Brink!
Erik von Detten as Andy "Brink" Brinker, a Southern California inline skater who secretly joins the sponsored Team X-Bladz for $200 a week when his dad's disability pay runs thin, betraying the "Soul-Skaters" who skate for fun, not money. Disney Channel premiered it on August 29, 1998, as only its third Original Movie, and it has anchored best-DCOM lists ever since.
Brink! was the third Disney Channel Original Movie by Disney's own count, after Under Wraps and You Lucky Dog, and the one that proved the brand could produce a classic. Written by Jeff Schechter and directed by Greg Beeman, it updated Mary Mapes Dodge's 1865 novel Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates into the late-nineties world of aggressive inline skating. Erik von Detten, who had voiced the toy-torturing Sid in Toy Story three years earlier, played Andy "Brink" Brinker, with Christina Vidal as Gabriella, Patrick Levis as Peter, Asher Gold as Jordy, Sam Horrigan as the sneering Val and David Graf as Brink's father Ralph.
Brink and his friends call themselves Soul-Skaters, meaning they skate for the love of it, and clash at school with Team X-Bladz, a semi-pro squad led by Val. When a race on school grounds ends with an X-Bladz skater hurt and everyone suspended, Brink learns his father has been on disability for six months, and he quietly takes Val's offer of $200 a week to skate for X-Bladz. Ralph, thinking his son wants honest work, gets him a job at Pup-N-Suds, a dog groomer. The double life collapses when Val tosses gravel onto a downhill course and Gabriella wipes out; she calls Brink a sell-out, he confesses to his father, quits the team with a milkshake to Val's face, and buys his friends new skates with an advance on his Pup-N-Suds wages so they can enter the championship as Team Pup 'N Suds. He beats Val in the downhill final while ESPN cameras catch Val's cheating, turns down the captaincy of X-Bladz, and takes the trophy back to his friends.
That is the entire movie, and it has aged into a monument. Complex ranked it the number-one Disney Channel Original Movie of all time in 2012; Entertainment Weekly put it fourth in 2015, crediting "the hilariously nostalgic lingo" and "one-time Disney golden boy Erik von Detten"; Collider's 2016 ranking placed it seventeenth while calling it potentially the best aggressive inline skating movie ever made, "though it might also be the only one." For the kids who watched it on premiere night with their own Rollerblades by the door, that was never in doubt.
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