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Information

• Member: ZephyrStar
• Studio: Corndog Vidvids
• Title: Death Race Cydonia
• Premiered: 2014-09-29
• Categories:
  • Action
  • Other
  • Character Profile
  • Serious
• Song:
  • Clutch Escape from the Prison Planet
• Anime:
  • REDLINE (Movie)
• Participation:
  • The Video Art Track at Anime Weekend Atlanta 20, The Professional Awards (2014-09-27)
• Comments: This is my AWA Pro video from like 4 years ago. CrackTheSky made me release it finally!
  
  So the serious stuff:
  The song is "Escape from the Prison Planet" by Clutch. The anime is "Redline." I had the idea forever that I wanted to do a video using it, but it took awhile to find the right source to get across the feeling that the song gave me. So first let's look at the lyrics, but then I have a few notes on what I think the song is actually about.
  
  Lyrics:
  Then against my better judgment I went walking out that door.
  I smiled at one person then I nodded to three more.
  One man asked me for a dollar, I asked him, "What's it for?"
  He said, "I have seen them." I said, "O.K., it's yours."
  And as featured on the M-T-V, the local high school lets out,
  And the town becomes anarchy.
  Parties are crashed, skid marks are measured.
  The story's in the paper, you may read it at your leisure.
  
  Get out.
  Eject.
  Escape From the Prison Planet.
  Get out.
  Eject.
  Escape From the Prison Planet.
  
  And to the tune of a billion dollars, I supplied to the D.O.E.
  Some tasty little nuggets of alien technology.
  And as one might expect, I've been harassed for years.
  The Men In Black have been bending my ear.
  As a matter of fact, they were just here today,
  But I escaped them through a secret passageway.
  Once I lived there for one thousand days.
  
  Get out.
  Eject.
  Escape From the Prison Planet.
  Get out.
  Eject.
  Escape From the Prison Planet.
  
  I have plans for the future, guess they're futuristic plans.
  Move out west and buy some desert lands.
  Maybe up North, just past Alaska.
  You know nothing of this if they ask you.
  Red Rover, Red Rover, Bob Lazar's coming over.
  So honey clear the airstrip and light up that stove.
  By Jove, I think it's started. Oh yeah,
  Escape From the Prison Planet.
  
  Billion people harvest on Mars.
  Rebuild the remnants of the obelisk,
  One mile from the pyramid.
  Escape From the Planet of the Apes.
  Go forth, ad infinitum.
  Return the relics to the Elephant.
  And Atlantis rises.
  
  Get out.
  Eject.
  Escape From the Prison Planet.
  Ejector seat ignite.
  Billion people harvest on Mars.
  Rebuild the remnants of the obelisk,
  One mile from the pyramid.
  Escape From the Planet of the Apes.
  Go forth, ad infinitum.
  Return the relics to the Elephant.
  And Atlantis rises.
  
  So on the first read through, the thing that stands out is the name Bob Lazar. Close to the time this album "Clutch" came out, a man named Bob Lazar went public and claimed to have worked at a site called S4, near what many people know today as Area 51. He claimed that he worked for Los Alamos National Laboratory, and that he had been responsible for reverse engineering recovered alien craft. Do a google search and read up on him. I was 15 when the story broke in 1995, and I remember hearing this song and thinking "they know something we don't know."
  
  The rest of the song is fairly esoteric in nature, but the general idea behind it is that we're trapped on the Earth, by unseen nefarious forces, who have been around for a very long time.
  
  The "main character" in the song is either not human, or is a human who knows these unseen forces and secrets, and knows that something very bad will happen. He's trying to get away from "them" and off-world, because he knows that the Earth's time is limited. We don't really ever find out if he made it.
  There are a few passages in the song that I'll elaborate on with some possible meanings. The first is the passage "parties are crashed" before "skid marks are measured." I think this ought to instead be "bodies, a crash" and in reference to a UFO crash (probably Roswell).
  
  Another thing is the abbreviation "D.O.E." which I beleive should be "D.O.D." for the Department of Defense. The passage "move out west and buy some desert lands" may refer to S4 or Area 51, and "maybe up north, just past Alaska" may have something to do with the HAARP facility. I love the song, but I also find it quite terrifying. It takes many pop culture UFO and conspiracy theory references and makes them into something tangible, they feel real. Billion people harvest on Mars? Escape from the prison planet? What is it that the protagonist in the song knows that we the sheep don't know? I knew as soon as I had seen Redline, especially the part with the gigantic baby of death, that it would be a perfect match for the song. I spent a really long time tweaking and editing to try to bring out the story of the song, and not the story in Redline.