Check Out World Of X Games’ ‘Animal Chin’ 30th Anniversary Encore Presentation
Beginning in 1984, Powell-Peralta released a game-changing series of 6 videos featuring the “Bones Brigade”: Tony Hawk, Steve Caballero, Mike McGill, Tommy Guerrero, and Lance Mountain. By 1986, this dream team became the biggest global phenomenon that skateboarding had ever seen, and the following year the brand released the third Bones Brigade video, The Search For Animal Chin, which became a cultural juggernaut. In 2016, to celebrate the video’s thirtieth anniversary, ABC’s World Of X Games dedicated an episode to the video—’The Search Is Never Over’—inviting all of the original Brigade members to take part in a retrospective. (The resulting reenactment of Grant Brittain’s ‘Four Inverts’ photo appeared in The Skateboard Mag issue #154.)
Filmed in 1986, Animal Chin is by far one of the most influential—and weirdest—skate videos ever made. Maybe the first full-length with a narrative, Animal Chin deals with the crew’s quest to find the elusive, titular skate legend. The search takes them from Hawaii to the most epic vert ramp ever built, with a lot of shenanigans in between. The endlessly quotable dialogue alone set this apart from the pack: Deal some meals; skedanked; yapple dapple; snootchie bootchies (oh wait). The skate lexicon would never be the same.
The event of last summer was undoubtedly Tony Hawk Week, but if you missed it you can still check out all the videos (plus Hawk’s “Do a Kickflip!” which he himself does in the Wired video… so meta) below.
