{"id":1761389,"date":"2026-02-09T16:00:30","date_gmt":"2026-02-09T13:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1761389"},"modified":"2026-02-09T16:00:30","modified_gmt":"2026-02-09T13:00:30","slug":"check-out-the-zine-immortalizing-early-online-skatepark-fights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1761389","title":{"rendered":"CHECK OUT THE ZINE IMMORTALIZING EARLY ONLINE SKATEPARK FIGHTS"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\nSidewalk pranks, music videos, and the inescapable Crazy Frog. Those are the things everyone remembers about exploring YouTube in the early 2000s. Well, that and the visceral, profanity ridden skatepark fight.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Filmed on less than capable technology, these pixelated, shaky videos are one of the best synopsis of being a young skateboarder at that point in time. A time when, \u201cSwing first, pussy\u201d was always one step away.<\/p>\n

And now that we\u2019re all grown up and skateboarding is a polished commodity, these online fights tether a generation to a time when skateboarding was a bit more unhinged. It\u2019s this exact reason Colton Abernathy<\/a> created the zine \u201cSkate Park Fights.<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

Filled with altered screenshots of knockouts and roundhouses, Colton\u2019s zine distills these fight videos into a single moment, leaving the viewer to fill in the blanks. Immediate fans of the zine, we reached out to Colton to talk about its creation, its meaning to him, and whether he\u2019s ever been in a fight himself.\n <\/p>\n

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Is this zine a love letter to when skating was more delinquent? <\/strong>
\nOh, for sure. And like we discussed, this is the era that I loved. My first Thrasher subscription was around 2004, and flipping through some mags from this year is so eye opening. Skateboarding has changed so much, and change can be good, but I think the reasons why I got into it are kind of being lost.<\/p>\n

A lot of people nowadays are getting into skateboarding with the intention of there being a paycheck down the line, and maybe that\u2019s not a bad thing, but me and all my friends got into skateboarding because there was no other avenue that we were interested in. We all felt at home with skateboarding and with each other. <\/p>\n

For sure, it spoke to me and that\u2019s why I hit you up. <\/strong>
\nI\u2019m stoked that people are excited about it. Print needs to come back, and there\u2019s room for more projects like this. Like this could have easily just been another Instagram page, but there\u2019s something to putting it into a physical form and keeping it off the internet. Online is so censored, offline is premium.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

How\u2019d this whole idea come about? <\/strong>
\nI was working at Tenant [Skate Shop]<\/a> for two years and every day I\u2019d be sitting in the shop, and to be honest I was kind of bummed out about where skateboarding has been the last couple of years. So I started thinking about my love for skateboarding, and trying to find where that spark came from. <\/p>\n

I was reminiscing on when I first got introduced to skating, and I was going through old magazines and videos that I grew up on, stuff from around 2006. There was one video in particular that I remembered from my childhood titled \u201cSkatepark Fight,\u201d and it was just two young kids in a prefab park yelling curse words at each other. <\/p>\n

They don\u2019t throw fists or anything, but me and my buddies would quote the video all the time. We thought it was hilarious, and so I was trying to find this video. While looking for it I started thinking about this idea of wanting to preserve some of these videos that I was coming across in search of that one. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Did you ever find the video? <\/strong>
\nI found it just after I released the zine. One of my homies sent me an alternative link to it, it\u2019s two young kids, they can\u2019t be any older than 12, and they\u2019re just foul mouths, calling each other names. <\/p>\n

It\u2019s just one of those early YouTube videos. There wasn\u2019t a lot of skateboarding on there back then and I grew up in Colorado where there wasn\u2019t a huge skate scene, so I spent a lot of time with whatever video content was available on the internet back then. Coming back to the same links time and time again.<\/p>\n

Did it take a long time to find all this footage of people fighting at skateparks?<\/strong>
\nIt took a few weeks of scrolling, a lot of the videos got removed from YouTube so it took some digging through different parts of the internet. <\/p>\n

I love the videos because there\u2019s a lack of context. For me, I\u2019m always trying to decipher how this fight started. Like by the end of the video most of the time you get to see a winner and a loser, but you don\u2019t have the backstory. It\u2019s very intriguing, and then by isolating these fights into even slimmer moments by screenshotting them, it felt almost artistic. You\u2019re sitting with one frame of a fight, and it\u2019s up to the viewer to figure out what\u2019s really going on. I thought that was really cool, so I started saving screenshots for myself and then it evolved into me wanting to print them. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

What changes were made to the screenshots before they made it to print? <\/strong>
\nA lot of the fight videos are filmed on cell phones or whatever and they\u2019re quite pixelated, so I did a lot of photo treatments to the screenshots. I easily could have just printed them in the quality of the screenshots, but I wanted to give the feeling that the prints are laying on a camera screen, if that makes any sense. So I was printing them, scanning them back in, and then laying them out. <\/p>\n

How many fights are featured in the zine? <\/strong>
\nI\u2019d say at least 40. At a certain point it started to run dry, like I couldn\u2019t really find any more. And I was trying to isolate niche moments from the videos, so at a certain point they started losing their luster. <\/p>\n

What era would you characterize most of these videos? <\/strong>
\nAt first I was going for the older stuff, and there are quite a few I remember watching as a kid, but then I\u2019d say most of them are newer. I found quite a few through Reddit pages and those were definitely filmed in the last ten years. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Of all the fights in the zine, is there one that stands out as being the most iconic?<\/strong>
\nThe one that comes to mind is the cholo guy. He doesn\u2019t look like he skates at all, and he just drop kicks the hell out of some guy. There are two screenshots of that one in the zine.<\/p>\n

Have you ever been in a skate park fight yourself?<\/strong>
\nYeah, I definitely have. I\u2019ve never seen it, but I\u2019m sure somebody got it on video back at Denver Skatepark. I actually have some plans to make a Denver Skatepark specific zine at some point because I grew up there and some of the stuff that has gone down there is absolutely ridiculous and unhinged. <\/p>\n

These parks in the Midwest, or other flyover states, are kind of a hub for juvenile activity, like a lot of the people hanging around Denver Skatepark are there for completely different reasons than skateboarding. So you get all these different people in the same area, and sometimes tensions get high. <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Closing up, did you win or lose in your own skatepark fight? <\/strong>
\nI\u2019d say I lost to be honest, but it was on some graffiti shit, and after the fight the dude came up and gave me all the paint in his bag. So I lost the physical fight, but I walked away that day with respect. <\/p>\n

Interview by: Ian Michna<\/a>
\nIntro and editorial assists: Ben Komins<\/a>
\nCop the Zine here<\/a>.
\nSettle a beef on Facebook<\/a>
\nBurn your retinas on Instagram<\/a> and Twitter<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sidewalk pranks, music videos, and the inescapable Crazy Frog. Those are the things everyone remembers about exploring YouTube in the early 2000s. Well, that and the visceral, profanity ridden skatepark fight. Filmed on less than capable technology, these pixelated, shaky videos are one of the best synopsis of being a young skateboarder at that point […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[226,282],"class_list":["post-1761389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-crawlmanager","tag-jenkemmag-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1761389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1761389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1761389\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1761389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1761389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1761389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}