The one thing that was fun about crashing in Skate/Skate2 was that the horrible Hall of Meat worthy crashes were completely dependent on the physics and whatever you were crashing off of. The randomness is what made this so fun, and is what made the videos (specifically Goonskate) so much fun to watch.

It almost always sucks when something like this becomes self-aware. Like pyide says below, this looks like Burnout's Showtime mode. It's pretty silly and really stupid looking. I hope it isn't required to progress in the game.