The second summer, they got good. They learned to edit by taping over old home movies of Leo’s family vacations. They built a ramp out of plywood and cinderblocks and filmed Finn crashing his BMX bike into a hedge in slow motion. They documented the “Midnight Melon Massacre,” where they rolled watermelons down the steepest hill on Oak Street and watched them explode against the curb. The videos had no plot, no moral, no point—except to prove that summer was a kingdom they were actively conquering.
Then the raft hit a submerged branch.
A week later, Leo hosted a premiere in his garage. He’d strung up Christmas lights and set a box fan to “hurricane.” Finn and Marcus sat on overturned laundry baskets. Leo hit play on his dad’s old VCR.
That video, titled simply “The Kings of Summer,” was the last one they ever made. High school came, scattering them into different crowds, different lives. The forum shut down. The camera stayed dead. The Kings of Summer Videos
That was the spark.
On the day of the launch, Leo narrated in a hushed, David Attenborough whisper into the camera’s fuzzy microphone. “Here we see the suburban adventurer, in his natural habitat, defying both physics and parental wrath.”
The footage was grainy, wobbly, and perfect. It showed them laughing, scheming, failing, and laughing harder. It showed the sun setting over the desert as they sat on the curb, exhausted and happy, eating gas station hot dogs. It showed them alive . The second summer, they got good
Their first video was a disaster. A shaky, fifteen-minute epic titled “The Great Soda Geyser.” The audio was just wind noise and their own panicked laughter as a shaken two-liter of root beer erupted not onto Finn’s little brother, but directly into the camcorder lens. The tape ended in a blur of sticky brown foam.
But the third summer—the legendary one—was when they made the video.
It started the summer we were all thirteen. Leo’s dad, a retired news photographer with a glass eye and a garage full of forgotten tech, handed him a brick-like Panasonic. “It still records,” he’d said, shrugging. “The world needs more stories, not just headlines.” A week later, Leo hosted a premiere in his garage
Every town has its mythologies. In the sprawling, sun-scorched suburbs of Mesa, Arizona, our mythology was not a ghost or a cryptid, but three boys and a clunky VHS camcorder.
But they uploaded it to a dead forum called DesertTapes.com —and someone in Albuquerque commented: “This is more real than TV.”
They spent a week stealing pallets from behind the grocery store and lashing them together with extension cords. Marcus, whose dad was a roofer, supplied a tarp and a single, ancient oar. The finished vessel was a monstrosity: crooked, splintered, and gloriously unseaworthy.
It was late July. The heat was a physical weight. Boredom had set in deep. Leo, now wielding a slightly-less-broken Hi8 camera, suggested they build a raft.