Thursday, June 27, 2013

 

Old video find offers a blast from sportbiking's past


Being one of those guys who noses around the Internet at every opportunity for anything remotely related to motorcycles, it's always nice when I find something vintage I've never seen before. I've done just that this week. Jackpot. I give you, "Street Smarts", a bonafide low-budget jewel from the height of the VHS era.

Being a video guy myself, and a fan of niche motorcycle stuff, I was surprised that Street Smarts (1990) had somehow slipped under my radar all these years. Once discovered, I found it in pieces all over YouTube and a few other video sites. Not being able to find it for sale from the original production house, I gathered it up, put it all back together and reposted it in its entirety.

Street Smarts was apparently one of the first independently produced how-to motorcycle safety titles of the 1990s. And while horribly flawed in some of its instructions (for example, it advises the viewer to never use a motorcycle's rear brake and to not do a full head-check, among other wildly incorrect assertions), it still contains a modicum of good information. But more importantly, if you can get past the poor on-camera presence of some of the so-called "experts" and the sometimes questionable things filmed on the street in order to demonstrate what not to do, you'll enjoy an hour of great classic motorcycles from a quarter century ago. Honda Hurricane alert!

In the process of re-assembling the video, I also found its sister titles Street Smarts II and Street Smarts III, which I didn't bother messing with since they were pretty tedious, filled with even more bad info than the first edition, and generally unwatchable by my tastes.

At any rate, here it is in all its late '80s glory. Enjoy.