Kokayi fronts the Rock-afire Explostion in new video. (Photo: QN5/Chad Griffith)

Several ideas were considered for the video for Kokayi's "RoxTar," a track from his 2010 album, Robots and Dinosaurs--there was talk of  a mosh pit-inspired clip, or filming various legends of the D.C. music scene. But the video that was eventually shot in Orlando in October features the D.C.-based singer/rapper/musician walking around sunny Florida in a leopard-print Snuggie, hanging out on a gator farm, and performing with The Rock-afire Explosion, the robot animal band that once played at the Showbiz Pizza chain of restaurants. 

The idea to incorporate the Rock-afire robots, which were eventually made over into Chuck E. Cheese's characters when the chain bought Showbiz in 1984, came from video director Donlee Brussel.

“He was like, 'We can use those puppets from Chuck E. Cheese!'" Kokayi says. "I said, 'Man, stop playing.' I was literally like, ‘C’mon dude, stop playin’’. Then he started sending me mad stuff, like, ‘You need to peep all the stuff these puppets generate. I was like,’ Alllllrighy, OK.

"And things just got funnier from there."

Originally, the video was going to be shot in Los Angeles, but it proved prohibitively expensive to ship Rock-afire robots to L.A. from the Orlando, Fla., warehouse where they are stored.

"These joints are, like, life-size--they're huge," Kokayi says. "[Donlee] was like, 'It’s $700 each to ship 'em, and I was like 'Ewww.' Then, he was like, 'But we can go to Orlando.' I was like 'Yay!'

So, the shoot was moved to Florida, and the scenes with Rock-afire were shot on the roof of the warehouse of Creative Engineering, the firm of Aaron Fechter, who created the robots for Showbiz in the '80s.

"He invented those robots, he and his crew used to do all of the songs for them," Kokayi says. "He programmed them joints on an Apple IIe. I’m not even playing, we came in and he was like, 'Here’s the original Apple IIe that I programmed them on!"

The shoot was two days total, one day of filming Kokayi with the robots, and another of getting shots of the musician around Orlando, hanging out in a Snuggie and visiting the "Alligator Capital of the World," Gatorland. 

“My wife was like, 'You gotta put the leopard-print Snuggie in the joint, you gotta rock the Snuggie.'" he says. "Some people have done the Snuggie thing before, but they haven’t done it done it."

"Then, we were riding around, just looking for shots, making stuff up, and Donlee said, 'You ever heard of Gatorland?' 'I said, 'No. No, I haven't,'" Kokayi says. "There's a shot in the video, where I have on shades and a safari shirt, and if you look to the left and to the right, you'll see two albino alligators. I actually did the wrestle an alligator thingie, but that was cut out. Someone was in the shot."