentary, consider yourself warned.

It starts with the early introduction of skateboarding, and what made Dogtown the perfect breading ground for modern day skateboarding. We also get some backstory on how urethane wheels made skateboarding possible. Soon following we get our introduction to the Z-boys, and how they took skateboarding from a children's toy to a main stream sport, bread out of "urban surfing." We see how they entered early competitions, and how the judges never saw anything like it before. Then there was the backyard pools that they skated, and how from empty in-ground pools vert skating was born. How the z-boys found sponsorships and made a career of skating. And coming to an end with the Dogbowl, a place where one of their fiends who was dying of brain cancer convinced his dad to drain their pool and let his z-boy friends skate it. It was all the old crew coming together once again, like the old days.

Now I will talk about the more "technical" aspects of how the story is told. The primary way the story is conveyed is through archived footage, still images/magazine clips, and interviews with the Jay, Stacy, Tony, and Peggy; and some other commentators such as Skip and the writer for Skateboard magazine. Seeing that it was the 70s, I'm a bit surprised that there was so much archived video of these guys. Then again, when you pioneer a sport, people take notice and record it. I noticed that there was more footage post skate competition, and that is to be expected because before the initial competition the Z-boys were just a group of surf punks in Dogtown. This was before home video recording became mainstream. Then when they were doing the interviews, it was all in black and white with a bit of a tilted camera angle. I don't know if this was common in the 70s skate scene, but it sure was common with 90s X-treme, which is fitting seeing how influential the works of the Z-boys was on 90s X-treme (Rocket Power and Tony Hawk Pro-skater come to mind). Speaking of interviews, I really liked how a majority of the narration was was through interviews with the original Z-boys. It's one thing to have a voice actor say "Jay was not one for corporate sponsorships, he could have been super successful but he chose not to," and it's another thing to hear Tony say "Jay was amazing, he gave me a run for my money" and then to hear Jay say "yeah, I could have gone full corporate sponsors, but it just wasn't me." While there was a narrator, he wasn't all that common like I've seen in many other documentaries. There's also the story transition cards. Overall the presentation was great. You aren't getting "high-def video," but you also have to remember that the archive footage was shot on 70s news cameras, and photos on Polaroids. It was quite well done.

So now the main question is, "is this entertaining?" As someone who has a mild interest in the extreme sports, this was very interesting. It was really cool seeing where it all came from, from the mouths of those that lived it. How it tells the story is alright, even if things just kind of "happen." We hear about the Z-boys, and how they got picked-up by big sponsors, and how that just kind of ended Zeffer surf shop, and then how these guys just kind of "got sponsored." It flows kind of like a well written history book. It's not perfect, but it's still entertaining. You might not like it too much if you don't have any interest in skateboarding, or don't like documentaries, but otherwise you will probably like it.

Now some of you may be wondering, "is this better than Lords of Dogtown"? Well, that's the topic of a different post (which I will make sometime in the future). This has been Pokematic, signing off, and bu-bye.