Who will you really miss if TikTok is banned? Not the Hawk Tuah girl, surely. Not watching oversized Stanley cups fill with colorful liquids. Certainly not the clipped content from Jubilee, Logan Paul and Andrew Tate. No, you’ll miss those moments of magic captured by everyday people: A Boston cop plunging down on a metal slide. A squirrel named Squishy fitting eight hazelnuts into its cheeks. Tornado sirens in Iowa City harmonizing like a choir of angels.
Another local in the pantheon of TikTok darlings: Thomas Hack Collins, a 60-year-old rollerskater with a dirty-blonde mullet and even dirtier moves in the rink. If you liked that guy riding his skateboard to work while listening to Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” and drinking Ocean Spray, you’ll love the videos from user @andruwjonesrichar, shot at the Super Skate in Cedar Rapids.
@andruwjonesrichar @thcollins #superskate #rollerskate #rollerskating ♬ original sound – andruwjonesrichar
The star of the show is Collins, a blue-collar skater who spends the majority of the vids skating backwards and doing tricks in a style one commenter aptly describes as gracefully chaotic. It’s a fever dream of a video series, the most popular of which is a gestalt of Collins’ moves, slow-motion camera work and Super Skate off-kilterness. A woman in a sparkling sequined bodysuit. A teen in a shirt that is almost too self-aware in its aesthetic allusion to Napoleon Dynamite that reads “I LIKE OLDER WOMEN.” Another kid absolutely fuckin’ biffing it in-time with the video’s soundtrack, a mash-up of Metallica, Megadeth and The Who by Bill McClintock. (As the kid drops, James Hetfield’s voice screams out “Die!”)
“I’m not cool enough to be watching this,” one TikTok commenter admits. “How did this not win Best Picture,” asks another. “If this doesn’t go violently viral I’m quitting this app,” reads a top comment. (Despite critical acclaim, @andruwjonesrichar’s most-viewed video from March 2023 has amassed less than a million views — still a better box office than many indie films.)
The cinematography, editing, subjects, setting, soundtrack — there’s an almost uncanny, nostalgic quality to them that no Netflix production set in the ’80s or ’90s has quite captured, full of shades of brown, gratuitous amounts of smoking and little to no fear that at any moment your clumsy ass might be filmed and immortalized on a social media app.
I could go on and on. But like all truly viral videos, you just have to watch it yourself.
Collins has his own TikTok account, @thcollins, and his bio states that he “helps friends. skates, uses chucks. works his ass off.” In my latest hyper-fixated deep dive into the matter, I found that Collins and @andruwjonesrichar met each other at Super Skate. Collins wrote of the encounter, “all it took was him to ask to vid me…bring ur cam and ask…I’m all about the show.”
And what a show it is. As one viewer perfectly assessed, “This feels so violently midwest, mesmerizing.”
This article was originally published in Little Village’s December 2024 issue.
