Scared straight (or regular?)

I’ve been watching Fuel TV more and more lately. I have the DVR set up to pick up “skateboard” in the title and descriptions, that way I don’t have to sift through all the extraneous wakeboarding, motocross, BMX and snowboard programing. I’ve blown it off for a couple years because I figured it would all be watered down X-Games drivel that I just don’t want to sit through. There is still a little bit of that in their skateboard programming, but for the most part it seems like they are in tune or at least sympathetic with the “lifestyle,” as if someone in programing actually skates. It’s mostly street oriented but they do throw in the tranny and vert occasionally. In general they have a respect for the history of skateboarding, meaning they don’t offhandedly dismiss everything that happened over two years ago. It’s not perfect by any means though, but surely acceptable for a daily dose of skateboarding on your TV. Of course, these are probably the “good old days” of Fuel TV, akin to when MTV started and used to actually play music videos. In five years Fuel TV could end up being a hugely popular channel full of reality based crap aimed at teenagers, 24-7 that years’ Ryan Sheckler and his posse shows.

Right. So this an entertaining clip called Switchstance that examines the perils of choosing a life of skateboarding. Originally pointed out by someone as a comment in an unrelated post, it turns out by someone who gets paid in some capacity by Fuel TV. Whether it was comment spam or not is irrelevant because it’s a good clip, and I was trying to figure out a meaningful way to talk about skateboarding on Fuel TV anyway. Check it out after the jump.

Switchstance on Fuel TV

I’m not exactly sure if this video is the entire film or not. The player page I got the embed code from did not offer any details, but some of the clips seemed to be excerpts, so it’s possible there is more. Insane Cinema is the category it was under, and that’s a catch-all they seem to use when re-broadcasting independent productions such as Skate Girl and some old skate videos from Element, Powell and Blind, etc… In fact, Animal Chin was on TV the other night. They have another series called Fossil Fuel that shows 70’s and older era Extreme!™ films.