Scenes That Shaped An Era, Featuring: Craig Anderson And Rob Machado

Hello, and welcome to a new four-part video series in honour of Taylor Steele. Why Taylor Steele? Well, because unless you’re a big useless pile of prehistoric fossil dust, then Taylor Steele’s digital surf porn (and surf art!) compendium has made an impression on your life one time or another.

Also, because Taylor is releasing a new movie soon. It’s called Proximity and Taylor promises it’ll be fantastic, which we don’t doubt. In fact, Stab actually talked to him about it not too long ago. Anyways, while Taylor’s parading Proximity around the globe through various premieres, we’re hyping it up with this new series. Here’s how it works:

Is there anything more original and complete than Taylor Steele’s filmography? Yeah, we don’t think so either.

We take each surfer pairing — Rob Machado and Craig Anderson, Stephanie Gilmore and Dave Rastovich, Kelly Slater and John John Florence, Shane Dorian and Albee Layer — from the film and get in our DeLorean with Doc and roll back the years. Picking our favourite sections from each individual’s past cinematic jaunts with surfing’s preeminent auteur. While I wanted to give this series a name like “The Show,” or, “Days of The Good Times” because those sound like the name of an award you would win for watching the most Poor Specimen Video Productions, I ultimately decided against it because that’d be pretty kitschy.

Concentrated here are our two favourite shaggy-headed goofy footers: Craig Anderson and Rob Machado. For Craig, we went with his solo performance from Castles In The Sky, a film more focused on the lands and cultures it travels to rather than the A-list surfers it stars. That doesn’t mean it lacks in the latter department, however. See: The section above. 

And for Rob, it would have felt wrong to not go with his profile section in Drifting: The Rob Machado Chronicles. Drifting broadcasted everything from Rob’s earliest days as a straight-haired grom at Seaside Reef to his fro’d out “peak” (mind you, Drifting came out in 1996) performances at Pipeline years later. Something only Taylor could do as he had the unique pleasure of growing up alongside Rob.

Up next is Shane and Albee. For now, enjoy the two tastes of nostalgia above. And make sure to catch Proximity as it picks up passport stamps on its premier tour. Dates and more info here.