This was my first work dealing with cartoon animation. I’d had never attempted such a piece before.
I had amassed the entire Godzilla film catalog itching to use it for this very purpose, and was waiting for the right spark. Which came after I found an article about Google with this huge hi-res cartoon of the Google bot:
That’s actually a low res clipping (plus the meme addons). It’s the best I could dig up online recently. Or I’d link the source. I’ll find it all in my archives later I imagine.
So, of course, then I strapped it (NOT HIM, it) to the tanks tracks of a Terminator HK:
Stretched out the arms, started moving them around with my video editor (Vegas), yada yada. Pretty frickin tedious! I had about 5 nights to spend on it.
The first couple scenes where I had the Google bot cartoon guy come on screen, no not very cartoon animated. But it improves I promise (I was learning the process as it went), but even if the piece just sucks, the story below might just be better…
Another element was the Skynet Mainframe scene from T2: The Arcade game (those tank tracks were too). True story, I actually lived in a coin op game warehouse at the time of making it (was there since the Housing Collapse). And we even had a machine (one of the best arcade games ever!) in around that time, but to get the video clips I had to run the MAME emulator and get to that part of the video game with a damn mouse. Worth it!
Back to the Godzilla elements, it features pretty much every scene from every old Japanese Godzilla movie, of human herds stampeding like World War Z. Sadly! There should have been more. I’ve had a lot of debate fun over the years with that motif. Especially with the EnvironMENTALISTS. They love the shit out of me for describing them as if running down the road from Godzilla, with their hair on fire, when being overly over the top with their assertions.
And that crazy stage scene (pictured here with Google co-founder Larry Page yammering on about Google becoming an all seeing all knowing god, by definition):
Well that was the 2009 Singapore National Day ceremony:
I had found a 2 page spread of the image in the video in a TIME magazine waiting in line at the grocery checkout. SOLD. Scanned and merged it, and talked about it here. Crazy ass story, with the storm troopers running through the crowd with weapons, the crowd teeming with glee, the brigades of military and such sorts all up there in formation like a scene from some Commu-Fascist rally of yesteryear… and then the Hypnotron stage itself:
Yikes!
Now most importantly, the song, “Peek-A-Boo!”, from “DEVO” (which stands for de-evolution in case you didn’t know), is actually some fun personal trivia. When I was around the age of five, as a child, well my dad whom was a cabinet guy by trade. He custom built a sweet huge double door cabinet for his profound VHS tape collection.
The doors too were shelves. All formica’d. Packed with tapes. ‘All’ the crazy shit out there back then. They were all recordings, several films and such on each tape. He had a handwritten book, as the guide book to navigate it all. Changed my life! Had to be pretty cool for whomever got it when he was done with VHS.
So amongst his archive, most of which I wasn’t supposed to touch, were some items I could and the DEVO home video was one the I can remember playing on a loop. And I loved that Peek-A-Boo song and its crazy music video, although it may be hard for many to make sense of on first pass. Especially not back then. And still not yet in entirety when I made Google GODzilla, not like in today’s new Clown World mass “reality” going on…
The original intended meaning of it that I know about:
“Peek-a Boo! was a song about Devo’s circus-like look and the dark side of human nature, the side we try to keep secret, the side we try to deny, in this Christian world where we’re only supposed to have happy endings and only supposed to be good, and instead Devo is dealing with what evil is here in a very light-hearted manner.” -Gerald Casale, DEVO’s bassist.
And that, The Most Taboo Subject of All, is definitely one that my works often tend to touch on.
But I came to see a deeper meaning to the song, that it makes perfect sense as a prophetic warning for the technological surveillance state of the modern era in general, with a particular aptitude of lampooning Google’s role as the epitome of the Big Brother Industrial Complex.
The lyrics being a narration from the point of view of the ‘entity’ or whomever is rather unique, and really helps sell the symbolism’s from the music video, in my view…
The system overlord entity swoops in:
It’s evil face emerges:
A system of ‘devils’ (laughing at you):
Welcome to Planet Clown World:
And in the end those pirates ravage humanity:
Whether or not DEVO saw the future and revealed it in this video matters not, because they nailed it anyways.
Praise BOB!
