ReBoot

This article is about the television program ReBoot. For Reboot, see ReBoot (disambiguation).

ReBoot
File:Reboot poster.jpg ReBoot Poster for Season III.
Created by	Ian Pearson Gavin Blair Phil Mitchell John Grace
Starring	Sharon Alexander Kathleen Barr Michael Benyaer Paul Dobson Tony Jay
Country of origin	Canada
No. of episodes	47
Production
Running time	approx. 23 minutes
Original release
Network	ABC (U.S.), YTV (Canada)
Release	September 17, 1994 – November 30, 2001

ReBoot was a Canadian animated series that was produced by Mainframe Entertainment, created by Gavin Blair, Ian Pearson, Phil Mitchell and John Grace, with character designed by Brendan McCarthy and Ian Gibson. It was credited with being the first full length, completely computer animated TV series. 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 Originally made for children, the series attracted many older fans when it became thematically darker partway through its second season.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.

Background

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 (for which Mainframe Entertainment is named). It was deliberately chosen due to technological constraints at the time, as the fictional computer world allowed for blocky looking models and mechanical animation. 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, 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 US 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. In March 1999 — years after Canadian audiences saw the third season — 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 two of the show's creators have since left Mainframe Entertainment. Gavin Blair and Ian Pearson resigned in 2004 to form their own independent studio, The Shop.

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. A spinoff called Binomes was also planned towards the end of 2004, featuring a family of Binomes who lived on a "chip farm". The series would have been composed of 52 11-minute episodes and aimed at a pre-school audience, but nothing of this project came to pass after the initial announcement.

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. Today, reruns of ReBoot can be seen occasionally on YTV.

History and summary

File:ReBoot Cast2.jpg

The cast of characters from the second season.

The main characters included:

• Bob, the Guardian,
• Dot, who owned a local diner,
• Enzo, her younger brother who idolized Bob as a hero
• Frisket, Enzo's dog
• AndrAIa, a friend of Enzo and later his lover
• Megabyte, a Virus and the series' main villain.

Main article: List of ReBoot characters

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" (not to be confused with the Nintendo GameCube, which did not exist at the time the series aired). 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.

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". 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, Glitch, and sending him into the Web portal before closing it.

File:ReBoot back cover.jpg

The cover of the third season DVD.

For the show's third season, there was a marked improvement in model and animation quality due to the advancement of Mainframe's software capabilities during the time between seasons. Subtle details, such as eyelashes and shadow, as well as generally more lifelike sprite characters, were among several visual improvements compared to previous ReBoot episodes. In addition, the show shifted their target audience to children 12 and older, resulting in a darker and more mature storyline. After severing ties with ABC following the second season, the show actually reached a greater number of households through syndication.

The 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 matured Enzo and AndrAIa far faster than the denizens of Mainframe. The rest of the season follows adult 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.

File:ReBoot Cast4.jpg

Cast of characters from the fourth season.

Matrix 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 Megabyte in a cliffhanger ending that has yet to be resolved. The two movies, broken up into eight episodes in its U.S. ran on Cartoon Network's Toonami and revealed much of Mainframe's history, including the creation of Lost Angles, Bob's arrival in the system, and the creation of Megabyte and Hexadecimal. Initial plans for the fourth season included for 12 episodes broken into three films, followed by a 13th musical special episode, although the final five were never produced.

VHS and DVD release

In the U.S., 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. Germany has DVD releases of all of season 2, while Russia has DVD releases for the first three seasons (though the first few season 3 episodes are counted as season 2).

Characters

Main article: List of ReBoot characters

Cast

• Bob (Seasons 1, 2, and 4) — Michael Benyaer
• Bob (Season 3), Glitch-Bob — Ian James Corlett
• Dot Matrix, Princess Bula — Kathleen Barr
• Enzo Matrix (young) — Jesse Moss (Season 1), Matthew Sinclair (Seasons 1 & 2), Christopher Gray (Season 3), Giacomo Baessato (Season 4)
• Matrix (adult Enzo Matrix) — Paul Dobson
• Megabyte — Tony Jay
• Hexadecimal — Shirley Millner
• AndrAIa (young) — Andrea Libman
• AndrAIa (adult) — Sharon Alexander
• Phong, Mike the TV, Cecil, Al — Michael Donovan
• Mouse — Louise Vallance
• Ray Tracer — Donal Gibson
• Captain Capacitor, Old Man Pearson — Long John Baldry
• Slash, Turbo, Herr Doktor, Cyrus, Al's Waiter (Front Counter) — Gary Chalk
• Hack (Season 1) — Phil Hayes
• Hack (Seasons 2-4), Specky — Scott McNeil
• Daemon — Colombe Demers
• Daecon — Richard Newman
• Welman Matrix — Dale Wilson
• Gigabyte - Blu Mankuma

Awards

ReBoot has been the recipient of several awards. The show received Gemini Awards for Best Animated Program Series for three straight years between 1995 and 1997, as well as a 1996 Outstanding Technical Achievement Award. Other honors include the 1995 Award of Excellence and Best Animated Program from the Alliance for Children and Television and an Aurora Award in 1996.

Other Gemini Award nominations include "Best Children's or Youth Program or Series" in 1998, and "Best Sound - Comedy, Variety, or Performing Arts Program or Series" for My Two Bobs and "Best Sound - Dramatic Program" for Daemon Rising, both in 2002.

Humor and trivia

References to computer technology

• At the start of the episode The Tiff Bob tells Dot that she “needs to take time to smell the daisy wheels”. A daisy wheel is a device used to print characters in an electronic typewriter. Also, the 2 most popular types of printers at the time were the Dot_matrix_printer and Daisy Wheel

• The character Phong is an obvious allusion to the game Pong. However, Phong is also an interpolation method used in three dimensional graphics rendering. Phong also has a rule that any who seek his advice must first play him in a 3D game of physical Pong.

• The episode The Crimson Binome begins at the mainframe port. A parody of Punch and Judy called "Punchcard and QWERTY" is playing. This is a reference to an early form of storage on punched cards and to the QWERTY keyboard layout.

• The character Dot Matrix is named after either a dot matrix display, a type of display device that uses dots to generate characters, symbols and images, or a dot matrix printer, which operates on the same principle.

• The two main villains, Megabyte and Hexadecimal, are plays on two computing terms. A megabyte is a a unit of data measure which describes how many 1's and 0's a piece of data contains. (a "1" or a "0" all by itself is referred to as a "bit." 8 bits make up a "byte." A "megabyte" is 1,048,576 bytes.) Hexadecimal, the female villain, is a reference to a mathematical and computational form of assigning numbers. There are three major ones that computer science deals with, the first is the familiar 0-9 of decimal, but the other two are a bit weirder. "Octal" only uses 8 numerals so it "flips over" at 7 not 9, (as in decimal), so the number eight is actually written as "10". It is also commonly referred to as "base 8" The other form of assigning numbers (and where the name comes from) is hexadecimal, and uses sixteen numerals in it's system, including the first six letters of the alphabet, A-F.

• A sprite, on being cured by the User of Megabyte's infection, exclaims "Great Norton's Ghost!", a reference to disk-recovery guru Peter Norton and the popular Norton Utilities software suite.

Pop culture references

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

• At the start of the episode The Tiff, Dot’s business associate tells Dot the download from the first national databank is late. This is a reference to the First National Bank.

• In the same episode, Bob receives a hologram which is introduced by Mike the TV. The video message begins with Mike saying “when you care enough to send the best, use Holomark”. This is a reference to the company slogan of Hallmark Cards: "when you care enough to send the best, use Hallmark."

• In the pilot episode "The Tearing", Bob launches from the carrier and says: "Proceed, heading 1138", a reference to THX 1138 by George Lucas.

• In "The Episode with No Name" two Imperial stormtroopers are clearly seen walking through the streets of the desert town; and one is seen in the bar, which is a parody of a Star Wars cantina.

• In the episode "Talent Night", Dot and a binome named Emma Fee are giving auditions for the birthday party show. Emma Fee is a program sensor who keeps rejecting nearly every act for trivial reasons, 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 are an obvious parody of the Village People and sing in the style of YMCA. In addition, "BSP" happens to be the initials of Broadcast Standards and Practices, ABC's censors. BSP was used in a season one 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, a tombstone inside the "Malicious Corpses" game cube read "Here lies the Mainframe joint venture, an unholy alliance."

• 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.

• "Talent Night" also featured a comedian named 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 Captain Kirk / 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 toupee to fall off, and disappearing in the style of a Star Trek transporter. When Megabyte makes his appearance, he turns the amps on his guitar up to 11. When he leaves, Mike the TV announces that "Megabyte has left the building!".

• The show occasionally featured a penguin that resembled Feathers McGraw from the Wallace and Gromit feature The Wrong Trousers. In the episode Identity Crisis, Part 2 the penguin emerges from a box similar to the one Grommet was hiding in while spying on McGraw. 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.

• The episode "Where No Sprite Has Gone Before" featured a group of sprites who combined elements of Star Trek characters and the powers of a typical superhero group like DC's Justice League or Marvel's Avengers. This episode was written by regular Star Trek writer D.C. Fontana.

• Although the "User" opponents featured in early episodes were usually invisible or designed with a minimalist appearance, increased computer rendering 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.
  • Ash Williams, in the "Malicious Corpses" game, a parody of the Evil Dead film series, which is furthered by constantly muttering "Groo-vy" , when the User is killed, hollering out, "I'm dead before dawn! I'm dead before dawn!" which is part of the running title for the Evil Dead II.
  • 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 in which Matrix became a gym leader resembling Ash Ketchum and Goku, Frisket rebooted into a Pikachu lookalike, and Bob was trapped in a little dodecahedron (itself a Star Trek reference) that was supposed to be a Poké Ball of sorts.
  • Other Game Cubes included parodies of a variety of action figures from G.I. Joe to Barbie.

• 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", a reference to Calvin Klein.

• The Gateway command from "When Games Collide" 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 3 episode, "To Mend and Defend" featured a parody of the Michael Jackson music video "Thriller", where Enzo reboots into a zombie that wore the same clothes as Michael Jackson in the "Thriller" video. Also, he performed some of Michael Jackson's signature dance moves (such as the moonwalk) to Michael Jackson-eque music to get the User to waste ammunition on him. 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 season 2 episode, "Nullzilla", Bob, Dot, Enzo, Frisket, and Mike the TV parody series such as Voltron and Power Rangers as they don alike suits and pilot insect-like giant robots to fight the giant monster. "Nullzilla" also pokes fun at the way these shows feature machines which don't really have a plausible way to fit together.

• In the final episode of season 4, 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 "neo-virals" flying. This is a parody of the scene in the Blues Brothers, when the brothers drove over a bridge and disrupted a Nazi demonstration.

• The second half of the last episode of season 3 features a show, where binomes reenact the events of the season dressed as the various characters. This is all performed to the tune of the classical Gilbert and Sullivan's "Major-General's Song".

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 even the slightest appearance 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, an insinuation which Pearson described as "one of the sickest things I've heard."

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.

Miscellanea

• United States president Bill Clinton was reportedly a fan of the series. [1]

• In episode 178 of the sitcom Roseanne Halloween: The Final Chapter, a trick-or-treater was costumed as Bob.

• Electronic Arts made a game for the PlayStation of ReBoot, which starts with actual animation from Mainframe Entertainment. The game had a limited print in 1998 and is quite rare. Due to terrible play control, the game is very hard. For information can be found here.

See also

• List of ReBoot episodes
• List of Games and Users from ReBoot
• List of ReBoot characters

References

• Press release (January 11 1995). "Alliance Communications and BLT Productions Invite You to Witness the Future of Animation - Reboot - The World's First 100% Computer Generated Weekly Animation Series".
• Schengili-Roberts, Keith. "Reboot Combines Dazzling Effects, Engaging Tales". The Computer Paper. March 1995.
• Murphy, Kathleen. "Cyberscreens". Film Comment Magazine, p.38-43. July/August 1995.
• "The History of ReBoot", "Mainframe City Locations" (2001). The Official ReBoot Website. Mainframe Entertainment.
• Miller, Dan R. (2001). "Gavin Blair interview". The Official ReBoot Website. Mainframe Entertainment.
• Full press release documents regarding the show's characters, background, and creators hosted at The Unofficial ReBoot Home Page.

External links

Official Sites

• Official ReBoot website
• Mainframe Entertainment, Inc.

Unofficial Sites and Fan Sites

• ReBoot at IMDb
• ReBoot page at TV.com
• Unofficial ReBoot Home Page (since April 1995)
• ReBoot Mayhem
• icomefromthe.net
• Julia Cat's ReBoot Corner
• A Minor Glitch
• ReBootilicious
• Slack & Hash's Domain
• Revival of ReBoot at The Java Hut
• The Making of ReBoot