Synopsis

Devo's "Jocko Homo" video plays like a fragment of a deranged educational film. Booji Boy runs through an industrial landscape to meet General Boy, who announces the alleged truth of de-evolution. The action then shifts to a classroom, where Mark Mothersbaugh delivers the song's chant-like manifesto as the students descend into ecstatic disorder. Rapid edits, masks, stark locations, and absurd violence turn the performance into a satirical warning about humanity's supposed regression, ending with Booji Boy's apparent death and unmasking.

Factoids & Trivia

• The video is part of Devo's nine-minute experimental short film "In the Beginning Was the End: The Truth About De-Evolution," which also includes "Secret Agent Man."

• The film was made in 1976 and became one of Devo's earliest attempts to merge music, performance art, social satire, and deliberately cheap-looking science-fiction imagery.

• Locations included Akron and Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. The factory exterior was filmed at the Goodyear World of Rubber, while the classroom sequence used the Governance Chambers at Kent State University.

• The classroom performance uses an early version of "Jocko Homo," rather than the later album recording. This version was subsequently issued on Devo's 1977 Booji Boy Records single, backed with "Mongoloid."

• The title comes from B.H. Shadduck's 1924 religious satire "Jocko-Homo Heavenbound," a source that also supplied ideas for Devo's de-evolutionary philosophy.

• The short film won an award at the 1977 Ann Arbor Film Festival, helping bring Devo to the attention of audiences beyond the Akron art and underground music scenes.

• Devo regularly screened the film before concerts, making "Jocko Homo" function as an audiovisual introduction to the band's worldview rather than simply a standalone promotional clip.

• The film's imagery helped establish Devo's early visual language: masks, authoritarian characters, staged instruction, industrial settings, and the repeated suggestion that modern society is moving backward.