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This article is about the television program ReBoot. For Reboot, see ReBoot (disambiguation).
ReBoot
File:Reboot poster.jpg
ReBoot Poster for Season III.
Created byIan Pearson
Gavin Blair
Phil Mitchell
John Grace
StarringSharon Alexander
Kathleen Barr
Michael Benyaer
Paul Dobson
Tony Jay
Country of originCanada
No. of episodes47 (list of episodes)
Production
Running timeapprox. 23 minutes
Original release
NetworkABC (US), YTV (Canada)
ReleaseSeptember 17, 1994 –
November 30, 2001

ReBoot was a Canadian (CGI) 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 Originally made for children, the series attracted many older fans when it became thematically darker partway through its second season.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.

History

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.[1] Mainframe is divided into six sectors (moving clockwise): Baudway, Kits, Floating Point Park, Beverly Hills, Wall Street, and Ghetty Prime. 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. Also, Ghetty Prime is a reference to Frank Herbert's Dune (novel), as Giedi Prime is the home world of House Harkonnen, both being the home of the villain in each story. 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 (on ABC) when the Walt Disney Company purchased the network. Episodes continued to air in Canada. 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[2], 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.[3]

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.[4]

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.

Characters

Main article: List of ReBoot characters

The main characters included:

File:ReBoot Cast2.jpg
The cast of characters from the second season.
  • Bob, the Guardian Hero of the series
  • Dot Matrix , who owned a local diner
  • Enzo Matrix, Dot's younger brother who idolized Bob as a hero
  • Frisket, Enzo's dog
  • AndrAIa, a friend (and later girlfriend) of Enzo introduced in season two
  • Megabyte, a computer virus and the series' main villain
  • Hexadecimal, Megabyte's twin sister, also a computer virus, whose face is concealed by drama masks
  • Mouse/Mous, A freelance Hacker who originally works for Megabyte in a one shot early in the season but joins Dot and Enzo to defend Mainframe when Bob is trapped in "The Web".

Summary

Template:Spoiler

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 until the end of the series). 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 an extended 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.[1] After severing ties with ABC following the second season, the show actually reached a greater number of households through syndication.[2]

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 accelerated game time matured Enzo and AndrAIa far faster than the denizens of Mainframe. The following episodes follow adult versions of Enzo and AndrAIa as they travel from system to system in search of Mainframe. The older Enzo adopts the name "Matrix," (previously his and Dot's surname) carrying the aptly 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 into a stereotypical, muscled FPS hero.

File:ReBoot Cast4.jpg
Cast of characters from the fourth season.

Matrix and AndrAIa are also shown to have developed a romantic relationship 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, as 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 US ran on Cartoon Network's Toonami and revealed much of Mainframe's history, including the formation of Lost Angles, Bob's arrival in the system, and the origin of Megabyte and Hexadecimal. Initial plans for the fourth season included for twelve episodes broken into three films, followed by a thirteenth musical special episode, although the final five were never produced.[5]

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 two had "The Quick and the Fed" and "Medusa Bug".[6] In Australia there were four VHS releases with each containing two episodes, comprising the first eight episodes of season one. However, all the 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[7] Spanning four volumes, all sixteen 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 at 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" and went out of print early 2007. It was improperly mastered as the 25fps source material was treated as 24fps film speed material, meaning 3:2 pulldown flags were encoded into the mpeg stream which results in the video playing back 4.096% slower and all the voices sound deeper. Anchor Bay have corrected and remastered the fourth season disc but it is only available by contacting them for a replacement. The Fourth season has also been released in Australia in its original PAL video format, it is still in print. Germany has DVD releases of all of season two, while Russia has DVD releases for the first three seasons (though the first few season three episodes are counted as season two), both also in ReBoot's original PAL format.[citation needed]

Universal still owns the rights to publish the first and second seasons on home video and will maintain those rights until 2009. Universal has not yet, and most likely will never, release the first and second seasons on DVD.

Season 4 is avalable on DVD from Mainframe's web site (US only)

Episodes

Main article: List of ReBoot episodes

Unaired special episode

"Fast Forward: The Making of ReBoot" is a rare, special twenty-three minute episode that has never been aired on TV or released on DVD or VHS The title sequence on the video sequence says "Date: February 27, 1995", putting its completion date after Season one and before Season two. A copy of the video can be found on Youtube.

The show starts off with going into Megabyte's lair where he has hacked into the principal office and through an energy vortex created a portal into a parallel universe (our universe), taking him into the offices of Mainframe Entertainment where the producer, writers & animators give some insights on how the show came about from early ideas, how it's scripted, voiced, animated and what the staff get up to in their spare time, playing with toys and ice hockey whilst wearing viral skull logo shirts appear to be high on their lists.

We get to see an animation test from 1990 with an early Bob flying round on a surfboard and Megabyte who looks more like Johnny 5 from the film Short Circuit than he does now in the ReBoot series, as well as a 1992 test piece from the "Wizards, Warriors and a Word From Our Sponsor" episode. Another notable CGI piece is from Def Leppard's "Let's Get Rocked" music video which the ReBoot team created, but absent from the show is any clip or mention of the well known music video to Dire Straits' song "Money For Nothing". (A reference to this clip is made in the "Talent Night" episode)

Amongst the interviews with the Mainframe staff, who all have toys on their desks & monitors, there are members of the public interviewed on a street somewhere about what they think of the show, though Megabyte is still in the background making narrator type comments about what he's watching.

The special was announced and due to be aired on Childrens ITV (cITV) during the original broadcast of season one in the UK, but was subsequently pulled from the running order without explanation.

Cast

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. [8][1]

Humor and trivia

References to computer technology

Several major characters are named after computer terms:

  • The character Dot Matrix is named after the method of using an array of dots to generate characters, symbols and images. The dot matrix was once widely used in the form of dot matrix displays and dot matrix printers.
  • The character Phong is an obvious allusion to the game Pong. Phong has a rule that any who seek his advice must first play him in a game of physical Pong. However, phong shading is also an interpolation method used in three dimensional graphics rendering.
  • The villain Megabyte is named after the unit of data measure which represents 1,000,000 bytes (a megabyte). Near the end of the second season Hex and Megabyte are fused, creating the new virus Gigabyte. Further in Daemon Raising a virus named Kilobyte appears. The power of the virus reflects the magnitude of the unit used as its name. 1,000 kilobytes make 1 megabyte, and 1,000 megabytes make one gigabyte.
  • Hexadecimal, the villainess, is named for the base-sixteen numerical system, otherwise known as the hexadecimal system.
  • An extremely slow character known as "Al" may be a reference to A.I. programming. Because Al and A.I. are nearly indistinguishable in sans serif typefaces and A.I.s generally take a long time to develop even the "slowest" intelligences.

For references to computer terminology in the episodes, see List of ReBoot episodes.

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 data-bank 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 episode "Talent Night", Dot and a binome named Emma Fee are giving auditions for the birthday party show. Emma Fee is a program censor 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 (also could refer to a Binary Space Partitioning (BSP) symptom)[1]. Further references to the American networks dropping ReBoot were inserted in the "Web World Wars" episode when Megabyte's Armored Binome Carriers ("A.B.C.s") betrayed the Mainframe C.P.U. fighters in mid-battle ("The A.B.C.s 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."

In this same episode, when Megabyte and Bob guitar duel, Megabyte turns his volume to eleven, a reference to Spinal Tap. Bob also refers to the guitar form of Glitch as "B.F.G.", a reference to the BFG9000 ultimate weapon of the Doom game series.

  • 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!".
  • 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:
  • The season three 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-esque 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 two 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 Season three, Episode sixteen, one of Megabyte's ex-sprites exclaims, "Oh, Norton's Ghost!" a reference to a piece of software of the same name used for fixing partitions.

Network censorship

The show's early jokes at the expense of BSP came from frustration encountered by the show's makers 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." [9]

ReBoot the ride

There have been two IMAX Ridefilms based on ReBoot. The first, "ReBoot™ — The Ride," opened at Sega City@Playdium (now simply called Playdium) in Mississauga, Ontario on October 17, 1997.[10] Viewers sit in an 18-passenger vehicle mounted on an orthogonal motion base. The film is projected at forty-eight frames per second onto a fourteen 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.

Miscellaneous

  • United States president Bill Clinton was reportedly a fan of the series.
  • In episode 178 of the sitcom Roseanne , a trick-or-treater was costumed as Bob.
  • Electronic Arts made a game for the PlayStation of ReBoot, which includes actual animation from Mainframe Entertainment. The game had a limited print in 1998 and is quite rare.[2]
  • The sprite, old man Pearson, may be a reference to ReBoot originator Ian Pearson.
  • The purple Game Cubes are not meant to refer to the Nintendo GameCube, which by coincidence was launched in North America on November 18, 2001, the same day that YTV aired the first ReBoot movie, Daemon Rising, in Canada.
  • Tony Jay the voice actor who portrays Megabyte, died in August 2006.

See also

References

Notes

  1. ^ a b c Hetherington, Janet L. "As Mainframe's technology reaches adolescence, there's a 'ReBoot' Renaissance". Animation Magazine #59. Vol. 11, Issue 8, September 1997.
  2. ^ a b Freeman, Mark. "Mainframe ReBoots with Beasties". Take One, p.42, Summer 1997.
  3. ^ Ball, Ryan (December 15 2004). "Platinum Sends Dylan Dog to The Shop". Animation Magazine. Retrieved 2006-08-11. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help); Italic or bold markup not allowed in: |publisher= (help)
  4. ^ "Mainframe - Binomes". Archived from the original on 2004-10-12.
  5. ^ Punter, Jennie. "Mainframe Reboots ReBoot". Take One. July 2001.
  6. ^ Smith, Joe (2001). "Reboot Video Tapes and DVD". The Unofficial ReBoot Home Page. Retrieved 2006-07-08. {{cite web}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  7. ^ ""ReBoot" Home Video Collection to Be Released by ADV Films" press release". ADVfilms.com. Archived from the original on 2000-12-11. Retrieved 2006-07-08.
  8. ^ The Envelope: The Ultimate Awards Site. LA Times.
  9. ^ Van Bakiel, Roger. "Before Toy Story, there was... Reboot." Wired 5.03, March 1997.
  10. ^ http://www.c4vct.com/kym/slachash/transcrp/imax/rideflm1.htm

Bibliography

Official sites

Unofficial sites

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