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The History of Green Day, a.k.a. Suburbia Bomb, a.k.a. Pogo Paradise

Posted: 1/24/06
The History of Green Day, a.k.a. Suburbia Bomb, a.k.a. Pogo Paradise

If you are walking down the street, and you see any of the DVDs bearing one of these names coming towards you, run for your life. If you don't, the next thing you know, you'll be chilled out on your couch, expecting to see an at least moderately revealing documentary on Green Day. If your expectations are even somewhat high, you will be disappointed.

"Pogo Paradise" was released in 2002. It advertises itself as "An Unauthorized Documentary Film Packed with Exclusive Interviews." Okay, great. This makes you think that "Pogo Paradise" is going to offer you some awesome and possibly scandalous new insights into who Green Day are. If it's "unauthorized" and "exclusive," it must be full of those guys doing nipple-revealing shit, right?

Sadly not.

What this little disclaimer is actually getting at, as you quickly discover, is that there is very little footage of Green Day in this video, and absolutely none of their music.

To be fair, the documentary starts with some very nice disclaimers about how it is probably going to suck, so after you've actually bought it, it doesn't try to trick you anymore. And right away, a British lady that sounds like the Queen mum comes on like she's going to give you all the dirt, which is the point at which you KNOW it's going to suck.

Although "Pogo Paradise" is full of interviews, it only includes about two minutes of the actual band members talking, and that two minutes involves the same clip being played twice, at the beginning and at the end of the movie, so really, there's more like thirty seconds of actual Green Day goodness throughout the whole thing.

The rest of the movie is screen shots of old pictures of the guys, and interviews with people who knew them or knew of them back in the good old days. There are a few cool interviews, like with Jesse Michaels from Operation Ivy, but for every interesting, informative speaker, there's some dude who's all "yeah, I know the Green Day."

If you knew that "Pogo Paradise" was just going to be about the Gilman Street scene in the eighties and early nineties, it might have been okay, but you pay for Green Day, you want some fucking Green Day. Just give me the goddamn fucking Green Day before I freak out.

Oh, and it was said earlier that after you've bought "Pogo Paradise," they don't dick you around anymore, but that is most unfortunately untrue. Riding the wave of popularity generated by "American Idiot," "Pogo Paradise" was re-released in the summer of 2005 as "Suburbia Bomb." It has all new cover art, but the blurb on the back is the same. To add insult to injury, once you turn the movie on, the title still reads "Pogo Paradise" and is exactly the same movie with no additional footage!

Needless to say, this little scam has left plenty of hardcore fans feeling ripped off and pissed off. The "Pogo Paradise" people could at least have tagged some "American Idiot" crap on at the end to try and convince us that the documentary is up to date, but they didn't bother. The only unique element in the new Green Day DVD is new cover art, so if you're an absolute try-hard fan that needs to have every conceivable edition of a product ever produced, this is the item for you.

For all other Green Day fans: 'ware, 'ware this cheap gimmicky crap. If the guys in Green Day were dead, they'd be rolling in their graves right now.

Word to the wise: some distributors market "Suburbia Bomb" primarily as "The History of Green Day," so don't get fooled by that tactic, either.