Little known Venice Beach street skater Tim Jackson- 1990

When I first moved to Southern California, Venice Beach was the place you went to see the crazy side of California in one afternoon.  It was the freak show people in the rest of the world expected of California.  The boardwalk area had the weirdest, craziest, coolest range of people anywhere.  There was no skatepark back then, but there were curbs, short walls, and open sidewalks.  Here the cameraman and editor of what I think is a Santa Cruz/OJ's wheels video, re-cut the footage of Venice local Tim Jackson.  For you Old School BMX freestylers watching this, the 1984 and 1985 Venice Beach AFA contests were held on this same sidewalk area.  

Although he won't take credit, Mark Gonzales is generally considered to have sparked street skating in about 1984.  Boards were big and wide for those early years, and a bunch of skaters, inspired by the skating of Gonz, Tommy Guerrero, Natas Kappas, Mike Vallely and others, began to see what was possible to do with a skateboard on the urban freatures around them.  Tricks were simpler, generally, but more creative and with a wider diversity, every skater had their own ideas, style, and usually a few original tricks.    

Also in 1990, when this footage was taped, the skateboard hype bubble of the late 80's had popped, and sales and interest in the mainstream was going down.  The skateboard and BMX industries were going into recession, as was the whole country.  The long recession of the early 1990's found the hardcore skaters going underground, and street skating blew up, and grew exponentially.  This era is also when the big dogs, Vision (who I worked for) Powell-Peralta, and Santa Cruz, lost their stranglehold on the business, and new companies like World Industries, New Deal, Black Label, Plan B, Blind, and a slew of other small companies, rose up.  By the time ESPN decided to jump on the action sports bandwagon in 1995 with the Extreme Games (renamed the X-Games in '96), skater run companies were the norm.  

This video is a great edit of that time just when the posers were fading from the scene, and street skating was evolving in many places.