Video of the Day: Dolby Kids’ ‘Corona and the Pirate Twins’

A good chunk of what SCIFI.radio plays is soundtrack music from movies, TV and games, but the rest of it could arguably be classified as “filk”. This is, broadly speaking, music that has been repurposed from something else, usually with rewritten lyrics to humorous effect, and usually by somebody completely removed from the original source material, though not always – sometimes filk is completely original in lyrics, melody and arrangement, but it’s still of particular geek interest.

Today’s piece is classically filk, but with a twist. It’s called Corona and the Pirate Twins. Based on Thomas Dolby’s Europa and the Pirate Twins, it details the stresses and constrictions of private life under COVID-19 quarantine. It’s the singers that make this one unique: they are the offspring of Thomas Dolby himself, filking their father’s music. It’s not identified, and the Dolby family is very private, so we can’t verify it, but we think the singer is his eldest child Harper Robertson.

The video uses footage from the original music video and takes advantage As the coronavirus lockdown continues, more and more creative works of born of frustration and cabin fever emerge. Using some of the same outdoor locations as were used in the original helps tie the whole thing together.

Harper can apparently really really sing, just as well as his father, and it’s really a pretty good, listenable piece of music. One of the other voices is likely Talia Robertson, a daughter, and that seems to be her in a brief clip or two. The other male, who appears in the scene where Harper is wearing the doughboy helmet looking out an apartment window, is likely Harper’s husband Joe.

Of course we’ll be playing this on SCIFI.radio, at least until the coronavirus crisis is behind us. We have to have something that makes us smile, after all, or the whole thing gets under our skins.

It’s popularly thought that his father Thomas Dolby was also the inventor of the audio technology used in both commercial and professional sound systems of all types, but this isn’t true. Dolby’s real name is Thomas Morgan Robertson. He acquired the nickname “Dolby” from his friends because he was always tinkering with audio technology. He did start an audio tech company in Silicon Valley, California, but it was called Beatnik, not Dolby Laboratories.

Enjoy this fun, bizarre filk of Thomas Dolby by his own offspring!

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SCIFI Radio Staff

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