King of the Road is one of my favorite pieces of media anywhere. Endlessly entertaining in a way that makes me laugh, makes me cringe, and even scratches my itch to watch skateboarding. I look forward to it every year, and this year in particular I had 3 extra months to look forward to it because they postponed its release to coincide with the launch of Viceland. This change has been a bit weird for some people, because the impression is that Vice has been hoarding all the good footage and only the minimal scraps for the webisodes.
In watching both the Vice version and the Thrasher webisodes, I've noticed that they make it difficult to get a feel for what the score is. I think that's for a couple of reasons. For one thing, I guess they think it adds suspense to not know who's going to win until the very end. I guess the other thing to consider is not knowing the score takes you along for the ride and immerses you a little bit more. After all, the teams didn't know how many points the other teams had, so they also had to live with not knowing who's going to win.
I have pretty mixed feelings about that, because on one hand, I don't want to know who wins the whole thing yet because that feels like a plot-spoiler. Plus, the points are really more of a motivator for the teams (winner gets a cash prize) and isn't the most important part of the viewer's experience for something like this. Anti-Hero proved in 2012 that the the points don't really matter. On the other hand, this IS a competition, and the information is dispensed slowly over a period of 10 weeks, and so I don't think it's crazy of me to want to know who's winning. It adds to the story if I can go into an episode thinking, "Man, Toy Machine really needs to pick up the pace if they want to win" and then I can see what they do during that episode. It adds a narrative.
Since I'm a huge nerd, as the name of this blog implies, I decided to go through and watch all of the episodes and do my best to tally up the points. This was way more difficult than I thought it would be, because Thrasher didn't release The Book on their website like they have for the 3 previous years, and the webisodes don't even show point values, so I had to watch the Viceland version to figure out the points (the name of the challenge and points flash on the screen for a maximum of 1second, by the way). As if that didn't make it difficult enough, Viceland left out a lot of tricks, so I had to watch the webisodes to make sure I didn't miss too many. So, you're welcome, is what I'm trying to say.
Click here for the full list of points so far.
The point summary is below. The 'Earned Score' is the score that I'm pretty sure of, while the 'Speculative Score' is what I expect the score to be if I guess right about the 'Highest, Longest, Most' category.
These are only rough estimates.
Here are the results so far:
Toy Machine
Earned Score: 1940
Speculative Score:1990
Birdhouse
Earned Score: 3240
Speculative Score: 3590
Chocolate
Earned Score: 2150
Speculative Score: 2250
Leading MVP: Elijah Berle, 800 pts.(Note: I'm not sure about this- These are only based on attempted points so far that I've been able to determine.)
Trailing LVP: Blake Carpenter, for whining the most while also producing 200 pts. Justin Eldridge has probably produced the fewest points overall so far though with 70 points, but in his defense he was sick for a day and has otherwise been pretty supportive of his team.
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