The Best Skate Videos of All Time (1984-2026)

The video that invented skate videos. Stacy Peralta put it together on around $15,000 expecting to sell about 300 copies to shops in California; he ended up selling around 30,000. It's widely considered the first commercial skate video in history, featuring the complete Bones Brigade lineup: Hawk, Caballero, Mullen, Mountain, Guerrero, McGill.

Context explains everything: skateboarding was climbing out of the early-'80s slump and Peralta wanted to reach skaters directly, cutting out the magazines. Without meaning to, he created the format that would define skate culture for the next thirty years.

The first skate video with an actual plot: the Bones Brigade travels through California, Nevada, and Hawaii searching for Won Ton "Animal" Chin, the spirit of skating lost somewhere in the industry machine. The "Have you seen him?" tagline became a generational slogan, and the acting is so wooden it's part of the charm.

At the heart of it is the Chin ramp, built and destroyed over about three weeks in 1986, the stage for the double sequences featuring Hawk, Caballero, Mountain, and McGill that every skater over forty can recite from memory. Peralta has said the character started as a joke in an ad before the video even existed.

While Powell was shooting big-budget productions, H-Street (Tony Magnusson and Mike Ternasky's brand) dropped Shackle Me Not in 1988: raw, cheap, home-edited and packed with tricks. It changed the way skate videos were made: suddenly what mattered wasn't the production value, it was the quantity and difficulty of what was happening on the board.

Its sequel Hokus Pokus (1989) locked in the format and introduced the world to a teenager named Danny Way and the impossibly smooth Matt Hensley. Out of Ternasky's camp would come Plan B shortly after, and with it the '90s.

This Santa Cruz video went down in history because of one person: Natas Kaupas, one of the two fathers of modern street skating alongside Mark Gonzales. This is where he debuted the trick that's impossible to describe in writing: spinning on top of a fire hydrant — the Natas spin.

Thrasher keeps rerunning his part in their classics series. Watching it today, you get why: while almost everyone else still had their eyes on ramps, Natas was skating the streets like they'd been built for him.

For a lot of people, the greatest skate video ever made, and it runs 25 minutes. Directed by a very young Spike Jonze (yes, the director of Her), with Mark Gonzales skating to Coltrane jazz credited on screen as "some damn good jazz", a teenage Guy Mariano flying to the Jackson 5, and Jason Lee closing out the video before leaving skating for Hollywood.

The ending is legend: the whole team, beers in hand, inside a '76 Oldsmobile that rolls off down a hill. It was a joke, but some people genuinely believed the team had died. Jenkem even ran an investigation tracking down the car — "the most famous car in skateboarding".

Mike Ternasky left H-Street, built a superteam called Plan B, and dropped the video that defined technical street skating in the 90s. Here Rodney Mullen made his transition from freestyle to street, debuting tricks nobody had ever seen, and a rookie named Pat Duffy started grinding rails that people considered literally impossible. His part is still cited as the moment skateboarding changed.

The follow-up Virtual Reality (1993) sealed the deal. Ternasky died in a car accident in 1994 at 27, and half of today's professional skateboarding descends, one way or another, from his approach to video making.

The video that turned Jamie Thomas into skate's favorite devil and made Toy Machine a religion. Filmed and directed by Thomas himself, it's the bible of the sacrifice school: rails, gaps, and a film-or-die aesthetic that shaped an entire generation.

And a milestone nobody saw coming: Elissa Steamer's part, considered the first female street part in a major video, dropped without her gender being mentioned once. Thomas flew out to Florida and stayed at Steamer's place to film it, and that part opened the door for women's street skating in videos.

Girl and Spike Jonze again, this time with sketches between parts (including someone skating San Francisco dressed as a mouse) and one of the most celebrated comebacks in history: the first full part from Guy Mariano since Video Days, five years later, skating to Herbie Hancock's "Watermelon Man" with a technique that still looked like it was from another planet.

If Video Days invented the skate video as an auteur work, Mouse proved it could also be comedy, cinema, and pop culture all at once without ever stopping being pure skating.

Fred Mortagne ("French Fred") at his best, working for éS: the first major video conceived with a global mindset, each skater introduced in their home country. Finland's Arto Saari came out of this one straight into Skater of the Year 2001, and Eric Koston closed the video with one of the most legendary enders ever — pressure he's openly admitted to feeling.

Technically, it was a generational leap: cinematography, editing, and music finally matching what was happening on the board. Twenty years later, éS was still dropping extra footage from the filming because people never stopped asking for it.

Flip's first full-length brought together the most stacked European team ever assembled: Geoff Rowley (SOTY 2000) destroying impossible spots, living legend Tom Penny resurfacing after years off the radar, a teenage Bastien Salabanzi, and Ali Boulala closing his part with the attempt at the famous Lyon 25, a gap so insane it would take over a decade to land — and it wasn't him who did it.

Between the level of skating, the legends, and the mythology surrounding it, Sorry is probably the most rewound video of the early 2000s.

Girl, Ty Evans and Spike Jonze took the format to another dimension: the famous invisible boards section (neon green boards digitally erased, with the team apparently floating) and an Owen Wilson cameo in full Wes Anderson actor mode pretending he can do a bluntslide.

Underneath the spectacle was a serious level of skateboarding: Marc Johnson's ender, Koston in his prime, and proof that the skate video had become its own audiovisual genre — with a real budget and cinematic ambition to match.

The anti-Girl: handheld camera, chaos, fights, shots before tricks, and the rawest skating of the decade. Erik Ellington opens, Andrew Reynolds lands a full cab down the Wilshire 15 that many consider better than his Emerica parts, Antwuan Dixon's debut leaves everyone's jaw on the floor, and Bryan Herman closes to Bowie with one of the greatest parts ever filmed.

If the 2000s videos were a production arms race, Baker 3 stood out by going the opposite direction — less production, more personality.

Four years of filming, direction by Ty Evans, Spike Jonze, and Cory Weincheque, and the most iconic intro in skate history: the team skating in slow motion over obstacles that actually explode, with M83 in the background. A 17-year-old Mike Mo Capaldi opens the video; Marc Johnson closes it with a roughly twelve-minute, three-song part — something nobody had ever seen — that earned him Skater of the Year 2007.

It was the peak of the skate video as a full-blown production. What came after (the internet era) is a whole other story, and it partly starts because Fully Flared set a bar nobody could touch.

The artistic response to the era of big-budget productions: Greg Hunt delivered for Alien Workshop a video closer to experimental film than trick porn, featuring Dylan Rieder, Jake Johnson, Jason Dill, Grant Taylor and company.

It closes with Heath Kirchart, the most enigmatic skater of his era, in what would be his last full street part: towed by a motorcycle to clear a gap and an ender kickflipping across an entire street. He retired the following year, got on a bike, and pedaled across the United States.

The defining team video of the outgoing decade: Jon Miner directed Emerica's testament to the Baker/Emerica generation. Leo Romero's part battling uphill rails earned him 2010 Skater of the Year, and Andrew Reynolds, The Boss, closes the video with a kickflip-down-staircases showcase that defines his reign.

After Stay Gold, the full team video started dying out: the internet chopped the format into individual parts.

Girl and Chocolate together, Ty Evans at the helm, and the swan song of the big-budget skate video: film cameras, studio money, and a suffocating level of skating. It closes, naturally, with Guy Mariano, whose part was built on years of war with every single trick — he's talked about finishing it through ice baths, massages, and physio just to make it to the ender.

Mariano took the Transworld award for best part, his second. From Video Days (1991) to Pretty Sweet (2012): nobody else has opened and closed an era of skateboarding twenty years apart like he has.

William Strobeck's directorial debut for Supreme changed what skate videos look like: raw New York, camera glued to the ground, fashion and street life blurred together, and the introduction of the generation that runs things today: Tyshawn Jones, Na-kel Smith, Sage Elsesser, Sean Pablo. Most people saw them for the first time right here.

Dylan Rieder, who died of leukemia in 2016, is behind some of the best skating in the video. If you want to pinpoint where the current era of street skating begins — aesthetically, attitude-wise, industry-wise — it starts with cherry.

Proof that the skate video as an auteur work survived Instagram: Colin Read (Mandible Claw) spent years shooting with eight VX1000 cameras to build a video structured around chapters of animals and spirits, with hand-drawn animations and an edit that plays with time and space in ways no commercial video would dare.

It's consistently cited as one of the best independent skate videos of the decade. If you only know the big brand stuff, this is a solid entry point into underground skate.

Strobeck's second film for Supreme, twice as long as cherry and with an ending for the ages: Tyshawn Jones, who barely appears until the final stretch, opens his part with a switch flip over the Washington Square fountain gap and closes it on his way to 2018 Skater of the Year — the first New Yorker to ever win it.

Right in the middle of the Instagram clip era, BLESSED proved that a part built over years still hits harder than a string of loose clips. The full video isn't dead; it's just rarer.