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ReBoot
 

ReBoot is a Canadian animated series that was produced by Mainframe Entertainment, created by Gavin Blair, Ian Pearson, Phil Mitchell, and John Grace, with character designs by Brendan McCarthy. It was credited with being one of the first completely computer animated TV series. Additionally, when the series debuted in 1994 the first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, had not yet been released. Originally made for children, the series attracted many older fans when it became thematically darker partway through its second season. Additionally, throughout its entire run, ReBoot made countless references to computer terms and pop culture that would not be understood by most children. The success of this series helped establish Mainframe Entertainment as one of the preeminent computer animation studios in the world.

The setting, which may have been inspired by the Disney movie Tron, is in the inner world of a computer system known by its inhabitants as Mainframe (also from which Mainframe Entertainment is named for). Mainframe is divided into six sectors (moving clockwise): Baudway, Kits, Floating Point Park, Beverly Hills, Wall Street, and Ghetty Prime. Mainframe is populated almost entirely by binomes, little creatures that represent either 1s or 0s, as well as a handful of Sprites who are primarily humanoid creatures of more complex design and are the main characters of the series.

ReBoot was first broadcast on Saturday mornings in the United States in 1994 by ABC and in Canada on YTV (although YTV had exclusive rights to air first-run episodes), and proved to be an instant hit with children and their parents, only to be abruptly cancelled when the Walt Disney Company purchased the network. Episodes from the second season could still be seen in the States when Claster Television distributed them for a short period of time during the 1996-97 season. Although there were many demands for a third season, it would be a year before new episodes aired on YTV due to Mainframe's involvement in Transformers: Beast Wars (Beasties in Canada) and Shadow Raiders, and the third season aired only on YTV at the time due to the lack of interest in America. It was March 1999 — years after Canadian audiences saw the third season — before American audiences saw the episodes on Cartoon Network. Again, production on other series delayed the fourth season of ReBoot, and there are no plans to produce a fifth despite a cliffhanger season finale, as the show's creators have since left Mainframe Entertainment.

Since 2001, many of the show's fans have carried out a movement with the hope of convincing Mainframe to produce more ReBoot episodes. These efforts have been unsuccessful up to this point, possibly due to the lack of support from American distributors. Today, reruns of ReBoot can be seen occasionally on YTV.

The show also aired in the UK in the mid 1990s, on the ITV children's strand CITV. However, CITV stopped showing the program half way through Season 3, possibly due to increasingly violent and dark themes, and several earlier episodes from that series were also omitted.

History and summary

The first season of ReBoot was highly episodic, with a single two-part episode. Most of the episodes established characters, locations, and story elements, such as the gigantic "Game Cubes." When "The User" loads a game, a Game Cube drops on a random location in Mainframe, sealing it off from the rest of the system and turning it into a "gamescape." Bob frequently enters the games, "ReBoots" to become a game character, and fights the User's character to save the sector — if the User wins a game, the sector the Cube fell in is "nullified," and the Sprites and binomes who were caught within are turned into energy-draining, worm-like parasites called Nulls. One notable administrative difference between the first and second seasons was the departure of producer Jay Firestone from the show and its production company.

The second season featured a deep story arc that began with the season's fifth episode, "Painted Windows". The arc revealed that Hexadecimal and Megabyte are siblings, and that Megabyte's pet Null, Nibbles, is their "father." It also introduced an external threat to Mainframe, "the Web." A creature from the Web infected Megabyte and forced him to merge with Hexadecimal, forming a super-virus called Gigabyte, Destroyer of Systems. When the Web creature was cornered, it escaped Mainframe and opened a portal to the Web. The protectors of Mainframe had to team up with Megabyte and Hexadecimal to close the portal, but when they defeated the Web creatures that had entered the system, Megabyte betrayed the alliance, crushing Bob's keytool and sending him into the Web portal before closing it.

The third season started with Enzo, freshly upgraded into a Guardian candidate by Bob during the Web incursion, defending Mainframe from Megabyte and Hexadecimal with Dot and AndrAIa at his side. When Enzo entered a game he could not win, he, AndrAIa and Frisket changed their icons to game sprite mode and rode the game out of Mainframe. The compressed game time matures Enzo and AndrAIa far faster than the denizens of Mainframe giving rise to two new characters. The rest of the season follows older versions of Enzo and AndrAIa as they travel from system to system in search of Mainframe. The older Enzo adopts the name "Matrix," carries an eponymously named weapon Gun and Bob's damaged Glitch. The time spent in games and away from Mainframe has hardened both Matrix and AndrAIa; Matrix has developed a pathological hatred of Megabyte, and has grown physically into a stereotypical, over-muscled FPS hero. Enzo and AndrAIa are also shown to have become romantically involved by this time. As the season progresses, Matrix and AndrAIa are reunited with Bob and the crew of the Saucy Mare and returned to Mainframe. Upon return, the heroes fought a final battle for control of Mainframe. Hexadecimal and Megabyte were defeated in confrontations with Bob and Matrix, respectively. All final problems in Mainframe were dealt with by The User restarting the system, setting everything right and restoring everything as it was again for our heroes, with one major exception: Younger and older Enzo now exist simultaneously. This was because Matrix's icon was still set to "Game Sprite" mode. Because of this mishap, he wasn't recognized by the system when it rebooted, so it created a replacement of his younger self.

After the end of the third season, two TV movies were produced in 2001 as a sort of "fourth season," Daemon Rising, which addressed the problem the Guardians were facing in season three, and My Two Bobs, which brings back a fearsome foe in a cliffhanger ending that has yet to be resolved. Since Mainframe announced they had ended production of ReBoot, there have been many petitions started by fans to bring the show back, or at least complete the ending. The two movies, broken up into eight episodes in its US run on Cartoon Network's Toonami, also reveal much of Mainframe's history, including the creation of Lost Angles, Bob's arrival in the system, and the creation of Megabyte and Hexadecimal.

VHS and DVD release

In the US, four VHS tapes were released in 1995 with individual episodes from the first season through Polygram Video. Each release contained a single episode: "The Medusa Bug", "Wizards, Warriors, and a Word from Our Sponsor", "The Great Brain Robbery" and "Talent Night". The UK received two VHS releases, but with two episodes each: Volume 1 contained "The Tearing" and "Racing the Clock", while Volume 2 had "The Quick and the Fed" and "Medusa Bug". However, these VHS tapes have long gone out of print.

The second season was never released, even though Polygram retained the rights to publish the episodes on home video with their deal for the first season. Despite this, in 2000 Mainframe struck a deal with A.D. Vision to release the third season on DVD. Spanning four volumes, all 16 episodes were published, separated by each story arc of four episodes: To Mend and Defend, The Net, The Web, and The Viral Wars. ADV planned to re-release these DVDs are a lower price in 2005, but changed their plans as they decided to cancel several of their titles at the time. Some time afterward, the company lost the publishing rights. Much like the first season VHS tapes, the third season ReBoot DVDs are now out of print and considered rare.

Anchor Bay Entertainment published the fourth season in its original form as two films (Daemon Rising and My Two Bobs) on one DVD as ReBoot v4.0. This DVD is still currently in print and is available at many online retailers.

Characters

Cast

Humor & Trivia

ReBoot is full of computer and popular culture in-jokes and parodies:

In the episode Talent Night, Dot and a binome named Emma Fee are giving auditions for the birthday party show. Emma Fee is a prog sensor (presumably to be heard as "program censor") who keeps rejecting nearly every act for trivial reasons or to preserve morality or prevent depictions of violence. She heartily approves, however, of a group of male binome singers and dancers called the Small Town Binomes, who sing, in the style of YMCA, "It's fun to play in a non-violent way, with the B, S and P." The "Small Town Binomes" are also dressed in the same "macho" costumes the Village People wore on stage. In addition, "BSP" happens to be the initials of Broadcast Standards and Practices (BSP), ABC's censors. "B.S. & P." was used in a first-season episode to move Bob through a stained-glass window rather than shattering it, a technique BSP felt children would emulate. Further references to the American networks dropping ReBoot were inserted in the "Web World Wars" episode when Megabyte's Armored Binome Carriers ("ABCs") betrayed the Mainframe CPU fighters in mid-battle ("The ABCs have turned on us! Treacherous dogs!") and in the first episode of the third season, on a tombstone inside the "Malicious Corpses" game cube that read "Here lies the Mainframe joint venture, an unholy alliance."

"Talent Night" also featured comedian Johnny O. Binome, whose binary joke translates as "Take my wife, please,", a cyclops-like robot that served as the YTV logo (although in airings outside of Canada, the YTV logo, but not the robot, is omitted), and Captain Quirk, an obvious William Shatner impersonation who did the first verse of "Rocket Man" in the style Shatner himself used at the 1980 Science fiction awards ending with Quirk bowing (causing his tupee to fall off), and disappearing in the style of a Star Trek transporter.

The two worker characters from the 1985 Dire Straits music video "Money For Nothing" make a cameo appearance in "Talent Night", which is fitting since they were designed and animated by the creators of ReBoot. Primitive by today's standards, the "workers" could be considered celebrities of the computer-generated character set.

The show occasionally featured a penguin that resembled Feathers McGraw from the Wallace and Gromit feature The Wrong Trousers. This is often assumed to be a reference to Linux mascot Tux, however Tux was created in 1996, and ReBoot's first season aired in 1994.

Later episodes featured direct parodies of films (the James Bond oeuvre, Toy Story, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and TV classics such as Thunderbirds, Star Trek and The Prisoner. Other binomes to have had quick cameos included KISS, Sailor Moon, Indiana Jones, an Elvis Impersonator, and most famously, Fax Modem and Data Nully (the latter of which was voiced by The X-Files actress Gillian Anderson). In fact, in one episode when Mainframe is under going a system crash, Modem is looking at two signs, one saying "B.C." and the other "L.A." This lampoons the fact that David Duchovny moved the X-Files from Vancouver (where ReBoot was produced) to Los Angeles.

Although the "User" opponents featured in early episodes were usually invisible or designed with a minimalist appearance, increased computer generation power allowed the third and fourth season game cubes to feature users who were parodies of known game characters and actors. These included a Sonic the Hedgehog/Crash Bandicoot hybrid ("Rocky Raccoon," a Beatles reference, no less), Elmer Fudd (whose form Enzo reboots into), Bruce Campbell (in the "Malicious Corpses" game, a parody of the Evil Dead film series), which is furthered when the "Ash" User character is killed and he hollers out, "I'm dead before dawn! I'm dead before dawn!" which is part of the running title for the second "Evil Dead" film, Mike Myers (in an "Austin Powers"-style game), Brendan Fraser (in a game reminiscent of "The Mummy"), Scorpion (of Mortal Kombat fame), a Pokémon/Dragonball Z parody (of which Matrix become a Gym Leader resembling Ash Ketchum/Goku, Frisket rebooted into a Pikachu lookalike, and Bob was trapped in a little dodecahedron that was supposed to be a Poké Ball of sorts) and a variety of action figures from G.I. Joe to Barbie.

The same game featuring the Dragonball Z/Pokemon characters featured an obscure reference to the film The Matrix, where while Enzo Matrix performs a comical Anima style time-consuming attack, Bob yells "Matrix! Stop trying to hit him and hit him!"

A running gag on the show is the crushing of Herr Doktor's hands in odd ways, causing him to yell out "Mein digits!" in a German accent and adopt bandaged fingers for the remainder of the episode. Another gag is based on the short execution times characters experience: the Mainframe analog to "Just a second" is "Just a nano," while characters consider one second a hyperbolically long period of time. Also, in Al's diner, when one of his assistants asks him a question, he always replys with yelling "WHAT?"

In the episode Crouching Binome, Hidden Virus, Mike the TV asks the rhetorical question "Is that really your pussy, Mrs. Slocombe?!". This is in reference to the British television series Are You Being Served?, in which the character Mrs. Slocombe owns a cat that she always refers to as her pussy.

One of the brands in the city of Mainframe is "Calvin Spline."

The Gateway command from "The Tearing" is identical in shape and function to the gateway from the Stargate movie and television series. Also, Dot's father bears several similarities to the character Dr. Jackson in the Stargate movie and TV show, such as having theories about life off-world.

Since ReBoot precedes the Nintendo GameCube game console by several years, the "game cubes" are not meant to refer to them, despite being purple, which was one of the GameCube's prominent launch colours. However, also likely to be just a coincidence, the first ReBoot movie, "Daemon Rising", first aired on YTV on November 18, 2001, the very same day that the Nintendo GameCube launched in North America. On a related note, a PlayStation controller is visible in the episode "Gigabyte".

The names of Mainframe's sectors are homages to famous neighbourhoods, mostly in New York or Los Angeles. However, the Kits sector is named for Kitsilano, a neighbourhood in Vancouver, British Columbia — Mainframe Entertainment's home city. Much like the sector's real-world corollary, Kits is a hip and trendy waterfront neighbourhood with numerous condominiums, the "perfect place for Bob's apartment", as stated in "The Crimson Binome". Baudway, nee Broadway, is also a prominent district in Mainframe.

The Season Three episode, "To Mend and Defend" featured a parody of the Michael Jackson film "Thriller", where Enzo dances to a Michael Jackson-eque music to get the user to waste ammunition. In the same episode there is a reference made to the Adobe program Photoshop, when Mouse says, "Uhh, sorry to break up this Photoshop moment..."

In the second season episode, "Nullzilla", Bob, Dot, Enzo, Frisket, and a TV-like binome named Mike parody Power Rangers when they don "Power Ranger"-like suits and pilot insect-like giant robots to fight a giant monster. In the final episode of Season Four (and the series itself), "Crouching Binome, Hidden Virus", there is a parody of the Blues Brothers movie, in which two Binomes that are alike to the brothers drive over a bridge and send members of the "pro-virals" flying. This is a parody of the scene in the Blues Brothers movie, when the brothers drove over a bridge and disrupted a Nazi demonstration.

Network censorship

The show's early jokes at the expense of BSP came from frustration encountered by the show's creators by an abundance of script and editing changes that were imposed upon Mainframe before episodes were allowed to air. These changes were all aimed at making the show appropriate for children, and to prevent an even slight show of inappropriate content, imitatable violence or sexuality.

For instance, the character Dot was considered too sexualized by exposing too much mammary cleavage, so the animators were forced to make them less curvy and form them into a lumpy "monobreast", as lightly referred to by the staff. In another case, the word "hockey" was banned from all episodes as in some countries it was supposedly used as a vulgar slang term. In the episode "Talent Night", one scene of Dot giving a kiss to her brother Enzo was cut due to BSP's fear of promoting incest. Roger van Bakiel. "Before Toy Story, there was... Reboot." Wired 5.03, March 1997.

ReBoot the Ride

There have been two IMAX Ridefilms based on ReBoot. The first, "ReBoot™ — The Ride," opened at Sega City@Playdium in Mississauga, Ontario on October 17, 1997. Viewers sit in an 18-passenger vehicle mounted on an orthogonal motion base. The film is projected at 48 frames per second onto a 14 foot 180° spherically curved screen. The ride played at the Circus Circus in the Adventure Dome in Las Vegas and then later was moved down the strip to The Luxor.

The second, was named "ReBoot™ — The Ride V.2: Journey Into Chaos". This was subsequently opened at Playdium in Burnaby, British Columbia and ran for a brief time.

See also

References

External links

Official Sites Unofficial Sites and Fan Sites

1990s TV shows in the United States | ABC network shows | Animated television series in Canada | Programs broadcast by YTV | Shows on Toonami

ReBoot

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "ReBoot".

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