Best Motorcycle DVDs

Easy Rider (1969)

Any list of best motorcycle movies would have to have Easy Rider at or near the top. This cult film has become an icon of the biker culture.

You may be a dandy in tightly tailored one-piece leathers on a sleek, Italian sport bike, but you share your motorcycle DNA with Captain America and Billy.

This film was made when I was in college. I thought it was so important that I rented the video and showed it to my own children when they were in high school twenty years later. Now it is available on DVD.

The DVD features commentary by director and co-star Dennis Hopper, production notes, a making-of featurette, interviews with Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and wide-screen anamorphic format.

The Wild One (1953)

This movie is important not because it is a great motorcycle movie, but because people who do not ride motorcycles think it is a motorcycle movie. You have to know what the enemy is thinking.

A curious blend of the beatnik culture and the biker culture, it did more to advance the biker gangs, 1%ers and the outlaw gangs than any other movie. With this role, Marlon Brando kick started his career as well as the biker movie genre.

Based loosely on the misreported and sensationalized events in Hollister, California by Life magazine, this movie makes caricatures of otherwise one-dimensional, fictionalized, cartoon characters.

Best line in the movie --
Girl: What're you rebelling against, Johnny?
Johnny: Whaddya got?

In a perverse movie becomes reality twist, San Francisco Hell's Angels chapter president Frank Sadilek bought the striped shirt that Lee Marvin wore in the movie to wear when meeting police officials.

And of course even the most casual motorcycle enthusiast knows that the motorcycle Marlon Brando rode was a Triumph and not a Harley-Davidson. In those days, Triumph ruled. How things change.