Rick DeBanks’ video of a wild Surrey-area house party he attended almost 30 years ago has been viewed more than 12,000 times since he posted it to Youtube just one week ago.
The 33-minute clip shows a house full of rocking teens and young adults ringing in the new year at a residence in Newton, near 144th Street and Highway 10.
“It’s a time capsule, for sure,” said DeBanks, who added the “Surrey BC House Party Dec 31 1989” video to his Rick Richards account on July 3.
“I have a whole bunch of videos that I’m in the process of converting to MP4s, and I remember that video in particular – and I hadn’t watched it in 20 years or more,” DeBanks said when reached on Wednesday.
“I knew it would be an interesting video for people to see, because it’s shot POV style – point of view – and if you watch it, it’s almost like you’re there, with all the people everywhere. There are some bad spots in the video but it’s not too shaky or anything. It just gives the viewer a sense of being at the party.”
DeBanks says he used a camcorder to shoot the video with the help of a friend – in an era before cellphone cameras were commonplace, of course.
The clip starts with eerie music for the first minute, then settles in a haze of smoke and booze as party-goers hoot and holler for the camera, to a soundtrack of Led Zeppelin, Tone Loc, AC/DC, Madonna, Poison and, in a group sing-along, John Mellencamp’s “Jack and Diane.”
The video is posted with the description of “a house party on the last day of the 80’s in the Blue Collar town of Newton in Surrey, British Columbia,” but DeBanks now acknowledges it was actually filmed on the final night of 1990, not 1989. One clue is that Warrant’s “Cherry Pie” can be heard in the video, and the song wasn’t released until the fall of 1990.
Another clue: the lines of cocaine cut into a ‘91’ shape on a table.
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DeBanks said the video features a lot of Princess Margaret high school students and grads.
“A guy named Wayne lived in the house,” DeBanks noted. “His parents were obviously gone for the weekend or something,” he added with a laugh.
“It was just a real fun night. I almost got into a fight before I even got in, out in the driveway, and it kind of boiled over, but it was OK.”
DeBanks, who lives in South Surrey, now runs Athletic Alliance and makes videos about the company’s sports-nutrition products. In the mid-1990s, after broadcasting school, he co-hosted an “Inside Surrey” news program on community TV, and has posted one of those episodes – focusing on the Melanie Carpenter homicide in 1995 – on his Rick Richards account.
“I was a wrestler for awhile, as Rick Richards,” explained DeBanks, who said he was known as Rick Brown in high school.
On Youtube, he’s also planning to post video of his days as a football player with the Surrey Rams.
As for the Surrey party video, DeBanks said he’s not entirely surprised by the reaction to it on social media.
“I knew it’d be fairly popular as a retro throwback for those who lived in that era, in that area,” he said. “What I have been surprised by is the amount of people watching it who didn’t grow up in that era. There’s a fascination factor, a curiosity about it.
“It’s funny because the video now has more views than any I’ve ever posted for my company.”
tom.zillich@surreynowleader.com
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