This was the first video that BMX Plus! magazine produced, in 1985. In those days, professional quality video equipment was really expensive, and to make a video to sell copies of, you had to hire a professional video production company to shoot, produce, and edit the video. That meant spending tens of thousands of dollars for the project. Because of this high financial barrier to entry, not many BMX freestyle videos got made in the mid and late 1980's.
"You can't get good by sitting around thinking about it. It's something you have to physically get out and do."
-Brian Scura, Freestyle's Raddest Tricks
What we called BMX freestyle in the 1980's began in the late 1970's, when Bob Haro and a friend started doing tricks on their BMX racing bikes. This video came out in 1985. In the intro, Bob says he had been freestyling for 8 years, putting the birth of BMX freestyle around 1977.
Yes, people have been doing tricks on bicycles since bikes were invented, which around 1875. The first time a cute girl walked by a guy on an early bike is probably when the first bike trick was invented. That's my thinking, anyhow. But the thing we call freestyle, the hobby, sport, and lifestyle of doing tricks on 20 inch BMX bikes, began with Bob Haro and his friend John.
Within a year or so, he began doing demos at BMX races, and then doing shows at other events. He rode with R.L. Osborn not long after, living with the Osborn family, while drawing cartoons and working at BMX Action. He started making custom number plates for racers. Bob Haro did his first freestyle tour with Bob Morales about 1980. R.L., the son of BMX Action magazine founder, Bob "Oz" Osborn, started the BMX Action Trick Team in 1980 or 1981. Bob Morales started MF, Morales/Fiola, with top skatepark rider, Eddie Fiola, making stickers and leathers, I think, and went on to start Dyno, an accessories company. Soon after he was putting on the first BMX freestyle contest series, in the skateparks in 1983, turning freestyle into a competitive sport.
My point here is that from about 1977 to 1982, BMX freestyle was a handful of really entrepreneurial guys doing shows, and a larger group of guys who rode BMX bikes in skateparks. Mike Buff, Jeff Watson, Fred Becker, Tinker Juarez, Steve "Bio Air Bennett, Martin Aparijo, and Woody Itson were some of the main riders in those early years, all in Southern California.
Then freestyle started getting photos in magazines, which got a good response, and it began to grow larger. Bob Haro's number plate business took off. Dyno, Bob Morales' accessory company, got bought by GT Bikes. R.L. Osborn and Mike Buff toured the U.S. and parts of Europe. Everywhere these guys did shows, a few kids got hooked on this new thing called BMX freestyle, growing the sport organically. Bob Haro redesigned a Torker, and put out the first bike specifically designed for freestyle, in 1983, the Haro Freestyler, later called the Haro Master.
By the time BMX Plus! magazine put out this video in 1985, Haro, GT, Redline, Hutch, CW, and other companies had freestyle bikes on the market. BMX Action started FREESTYLIN' magazine in the fall of 1984. They also put out a video, made documentary style, of the BMX Action Trick Team, in 1985. That was the first wave of popularity of BMX freestyle, and that's when this video came out.
In the 1980's, the BMX media was all about the magazines, beginning with BMX Action, BMX Plus!, and Super BMX. FREESTYLIN'magazine, the "Thrasher" of BMX, came out in the fall of 1984. BMX Plus! put out some one shot freestyle magazines, Freestyle Spectacular, in 1986, and then came out with American Freestyler. Super BMX put out Freestyle magazine soon after. If you wanted to get sponsored, you had to get coverage in magazines, and there were six magazines, in 1987-1988. It was all about magazine photos. Many pros, and some amateurs, got a "photo contingency," a cash bonus, if they got photo in a magazine, bigger money for bigger photos. Some riders got coverage for their skill, and a few became coverage whores, always hanging out at the magazines or calling up photographers to see if they needed riders that week.
Videos in the 1980's cost a lot of money to produce, easily $20,000 to $40,000, to hire a video production company and make a half hour video, like Freestyle's Raddest Tricks, above. Consumer video cameras existed, VHS, and 8mm, (before Hi8), but the quality degraded really fast when you edited and made copies of them. Because of this, there weren't many BMX freestyle videos in that first wave of freestyle's popularity. BMX Plus! and GT Bikes ruled the 1980's BMX freestyle video market. Because there were so few videos put out, no standard form existed then. That's why many early videos didn't have sections for each rider. That concept was one of many at the time. Most videos had a bunch of riders, riding together at a shoot, to save money. Then they were edited in a montage.
Another thing, riders had their tricks dialed back then, because doing shows, riding in contests, and photo shoots for sponsored riders, were the main forms of showing your tricks to other riders and everyday people. It wasn't about doing something super gnarly and getting it on video one time. You had to be able to land that trick 9 times out of 10, or better, 10 out of 10. Because of this, when it came to the few video shoots, riders were doing the tricks they practiced every day. Each separate shoot in this video probably took place over one to three hours. So riders weren't trying something to get it once. They did the tricks they could do almost every time, and then the shoot was over. There was no going back to get the shot a week over. Either you pulled your best tricks at the shoot, or you didn't.
Since BMX freestyle was spawned from BMX racing only a few years earlier, riders wore racing leathers to promote their sponsors, and even helmets, goggles, and sometimes jofas (mouth guards).on flatland. They did this because the BMX companies, the magazines, and the video producers didn't want to get sued if some kid got injured trying this stuff at home. Yes, it looks goofy and hokey, but that was the nature of this brand new sport back then.
BMX freestyle was this weird hybrid of BMX racing and jumping, and skateboarding in pools, which is where the airs came from. Its influences ranged from motocross, to BMX racing, to surfing (skaters first rode pools to imitate surfing waves), and skateboarding. All of these influences were coming together, and nobody really knew what the fuck they were doing then, in the sense that everything was new. Riders, the magazines, and video producers were all trying different ideas with this new and emerging little sport, trying to find out what worked in riding, for photos and video, and on the business side. Much like skateboarding in the 1970's, BMX freestyle was considered a fad then, by most people. It was some weird little fad that would go away in a couple of years, but it was new and fun to watch. Obviously, over the 39 years since Freestyle's Raddest Tricks came out, BMX freestyle, or whatever you may call it now in its various forms, has evolved in many different directions. None of us expected it to get as big and widespread as it has back in 1985.
I bought this video for $29.95, by mail order, in the fall of 1985. I had just moved to San Jose, California, and was 19 years old. I wasn't going to college, I was working nights at a Pizza Hut, and I had no friends yet in San Jose. Freestyle was it, that was my whole focus, at that point in time. I was riding 2 to 4 hours everyday, often wandering around San Jose, exploring my new region. I was just starting my first zine, as a way to meet some other freestylers in the Bay Area.
I watched this video seven times the day I got it in the mail. Two of those times I sat on my handlebars of my bike, balancing on it, feet on the front wheel, through the whole video, without putting my foot down. That just seemed like the hardcore thing to do that day. I watched this video dozens of times over the next year. I watched it so many times, that I remembered the goofy, electronic "canned music," which video producers used in many different types of videos in those days, to avoid getting sued for copyright infringement. I heard some of this exact same music in at least two porno videos in the years after I bought this video. Yeah, they used the same canned music other video producers did then, which is pretty funny.
Freestyle's Raddest Tricks, the two sequels, and the GT Bikes videos GT-V and Demo Tape, were the most widely watched, and most influential BMX freestyle videos of the late 1980's. As my blog works towards its 1,000th blog post, and I look back on major influences in those early days of 1980's BMX freestyle, this video was a huge influence on me, and almost all of us.
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