Roomrunner, 'Karn'

By Lars Gotrich

Published February 11, 2015 at 11:58 AM EST

This is the mash-up of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and Mighty Morphin Power Rangers you never knew you wanted. And, yes, you want it.

A sequel of sorts to director Pete Binswanger's channel-surfing nightmare for "Wojtek," the video for Roomrunner's bummer noise-punk anthem "Karn" is set after the insect apocalypse, and one man must go back in time to save humanity. You may recognize him as the Billy Mays-type character from "Wotjek," but now he also plays the parts of Alexander Graham Bell, Julius Caesar, George Washington and Cal Ripken Jr., whose flaming bat is a beacon for battle if I ever saw one.

"We all really liked David Plascencia's over-the-top performance in the last video and decided to feature him more prominently in this one," Binswanger says. "On top of that, I wanted to do something with bit more of a narrative to it, but which still allowed us to cram as much dumb stuff into the video as humanly possible."

With their powers combined, they must defeat the cheaply costumed mosquito king Karn in a computer-animated mecha war. But even cheap takes time.

"We shot the entire video in five days, which is actually a lot for such a low-budget shoot," Binswanger says. "Because David [Plascencia] is essentially playing every character, there were a lot of shots that we had to shoot five times with five different costume changes. After that, I spent the rest of the year working on and off to finish all of the VFX shots. I probably spent well over 100 hours on those. I wanted the video to look as ridiculous and cheesy as the story we were trying to tell."

Separate is out now on Accidental Guest.