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.