If I had my way, I’m not sure I’d have chosen Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 4 as one of my last memories of innocence. Even though it was juxtaposed against a fearful early-2000s America, there’s something that feels carefree about the atmosphere surrounding extreme sports at that time. But those days are over; let’s drop a Chevy Trailblazer into those memories, smoke some salvia, and upload the result directly from my brain to… I dunno, EBaum’s World. That may as well be how we got the “Aggressive Urban Off-Road” saga.
These videos were the making of sports videographer Johno Verity, who in the video’s description said they came from a misadventure while filming snowboarders in Utah in 2005. Verity messed up a snowboarding stunt so badly that he was hospitalized, and was forbidden from flying home for weeks. He killed time by crashing at a friend’s place in Vail, Colorado, using his insurance to cover renting a Chevrolet Trailblazer. Like any good MTV Jackass aspirant, Verity drove it like he stole it for a satirical extreme sports video.
Verity and company wheel the Chevy around the ski town, bouncing over curbs and driving down a flight of stairs, scraping at every opportunity. All the while, he prattles on about passion, calling, and all the buzzwords you hear from people who now are chronic LinkedIn posters. It all seems to be about poking fun at a self-aggrandizing rollerblader Verity once met, who presented himself as an “aggressive inline skater.” Hence the name.
The video was originally uploaded to YouTube in 2007, where it apparently made people awfully mad that he treated the car that way. It wasn’t a big hit even by early YouTube standards, but it did well enough for Verity to film a sequel using a Peugeot 107 in 2009. The vibe is similar, only with European roads, and the word “freedom” thrown around like a 2024 presidential campaign ad. In that sense, the energy comes off as a cross between a Jeep guy and a Nissan Altima driver. Not that those two are all that different, mind you; they both love crashing mediocre vehicles into stationary objects. Roast me back in the comments, I’ll read them and cry. (I might only be slightly exaggerating about the crying.)
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