Kilroy Wasn’t Really Here After All

Distraught Consumer Ponders Poor Artificial Intelligence Programming

Secret, secret, I’ve got a secret.  There was always something disturbing about Mr. Roboto, even before the Volkswagon people got ahold of the tune.  Those sleepy eyes, those razor-bar teeth, and those fat jowls made them look like a nightmare version of Twiki from Buck Rogers.  Anyway, the Kilroy Was Here mini-movie was the origin of the “Future Without Hard Rock Music” mini-drama, which Quiet Riot would do better in a much more over-the-top way in their video “The Wild And The Young”.  QR Lead singer Kevin DuBrow even sported a removable metal mask.  And there was an authoritarian pseudo-military cigar-smoking woman intoning, “Technology”.  As if it were self-explanatory.  In Styx’s seminal version, a man named Robery Orin Charles Kilroy (gee, what’s *that* stand for?) finds himself in a future without rock music, and hides inside the dessicated corpse of one domestic robot servant.  For a while.  About three and a half minutes.  Then other stuff happens.

Or so we were led to believe.  What if the whole sequence was merely the delusions of a poorly programmed fat-jowled machine? Just like the new almost-final four Cylons.  Or Harlan Ellison’s The Demon With A Glass Hand.  We’ll never know, because it’s almost impossible to stay interested in the album after the Roboto song.  So just keep throwin’ those pointy guitars and glittery jackets in the woodchipper…the sun never sets for souls on the run.  Even metal ones.

Evolution of the Double Cheeseburger

“Now I am become the Dollar Menu, the destroyer of worlds.” Could the world really end in a giant cheese implosion into another dimension? The world is supposed to end, or possibly transmute into some new “level of being”, on December 21, 2012. Something to do with an ancient Mayan Calendar and an alignment of the Earth, Sun and the horizontal plane of the Milky Way Galaxy. Which isn’t actually going to happen for another 30 million years (and technically, it’s just a visual alignment – has nothing to do with gravity or changing magnetic poles, etc.), but somehow it became part of this whole 2012 mythos. That Roland “Independence Day” Emmerich dude is directing a new movie about it. Didn’t he already do about five other movies with relatively the same plot?. Whateveh…

As for the Mickey D’s stuff, I was inspired by the recent addition of the “McDouble” to the Dollar Menu. The Double Cheeseburger had become a staple of my ultra-healthy diet plan these past few years, but with the economic meltdown (the REAL apocalypse), the Wise Elders of McD-land decided that removing the second slice of cheese would save them a gabillion dollars. Man, it just wasn’t the same – the cheese-beef equilibrium was totally off. But now the original Double Cheeseburger has returned to the new “Snack Menu” for an extra 19 cents. Ah, I will gladly fork over the extra change for this object of gastronomic perfection (my body thanks me).

– Nigel Matrix

Brokeback Zardoz

Monolithic Stone Entity Contemplates Morality and Post-Apocalyptic Fashion

Zardoz speaks to you! 300 years in the future, a giant stone head floats around the wastelands of humanity, spewing guns and ammo from its mouth and ordering Brutals like Zed to “go forth and kill”. Though even the mighty Zardoz is not infallible, and being forced to watch Sean Connery (yes THE Sean Connery, as in James Bond 007) run around in his safety-orange skivvies for two hours may prove too much for anyone or thing to handle. Zardoz has one THING he considers to be EVIL above all else… this being a family website, you’ll have to google/youtube it for yourself…

– Nigel Matrix

The Apple Store, Bespin Mall

Enraged Cybernaut Bemoans Latest Technology

Ah, Lobot. Short for lobotomy? They say (in the Expanded Universe) that Lobot was some kind of criminal at one time, and he eventually wound up as an “indentured servant” to the administration of Cloud City. Forced to have cyber implants installed on his head and take orders directly into his brain, Lobot supposedly was a mute by that point. Oh well, I don’t really follow the EU much… seems like Lucas doesn’t really, either. If I recall correctly, in Episode III, there are some pilots wearing implants similar to Lobot’s on the Tantive IV – the familiar Blockade Runner, an Alderaanian vessel of Senator Organa. So would such a peaceful, highly democratic, poster-child-of-the-Rebellion planet such as Alderaan allow indentured servitude to exist? Hmm…

Oh well, mute or not, in the case of this comic, Lobot has reason to scream over the never-ending march of technology. Maybe he can get a refund if he writes to Steve Jabba of Apple Intergalactic, Inc.

– Nigel Matrix

Life After Intergalactic Conquest

ExWould Be Galactic Conqueror Gives Awesome Creme Rinse

Kimmmmmeeeeeeeeee!!!!! Who can forget the plaintive cry of the man-as-boy, Dexter, aka Space Ace, after being turned into a goobery kid by the Infanto Ray of evil galactic conqueror, Borf?  The awesome animation skill of Don Bluth and company made this and its companion game Dragon’s Lair truly a sight to see, even if the gameplay consisted of hitting the joystick at exactly the right moment…or sudden death!  And Borf…well, certainly a memorable bad guy…although if you try to imagine both Borf and the Genie from Disney’s Aladdin at the same time, you can’t….err, well, I think Borf had slightly more neck fat….

But let’s think about it.  Yeah, he’s got robots and spaceships, and good taste in redheads.  But his crowning achievement, his ultimate weapon…is a raygun that makes you younger?  The dude totally missed his calling.  He could have made a killing opening a Beauty Salon in New York.

–Raven

Galactica 1994

Disenfranched Gen-Xers blase about alien robot destruction

Reviled, Loathed, Disparaged…yet Battlestar Galactica 1980 still lingers in the collective sci-fi consciousness.  It had none of the charm or elan of its more noteworthy predecessor.  No Apollo, no Starbuck (well, except for that one last episode), no Athena, no Daggits (Dag.)  And Adama had a beard!  At least Boomer got promoted (and not turned into a cylon, sheesh).  Most people forget that the Wolfman Jack episode was actually pretty cool, and hey, they almost destroy a cylon centurian with a microwave!  Pretty err, well…stupid, in a cool way.  But seriously, how can you top flying motorcycles and invisibility watches?

But who cares about 1980?  Nothing much interesting happened then in retrospect.  It wasn’t 1985, or 1977, or some other eventful year.  So why not a better year?  Why not 1994, when coffee became a national obsession, everyone was bummed out about Kurt Cobain, and dismal Grunge bands roamed the earth in flannel.  What if they cylons landed then, huh?  They might have met Alice in Chains instead of Wolfman Jack.  And nobody would have cared all that much.

–Raven

Zoshi

Proud New Cannon Fodder Joins Elite Death Squad

We all lovingly remember that arcade classic, Xevious–right?  It’s on the short list of games, and well all things, really–beginning with the letter “X”.  Classic top scroller with adaptive difficulty.  But the cool thing was the list of names and enemy descriptions that were found on the game cabinet.  Gido Sparro, Andor Genesis, Domogram…and of course Zoshi.  Zoshi were supposed to be the elite Death Squad of the enemy, come to destroy your Solvalou fighter.  But in reality, they could be taken out with one shot and made the same tinkling-glass noise as any other airborne bad guy in the  game.   And let’s face it…their ships were kind of dorky.  Kinda makes you feel bad for them….

–Raven