Picture this. It’s 1995. You’re plugged into the family TV with the latest surf fillum sitting in the VHS below, ready for its maiden run. You’ve been waiting six months for it to hit the shelves of your local surf shop. Six months of reading and re-reading the five star review it got in your chosen magazine – your one source of truth for the surfing world.
You press play. The cathode rays fire to life. And your mind is blown.
If you were anything like me, your favourite surf movies were seared into your temporal lobe. Vignettes that played out so naturally recalling them wasn’t even a rote exercise. It was more like listening to your heart beat. You studied the styles. Dissected the designs. You bought the albums of the bands you were exposed to. You dropped the obscure quotes with your friends for years afterwards. These were Mombassa-esque Holy Scriptures. Young minds were subtly ensnared and rewired into surfing’s cultural matrix through didactic repetition.
It’s fair to say the way we consume surfing (and life) has changed a lot since then. Everything is instant. Everything is disposable.
Has something been lost along the way?
Well, friend, philosophical questions like that can be answered at a later date over a beer or three. Your pal surfads drinks Old, if you’re buying. I’ll see you at the bowlo.
In the meantime, here’s my top five surf movies of the ‘90s.
Enjoy The Ride (ETR)
“I wanna go to the Gold Coast and get sick chicks and filthy pits.”
Possibly the most iconic line ever uttered in a surf movie. And it came from a barely pubescent Mick Fanning, sitting poolside while being lathered up with oil by a bevy of bikini-clad girls.
This was definitely a memory-searing moment for impressionable young grommets. Sure, it might be called ‘problematic’ now. And surf movie acting has always been pretty lame. But noted auteur Matty Gye was able to produce some of the finest performances ever seen from the then-Quikky team: the Paterson brothers introducing the Gold Coast to their West Oz brethren. Danny Wills, Tom Carroll and Blake Johnston negotiating an intergenerational time warp. Mick ‘Dangar’ Campbell repeatedly flashing his nuts.
It was gritty, it was raw,and it was damn funny. Plus they all absolutely tore the bag out of it (literally, in Dangar’s case).
Pulse 1 & 2
In the early ‘90s Taylor Steele changed the game when he introduced us to the tail-slide throwing Momentum Generation, led by Kelly Slater and Rob Machado.
The world gushed. Power surfers recoiled. Australian surfing was, for a time, shook.
It wasn’t until 1996 when Justin Gane released Pulse that the Oz contingent really hit back. Pulse had it all. Old school power surfing mixed with new school tricks. Led by a flex of underground chargers, but also featuring cameos from a few up and comers with names like Parko, Taj and Mick, Pulse was an instant classic that put the new wave of Australian surfing up on the pedestal it belonged.
Pulse 2 was more of the same, and potentially even better. Lee Winkler’s carving backhand roundhouse into closeout re-entry will forever be the stuff of legend.
5’5 x 19 ¼
It was hard to choose just one video from the …Lost ‘90s back catalogue. There were so many genre-defining classics. What’s Really Going On. What’s Really Going Wrong. …Lost Across America. But while these were all epics of the James Joyce scale, 5’5 x 19 1/4 was our Catcher in the Rye. Short, sharp and abrasive, like a punch in the nose on a cold winter’s morning. This movie snapped the surfing world out of its obsession with length and volume, or lack thereof. From this movie the ‘performance fish’ was born: the world’s best surfers going to town on little magical disks in waves of consequence as well as the slop 99% of us surf 99% of the time. The effects of 5’5 are still felt today in board design around the world today.
Quiksilver’s G-Land ‘97 Pro
On face value this one seems pretty innocuous: a $10 VHS documenting a single contest. 40 minutes of ‘90s-level competitive surfing. And they only go left.
But many a better surfer than me have spoken at length about the time and space bending properties of da tube. It’s a place where the standard laws of nature do not apply. The sum equals so much more than the parts. ~Majik happens~. So when you factor in that the real-time tube-time clocked up from this single contest was probably somewhere around 46 thousand hours (maybe an exaggeration) it’s no wonder the VHS produced something that tapped a much deeper source.
Tuberiding masterclasses from the likes of Luke Egan, Kelly Slater, and Rizal Tandjung fell from the jungle trees like coconuts. Combined with a feast of ‘90s Australian alternative rock (Skunkhour, Powderfinger, the Mark of Cain to name a few ) and a sublime school-room-biology-class coda from Nick and Tom Carroll, set in the low tide rock pools of the Garajagang reef, G-Land ‘97 was a thing of mind-expanding beauty.
No YouTube cheats for this bad boy. It only belongs to those in the know. Maybe buy me a beer or three and we can talk about it. But here is a picture of Skunkhour.
Post script of my notable omissions/inspiration for my top, 5 volume 2:
Litmus
Chocolate Barrels and Liquid Trips
Sik Joy
Sabotaj
Searching for Tom Curren
To be…continued?