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ReBoot is a Canadian animated television series for children produced by Mainframe Entertainment, noted for being the first completely computer animated television series.
The setting, which seems to been inspired by the Disney film, Tron, is in the inner world of a computer in a city called Mainframe. It is populated primarily by binomes, little creatures that either represent 1's or 0's, and a handful of Sprites who are primarily humanoid creatures of more complex design and are the main characters of the series. ReBoot is considered by many as one of the greatest computer animated cartoons ever.
Characters
The main characters are:
- Bob: Guardian 452 and defender of Mainframe from internal and external threats. He is equipped with a Guardian Keytool, Glitch, which can transform into any device with a voice command. Often criticized by other Guardians for his unorthodox views and theories regarding viruses. Unlike other Guardians, who believe that viruses should simply be deleted on sight, Bob believes that viruses can be rehabilitated to live as normal sprites. Despite the criticism he receives, the Guardians still respect Bob as one of the finest Guardians ever to come out of the academy.
- Dot Matrix: Proprietor of Dot's Diner and later Command.Com of Mainframe.
- Enzo Matrix: Dot's little brother. Hero-worships Bob and wishes to be a Guardian. Has a crackling mid-pubescent voice and often uses phrases like "alphanumeric" and "high-density" in place of more common phrases like "cool" and "awesome" to express enthusiasm. Very energetic, hyperactive and loves to play Jet Ball and Circuit Racing.
- "Matrix": Enzo Matrix when he's grown up. Ashamed of the child he used to be, he prefers to be called by his last name, Matrix, instead of his first name, Enzo, which reminds him of his childhood. With a cold personality, violent behavior and a built-like-a-tank physique, he's nothing like the child he used to be. He has an unparalleled hatred towards viruses and won't hesitate to delete them in a violent and sadistic manner. He's in love with AndrAIa, who is also grown up by this time, but is also quite jealous and protective of her. His right eye was severely damaged in a game, so he replaced it with a mechanical eye that grants him extended visual powers, such as magnified long-range vision and X-ray vision. Uses a gun (aptly named Gun) which has many functions that can be called upon by voice commands. His mechanical eye also works in conjuction with his gun for lock-on targeting and tracking purposes.
- AndrAIa: A backup copy of a game sprite that met Enzo in a game. She fell in love with him at "first sight." (Ref: ReBoot 4.03 What's Love Got To Do With It?) The originial AndrAIa piggy-backed her icon on Enzo's to allow the backup to escape the game and stay in Mainframe. The original remained in the game. (Ref: ReBoot 2.06 AndrAIa)
- Phong: System administrator for Mainframe who lives and studies in the Principal Office. A wise old sprite somewhat reminiscent of Confucius who often dispenses advice in the form of confusing and vague philosophical quotes derived from old README files. Very fond of Pong; one must defeat him in a game of it to be considered worthy of his knowledge. Immune to viral infection.
- Megabyte: Evil virus operating out of Silicon Tor in Sector 1000. Megabyte desires to corrupt and control Mainframe. Megabyte is a malignant virus, with the ability and the desire to infect other programs.
- Hexadecimal: Insane virus operating out of Lost Angles. Hexadecimal desires Bob. Her cat-like "pet" is SCSI (pronounced "Scuzzy"). She has the ability to control nulls, which has earned her the title "Queen of the Nulls". Hexadecimal is a benign virus, so she doesn't infect other programs.
Secondary characters include:
- Hack & Slash: Red (Hack) and blue (Slash) flunky sprites that originally served Megabyte. They are frequently torn apart, although they seem to take it in stride.
- Mike the TV: Extremely annoying ambulatory television. Constantly pitching bizarre products (like the famous Bucket O' Nothing) or just rambling until somebody shuts him up. His remote control ran away, so he can't be turned off.
- Old Man Pearson: Owns a data dump in Sector 1001. A cranky old scotsman and the former Codemaster known as Talon.
- Al: Never seen, only heard to shout, "What?!" According to his waiter, Al runs at 3 decahertz (30 Hz).
- Al's Waiter (Front Counter): Never named in the series. Behind the counter at Al's Diner (aka Al's Wait & Eat) on Level 31.
- Al's Waiter (Roller Skater): Never named in the series. Stereotypically flamboyant and makes Bob a bit uncomfortable.
- Mouse: Bob's old flame. A hacker extraordinaire, equipped with a katana to cut programs into small pieces. Becomes a main character in Season 3.
- Ray Tracer: Web surfer introduced in Season 3. Became a main character upon the return to Mainframe, and is romantically involved with Mouse.
- Captain Gavin Capacitor (The Crimson Binome): A software pirate and captain of the Saucy Mare. Armed with a hook for a hand and a pegleg. Fits the pirate stereotype perfectly, complete with pirate catchphrase mutations such as "Shiver me templates!"
- Mr. Christopher: Captain Capacitor's bookkeeper. A nerdy and timid binome who's never seen without his laptop. His name is likely a reference to Fletcher Christian, the Master's Mate from the HMAS Bounty.
- Frisket: Enzo's dog. Vicious toward anyone other than Enzo. Has uncanny physical strength, comparable to that of Megabyte, and is known to catch cannon balls in his teeth. Frisket is extremely loyal to Enzo and wouldn't hesitate to sacrifice his life to protect Enzo's.
- Turbo: Prime Guardian and leader of the Guardian Collective. He is equipped with a Guardian Keytool, Copland, which can transform into any device with a voice command.
- Herr Doctor and his assistant: Megabyte's evil scientists whose practices are disturbingly unethical.
- Gigabyte: A Class-5, malignant, energy-absorbing, extremely powerful virus. The upgraded version of Kilobyte, a virus who is only seen briefly in one episode.
- Nibbles: Megabyte's pet null who later turns out to have a rather interesting past...
- Welman Matrix: Scientific genius and father of Dot and Enzo Matrix. Designed a gateway device that allows Mainframers to connect to outside systems. Nullified long ago in the explosion that destroyed Mainframe's sister city, the ruins of which were later to be known as Lost Angles.
- Daemon: A super-virus with powers beyond those of even Gigabyte. Bent on infecting the entire net. Succeeds in infecting the entire Guardian Collective and turned the Super Computer into her base of operations. Religiously worshipped by those she infects and known to her followers as "The Word". Claims to bring peace and unity to the net, but her true malicious intent shines through her veil of benevolence.
- Deacon: Daemon's main advisor and assistant. Not much else is known about him.
With the exception of a few characters such as Enzo, most ReBoot characters are named after technical computer terms, or pieces of computer hardware.
History and summary
The first season of ReBoot was highly episodic, with only one two-part episode. Most of the episodes established characters, locations, and story elements, such as the gigantic "Game Cubes." When the User (a godlike figure to the sprites and binomes of Mainframe) 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 entered the games, "ReBooted" into a game character, and fought the User's character to save the sector (if the User wins a game, the system the Cube fell in is "nullified," and the sprites and binomes within are turned into energy-draining worm-like parasites called Nulls).
The second season contained a deep story arc that began with the episode "Painted Windows." The arc revealed that Hexadecimal and Megabyte are brother and sister, 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 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 only acknowledges the name "Matrix," carries a gun called Gun, the damaged Glitch, an eternal hatred of Megabyte, and looks like Dolph Lundgren in The Punisher. As the season progrssed, Matrix and AndrAIa 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. Hexacdecimal and Megabyte were defeated in confrontations with Bob and Enzo respectively. All final problems in Mainframe were dealt with by restarting the system setting everything right again for our heroes. Season 3 was largely free of the network censorship that plagued the first two seasons; this is evidenced by the series establishing that the adult Matrix and AndrAIa have become lovers.
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. 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 and Bob's arrival in the system.
This series, first broadcast on Saturday mornings in 1994 by the ABC Television Network, 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 when Claster Television distributed them for a short period of time during the 1996-97 season. The entire series aired on Cartoon Network's Toonami in the US in March 1999, marking the first time Americans saw the third season of ReBoot.
The success of this series helped establish Mainframe Entertainment as one of the predominant computer animation studios in the world.
It is important to note that when the series debuted in 1994, the first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, had not yet been released.
As of December 13, 2004, only the two-movie 4th season is available on DVD in the US. The 3rd season is out of print, but a re-release of volume 3.1 is currently scheduled for mid-January 2005.
Humor
ReBoot is full of computer and popular culture in-jokes that few people get the first time around.
The episode "Talent Night" centered around a surprise birthday party for Enzo. Dot and a cubistic binome called 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 singers and dancers called the "Small Town Binomes," who sing, "It's fun to play in a non-violent way, with the B, S and P." They are singing this to the tune of "YMCA," a hit tune of a 1970s disco group called the Village People, who were notorious for the homosexual undertones and double meanings of the words of their songs. The "Small Town Binomes" are also dressed in the same "macho" costumes the Village People wore on stage. In addition, "BS & P" happens to be the initials of the Broadcast Standards and Practices, ABC's censors. "BS & P" was used in a first-season episode to move Bob through a stained-glass window rather than shattering it, a technique the BS & P felt children would emulate. Further references to the american networks dropping Reboot were inserted in the "Web World Wars" episode when Megabytes'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 "Evil Dead" game cube that read "Here lies the Mainframe joint venture, an unholy alliance."
"Talent Night" also featured "Johnny O. Binome," whose binary joke translates as "Take my wife, please," and the YTV robot (the large, red, cyclopean figure). In syndication, the "YTV" logo on the robot's chest is omitted.
The show occasionally featured a penguin that resembled Feathers McGraw from the Wallace and Gromit feature The Wrong Trousers.
Later episodes featured direct parodies of films (the 'James Bond' oeuvre; Toy Story) 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... aka Fox Mulder and Dana Scully from the X-Files. In fact... in one episode, when the 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. Sadly... Modem was blown apart in an explosion.
Although the "User" opponents featured in early episodes were usually invisible or designed with a minimalistic 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/Crash Bandicoot hybrid ("Rocky Racoon"), Elmer Fudd (whose form Enzo reboots into), Bruce Campbell (in the "Evil Dead" game), Brandon Fraser (in a game reminiscent of "The Mummy"), Scorpion (of Mortal Kombat fame) and a variety of action figures from G.I. Joe to Barbie.
External links
Official Sites
Unofficial Sites and Fan Sites
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