I grew up in a rural town where culture trickled slowly down from urban centers through MTV and magazines. Sometimes a cool kid would move into town to spice things up a bit. I specifically remember the girl that started school in full Madonna/Lauper attire. Boys swooned while girls flocked to purchase the town's entire stock of bangles, scarves and thrift store clothing. Everything we got was usually a few years behind... if we were lucky. We managed to learn break-dancing and since it was Vermont, we had an ample supply of hippies hell-bent on learning Frisbee and foot-bag moves. I personally tried my hand at skateboarding, but the frost heaves in our driveway made for a treacherous learning curve.

How much easier for the kids today to have something like The Book of Cool to learn from. This compact UMD set contains four hours of demonstration from world professionals in skills like golf, cards, rugby and street basketball. Now deprived children from rural America to rural Armenia will have access to cool skills. What, you may ask, would an enterprising young person do with skills like pen spinning, card throwing, skooter hops and street football moves? The answer lies in the red rump of the baboon, the cascading green plumage of the peacock or the fierce fighting ability of the lion. This a prescription for those who may not have the natural skills or ability, but wish to learn. And if you can't learn from these teachers you just need to give up.

Each segment of The Book of Cool is a short movie and then multiple sequences of tricks with explanations. In many cases, you'll be able to loop tricks using a built-in feature rather than trying to loop on your player. For any one segment there may be 5-10 short sequences to show specific tricks. The footage is shot professionally with nice music, but the direction is always geared toward visibility. We've seen plenty of other "extreme sport" films shot like high-art, which is great for entertainment value, but not great if you're trying to learn tricks.

The Book of Cool is a way to shorten the learning curve and have the pros tell you exactly what they do to pull off each trick, step by step. Some tricks, like pen spinning, are relatively harmless. Others like card throwing or skooter tricks have some inherent risk. These segments and the trick sequences within the segment contain a warning recommending safety measures like wearing protection and not throwing cards at people. The warnings are a little overdone, I thought. Put something at the beginning saying that many tricks are dangerous, blah, blah and then shut up. No doubt there were great legal minds that devised the idea of including extra warnings to stave off lawsuits, but it doesn't help the viewing experience.

The Book of Cool is fun to watch whether you do some of the tricks and want to be better or haven't done anything yet. A wish-list feature we'd love to see is something where tricks are shot from multiple angles. I rarely see that feature used in movies but it would be perfect here. The entire collection of segments here is nice and there are many more hours of The Book of Cool that released on DVD, but didn't fit on UMD. I love that this is a training video that also happens to be incredibly entertaining. If school managed to be half this fun, we'd have a lot more literate people walking around...