Watch the segment at 16:27, that's what this post is about.
Looking through photos on my laptop yesterday, I saw one I snapped of Dave Voelker and Brian Blyther at the One Love Jam (photo below), about a month ago. Like the rest you riders out there, these vert riders blew my mind in magazines and contests back in the day, and were both inspirations in my own riding. Since I got lucky and stumbled into the BMX freestyle industry, I got to know both of them back in the 1980's.
In a moment of dorky thoughts about all the crazy shit I've seen them do back in the day, the segment at 16:27 in the Vision/Unreel Productions Freestylin' Fanatics video popped into my head. While I was working at Unreel, a lot of riders thought I was busy producing and directing these Vision videos in my 2 1/2 years there.
In reality, I was The Dub Guy, that was my nickname. Most of my time was spent in a little, 6 by 8 foot room, filled with all kinds of pro VTR's (video tape recorders, because "VCR" wasn't a cool enough acronym for $7,000 machines) making copies of different videos, for all the the assorted people in the Vision Skateboards/Vision Street Wear empire. When I wasn't doing that, I was cleaning heads on the machines, running important errands, like picking up frozen yogurt and Chinese chicken salads for my co-workers, or hand labeling the 3,000 tapes in our tape library. I was everybody's assistant and gofer, and I didn't direct or produce anything until late 1988, and that was a short video segment.
But since I was the sole BMX kid, in a office full of old surfer/skateboarders, they told me one day to "write some copy" for the Freestylin' Fanatics video. "Copy" is TV talk for a script, basically, words for a voice-over guy to say over the video. I had no idea what the fuck they wanted, I'd never written any copy before, so I said, "Sure, I'll give it a try." I figured they'd hate what I wrote, and write something else. So I made up this weird story about Ivan Drabinski's School of Parking Attendants for the clip of Brian and Dave riding over the junk cars. Those cars, I believe, were somewhere on the Ohio State Fairgrounds, where an AFA Masters contest was held. Don Hoffman ( I think) was the cameraman at that contest, and saw the cars, and told Brian and Dave to screw around on them, outside the contest, for a little funny footage.
As was typical for all raw video footage at Unreel, I made a VHS window dub of the footage after the contest. A window dub is a copy of the raw video footage from camera, usually on a VHS tape, that had a box with running numbers in it, showing the time code from the original tape. The directors would watch the VHS window dub, write down the numbers of the shots they liked, and then take that list of shots in, when they went into the edit bay (the $250,000 room of editing equipment in those days), and edit the final video. In typical Unreel Productions fashion, the footage sat, unwatched, for over a year.
Then, management decided to make a BMX freestyle video, and Brian Gillogly, an old school surfer who once worked at Skateboarder Magazine, got picked to direct the video. Even though I was the only BMX guy in the office, I wasn't a producer, so I had nothing to do with decision making for Freestylin' Fanatics. At least until Brian asked me to write the voice-overs. So I took a tape of the footage home, and wrote V.O.'s for this scene, the Dave Vanderspek scene, and the Martin and Woody flatland scene, that night. Brian and I irked each other sometimes, so I figured he'd hate what I wrote. But he actually liked it, and Dave Alvarez, our video editor, did the voice-overs, then edited them into the video.
Where did I come up with Ivan Drabinski and his school for parking attendants? Three years earlier, in Boise, Idaho, I managed a tiny little amusement park, called The Fun Spot, for the summer. One of the kids working there was John Drabinski. He was a cool guy, and Drabinski was a cool sounding name, so I started there. Ivan just seemed to fit with Drabinski, they sounded good together, and I just made up this dumb ass little story. And what do you know? It wound up in the video. To be honest, I told Brian that talking over the riding was a stupid idea, and he should just cut the scene together with some cool music. But he was the director. So that's the story of Ivan Drabinski's School of Parking attendants, which I think went bankrupt a few months later, after one of the valets rammed a $100,000 Lamborghini Countach into the side of a parked Rolls Royce at 85 mph. There I go, making up stories again. Something about the name Ivan Drabinski makes me want to keep making things up about him. Maybe it'll be a novel someday.
I think I actually apologized to Dave Voelker after the video came out, for the lame voice-over, but he said he actually thought it was funny. Maybe. It was a long time ago. Dave can comment if he remembers that.
This was one of those little things I did at Unreel that I didn't think twice about, just some extra work to goof around with, and that would be thrown in the trash the next day, as far as I was concerned. And here I am, writing a blog post about it, 32 years later. Weird world.
Brian Blyther and Dave Voelker, hanging out at the One Love flatland Jam, in early 2020. No cars were damaged in the making of this photo. Which is good, because Brian's a cop now, and one of us would have got arrested.
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