If I wanted to, I’m not sure I would have chosen Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 as one of my last memories of innocence. There was a light-heartedness to the atmosphere surrounding extreme sports at the time, even though it was contrasted with the horror-filled America of the early 2000s. But those days are over. Throw a Chevrolet Trailblazer into that memory, smoke some salvia and upload the results directly from your brain… well, the world of EBaum. That might have been the birth of the “Aggressive Urban Off-Road” saga.
The videos were created by sports videographer John Verity, who, according to the videos’ descriptions, grew out of a mishap he had while filming snowboarders in Utah in 2005. Verity botched a snowboarding stunt, was hospitalized, and was banned from flying home for weeks. He killed time by staying with a friend in Vail, Colorado, and used his insurance to rent a Chevy Trailblazer. In true MTV Jackass-hopping fashion, Verity drove the car as if he’d stolen it for his satirical extreme sports videos.
Verity and the gang drive their Chevy around the ski slopes, jumping curbs, going down stairs, and getting scraped at every opportunity, all while he rambles on and on about his passions, his calling, and the buzzwords he now hears from LinkedIn regulars. It all seems to be a dig at a self-important Rollerblader she once met who described himself as an “aggressive inline skater,” hence the name.
The video was originally uploaded to YouTube in 2007, and people were apparently very upset that he treated his car like that. It wasn’t a big hit even by early YouTube standards, but it was successful enough that Verity filmed a sequel in 2009 using a Peugeot 107. The atmosphere is similar, but the setting is European roads and the word “freedom” is thrown around like an ad for the 2024 presidential election. In that sense, the energy of this video is like a cross between the Jeep guy and the Nissan Altima driver. Of course, these two people aren’t that different. They both love crashing their mundane cars into inert objects. Feel free to criticize me in the comments. I’m crying reading it. (Crying might be a bit of an exaggeration.)
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