Thrasher Magazine

After nearly a decade of making skate videos shot exclusively on the VHS format, London’s Palace Skateboards have taken a landmark decision to switch it up and ditch this cumbersome, weighty, ludicrously outdated technology—and to replace it with an even more cumbersome, even more weighty, even more ludicrously outdated technology! VHS Palace is dead; long live the new era of Betamax Palace!


Photo: Saari

Photo: Atiba

Photo: Saari

In an impressively baffling move, Palace have invested in a batch of huge, unwieldy, astonishingly heavy Betamax cameras from the 1980s. These are the fuckers that they used to shoot TV shows on back in the day, when Betamax cameras were on the very cutting edge of video technology and would retail for tens of thousands of dollars, before VHS came along and blew them out of the water and the whole Betamax dream died on its clunky old ass.

Photo: Saari

Photo: Saari

Photo: Saari

Photo: Saari

Betamax cameras were renowned in their brief heyday for their rich reproduction of color, and so when the time came to plan the first ever Betamax-filmed Palace skate trip, “somewhere colorful” was their paramount consideration. It didn’t take them long to decide on the famously colorful tropical island paradise of Hawaii: teeming with jungle-y flora, steeped in surfing heritage and featuring some legendary (and legendarily rugged) spots. It was basically a case of “Hawaii not?”



Photo: Atiba

Photo: Atiba

Photo: Atiba

Photo: Atiba

Photo: Saari

Photo: Atiba

Photo: Atiba

Photo: Saari

The Palace team spent two weeks on beautiful Oahu island. For a skate team that traveled over 7,000 miles in pursuit of color, they spent a crazy amount of their time in paradise in dull-grey drainage ditches and grimy-brown sewers. But, hey, I guess that’s skateboarding for you.

Photo: Atiba