Illustration by Tyler Hartlage
March 28, 2019
Shredding and Good Times: Viva Vonn
Thirty-five years ago, the most seminal Hollywood ski movie was, um, released on the public, exposing them to the stunt skiing of Tahoe legend Tom Day, the boozy antics of Squaw Valley misfits, a number of questionable scenes, including a 17-year-old runaway being roofied in a sauna by the entire Austrian freestyle team, and the repeated appearance of a pair of improbably shaped aftermarket breasts. Marketed as a teen comedy, Hot Dog: The Movie promised America’s 13-year-old boys a utopia where Squaw Valley had 10,000 feet of vertical, everyone shredded pow and smoked dope all day, and boobs urgently needed to be free.
Today, it’s looking pretty dated, and I say it’s time for a sequel. But what would a contemporary Hot Dog look like? The original blatantly exploited women as sex objects and built its plot on a sliver of a story about the sport’s sanctioning body selling the soul of pro freestyle skiing to corporate advertisers. A proper sequel would need a new ski genre, updated conflicts and characters, and a broader target demographic.
Posted from Powder Magazine
