In Upton Sinclair’s 1906 action adventure epic “Welcome 2 Tha Jungle,” protagonist Jurgis Rudkus immigrates from Lithuania to Chicago, a realm of industrial opportunity ripe for fortune making and dream chasing. Despite his oxen-like strength and physical endurance, Jurgis’ entry into the working world offers mainly wages of humiliation, injury, poverty and misery, ultimately destroying his family life and setting him on a path to hoboism. Eventually, Yung Jurgis moves into violent and organized crime, at which point the reader is like “finally.”
More than a century later, like subgrade urethane capitulating to a screechsome blunt-slide, time remains a flat circle. Chocolate, the Torrance, Calif.-based deck concern whose video output has often dealt with themes of desperation, justice and living at the boundaries of the law, returned last month with the Crailtap camp’s most vibrant full-length vid in nearly 15 years, the fantastic, Keenan Milton-quoting ‘Bunny Hop.’ The stakes aren’t nothing — there hasn’t been a formal Choco production since the first W. Bush term, and most of the dudes with parts haven’t been on the team more than a couple years — but it starts off poking fun at the uncomfortable truth that’s become apparent for board companies yea this past decade, which is that most of them don’t got much money. “You wanna do a full-length video in 2021?” the incredulous Crailtap accountant scoffs at the ‘Chocolate Tour II’ trailer’s opening, rejecting a proposed rooftop spine ramp and underwater sequence. “You gotta find the money yourself. We don’t have it.”
So begins the young Chocolate team’s plunge into the bowels of working-world hell. As an apprentice real estate agent, Erik Herrera is ignored in his futile task to sell a falling-apart bungalow; Stevie Perez becomes a paid guinea pig for experimental brown-coloured beverages, and later has foodstuffs and screamed insults heaped upon him at a pizzeria. The team furrows their brows as they are led down a digital primrose path into what appears to be a bewildering crypto scam, and Carl Aikens endures verbal abuse and word salad dished out by Chuck of Chuck’s Skate Barn fame, now living a Howard Hughes-esque lifestyle centered around persona fitness and online charts. Like Yung Jurgis before them, before long the hopelessness and debasement overwhelms the young Chocolate team, soon turning them toward robbery, break-ins and fiery auto-insurance fraud.
On its face, the ‘Chocolate Tour II’ trailer clip (followed by Sam Cooke’s ode to forced labour, “Chain Gang,” soundtracking the conventional intro section) can be read on its face as another entry in the skateboard sphere’s long-running aversion to the proverbial ‘office job’ and various other career paths more square than kickflip backside tailsliding ledges in overseas locales, a trope that’s likely helped keep low-cost talent accessible to the skate industry. It’s easy, too, to be reminded of the Girl/Choco camp’s own business-world sagas over the past decade, the Crailtap assets bought and sold and merged by barons of private equity, longtime family members decamping for corporate sportswear gigs or to launch rival hard-goods operations.
But as the video gets underway — in between James Capps’ crackling wall gap 360 flip, Erik Herrera’s run-it-back-five-times backside noseblunt, Jordan Trahan’s garbage bin leap into the top five all-time kickflips, Stevie Perez’s window-rattling wall banger, Vincent Alvarez’s switch backside noseblunt pop-out and Carl Aiken’s hazy magic — the secular world shows how much has shifted since the first Choco movie portrayed skaters as literal outlaws.
As the 2021 calendar petered out, a law firm literally opens its doors to let James Capps, Stevie Perez and Erik Herrera hit the rail out front — and edits release forms for them to sign on the spot. Vincent Alvarez gets spot tips from a car wash attendant and is lightly mothered by a phone-filming cop; a tie-wearing oldster gives Carl Aikens his personal thumbs up, judging the trick an “excellent job;” in midtown, an aging suit confides to James Capps that “I love what you guys do” and deems skating the best sport in the world; passersby poach photos and a cop car stands by while the Choco bros take a few more tries; a big rig operator declares Jordan Trahan a “bad motherfucker,” accurately. And whereas the ‘Chocolate Tour II’ clip leaves the current team in a state of lawless desperation, the walk-ons from legacy pros portray hope for success beyond the skate industry, with Stevie Williams overseeing an industrial cannabis operation, Richard Mulder a smooth-operating real estate agent, Federico Vitetta a detail-oriented (if volcanic) restaurateur, and Daniel Castillo successful enough at some digital economy shit to afford enhanced reality goggles.
Does ‘Bunny Hop’ simply detail the dark side of the contented 9-to-5erness showcased in the intro to Girl’s ‘Doll’ a few years ago, which featured Griffin Gass as a focused shelf-stocker, Mike Carroll as a relaxed postman, and Niels Bennett as an intrepid vintage clothing merchant? Could Thrasher’s recent ‘Skaters With Jobs’ feature encourage aspirations beyond barbacking and car-based gig economizing, or will it choke off critical future talent flows? Will “Chocolate Tour II” result in a federal examination of sanitary and worker safety practices in the burgeoning ‘Chocolate Pow’ industry? What’s up with no Hosea Peeters?
boil the ocean 
