Alan Myers

Originally formed amidst the chaos of the 1970 Kent State anti-Vietnam War protest killings, the not quite new wave band Devo scored a hit with "Whip It" and gained mainstream success with their message of societal "de-evolution."

"This lone video artifact offers indisputable evidence that in 1980 Devo had reached a turning point. We were no longer just art monsters, we were mainstream performers too. " - Gerald V. Casale (from the back of the DVD case) August 17, 1980 Phoenix Theater, Petaluma

Now, the complete truth can be told...Devo, the seminal New Wave audio-visual concept band made a career out of setting to music video their Dada-gone-camp theory of de-evolution and its riotous rebuke of corporate culture. Punk/New Wave mad scientists Devo were among the few bands to understand the music video's potential as art form during its infancy in the eighties. Their brilliant and bizarre videos were compiled on VHS and then on laser disc; that long out-of-print disc, The Complete Truth About De-Evolution, has finally arrived on DVD, which should please longtime fans of this eclectic outfit.

A failing television station is bought out by a slick TV evangelist and starts making mountains of money in the guise of religious programming, which is actually just an excuse to sell merchandise.

The new owner of a roadside diner stuck in a town built around an always leaking nuclear power plant plans to torch the place to collect insurance. However, an assortment of bizarre characters and weird events (such as spaceships flying around) gets in his way.

Like The Men Who Make the Music, We're All Devo! has a storyline to tie the videos together. In it, the character of Rod Rooter (Michael W Schwartz) is reviewing Devo's music videos for Big Entertainment. Much to his chagrin, his daughter Donut Rooter (Laraine Newman) is a fan of the band. Donut discovers the videos after asking her father for money to get an abortion (though this is not explicitly stated). Two excerpts from the storyline were included in the "Complete Truth About De-Evolution" laserdisc and DVD (both out of sequence) but the rest is exclusive to this videocassette. "Theme from Doctor Detroit" was also not included, and is unique to this tape. (Wikipedia)

3-DEVO took place on October 30, 1982, at the Warner Beverly Hills Theater in Beverly Hills, California. It was filmed and transmitted live in 3-D to college campuses around the country. This is the original broadcast, not the late rebroadcast that was edited significantly.

Japanese television broadcast. Different production from the home video release, only sharing the title and the live version of "Red Eye." The video is mostly comprised of footage from a concert at Nippon Bukodan Hall in Tokyo in May 1979 and includes the full set except for "Pink Pussycat". Concert footage is interspersed with short clips of Booji Boy, Pliny, and Mongo at a sushi restaurant, shot for Japanese television around the same time as the concert. DEVO also interact with Mr. Kato.

Part concert film, music video collection, and propaganda piece, The Men Who Make the Music was DEVO's first home video release. Features live footage from the band's 1978 "Duty Now for the Future" tour.

Not to be confused with the longform video of the same name first released in 1981, this earlier film was filmed as a prototype for that later piece and features DEVO in greyish-blue janitor uniforms. It includes songs such as Huboon Stomp, The Words Get Stuck In My Throat and Too Much Paranoias.

A documentary about DEVO