Music Video #37 (Day 7 of 2008)

Today's video is a change of pace. I've actually heard of this song. It's five and a half minutes of Styx's Mr. Roboto.


Ok, let me take that back. After watching the video, I realize that I'm only familiar with the famous refrain. The rest was new to me. I will guess that this was an eighties song. The futurisism and the synthesizers poin in that direction. It'll be so wrong if this came from the seventies.

So this music video is about vaguely asian robots and a guy who might be a robot or not. There's a stage where the song is performed and maybe a jail. There's some more visuals, but that's about it.

Some blond guy walks up to a stage. In the background it reminds me of a scene from Warrior of the Lost World, an MSt3k episode which had a totalitarianism future ruled by Donald Pleasance. Watch it and you might see the weird dance scene and know what the heck I'm talking about. Blond looks at the "Kilroy Kills" stage and sees band members doing the robot.

Then, they suddenly are robots! And when I said vaguely, I think I meant vaguely racist. The famous intro plays and we get what I'm sure is Japanese. This was the eighties and the Japanese were this close to taking over America. The Japanese stands for...not much. I looked it up and its just "thank you robot" and something about a secret. Still catchy.

Anyway, we have five robots on stage. This must mean that the middle robot is important, and he appears to be while the rest do awkward robot moves. Singer guesses that we're wondering if he's a robot or not. Oh jeez, I guess I'm now prejudice about robots. Now I have to worry about immediately assuming whether something is a alive or not. He assures us that he's the modern man, so I guess he's a cyborg?

Singer has a human heart, boiling blood, and an IBM brain. Totally a cyborg. Except for he's not, as he soon reveals as he suddenly becomes human. He's just a guy in a robot costume. Lame. If he had to disguise himself as a robot, could he have picked one that didn't appear in a Bela Lugosi serial?

While we see a robot meet our singer in a jail, the singer drives home the poin that he's not a robot. Gotcha. I think it shows him tackling the robot but there's also a scene with several people surrounding a robot so I'm not sure what's going on there.

Then the singer starts to sing about being the modern man who hides his identity. What? You were a guy in prison who beat up a robot and stole it's face. How is that like modern man? Your metaphor sucks. "I go to work and use a credit card, which is like hiding in a robot prison!"

Then singer is back to his robot disguise. The other robots join him and take a bow while the refrain starts again. They're Japanese, you know. Next we see some futuristic building. It's flat and has a airplane looking over it, so it must be a prison. This hunch is further, uhh, hunchified by the fact that we see our protagonist hiding from a spotlight. The singer thanks the heck out of the robot for helping him to escape.

Next the singer sings about how the problem is dehumanizing technology. Yeah, I love the good old days of smaller life spans and no light bulbs, don't you? And remember, the Internet was barely around at this poin, if at all. I'd love to show him the real future. The singer feels that he needs to shout his identity to the world, which is Kilroy. Wow, what a payoff! Now go churn some butter, technology hater.


The song was much different than what I assumed it was. It's ok, but to me the entire song will be like the refrain. I wish the song would explain why this guy is in prison, but it's probably some power that the band wants to speak truth to, or some crap like that.

The awesome part of this video is that the Japanese economy eventually collapsed, which led them to keep their robot fetish in their own country instead of their great empire. But that's cruel, so the second awesome thing about this video is the Elvis robot. Elvis survived Big Brother! There's still hope in the world.