The Movie: This is a documentary about the birth of modern skateboarding. Where skateboarding was once looked at as something surfers did when not in the water, the Zephyr skate team from the "Dogtown" neighborhood in southern California took skateboarding to a whole new level, creating what would eventually become what we see on the X-Games today.

The film consists of a ton of neat old footage mixed in with a little bit of modern interviews in a fairly creative way, though I have to admit, I was less than riveted to my chair while watching this one. It was pretty cool to see just how intertwined with surfing skateboarding was at the beginning, though.

If you're into the skateboarding scene that was around in the 70's and 80's, or the history of the sport, or generally into surf culture, you'll probably find this film at least somewhat interesting, but otherwise... I don't know. It was just "ok" to me.

The DVD: The video transfer is in a 4:3 format. I'm not really sure if it was an unmatted full frame transfer, or actually a pan and scan transfer. I didn't think to check, actually haha. But I've listed it as "Full Frame" here. Anyway, the video exhibited a general overall softness, even the new material. A whole lot of this film was made up of old 16mm and 8mm film and still photographs, and I guess it would be pretty fair to say that the DVD stays true to the original source material -- showing the age and defects of the old film, without introducing any new compression artifacts of its own.

Audio was fairly unspectacular, but completely functional as well. "Just OK" here. And that's about how I'd rate the special features as well. You get an audio commentary track, an "alternate" ending, some of the unedited session footage (which can be accessed while watching the completed film), and some trailers for some other movies.