The Pixar of the North

November 29, 2016 9:06 AM

A history of ReBoot, the first computer-animated TV series, and the ambitious startup behind it.
posted by Horace Rumpole (34 comments total)

I absolutely loved this show.

My first programming course in college had a lesson on how binary worked. During the class, my mind immediately recalled this scene from ReBoot. I thought my ultra nerdy professor would get a kick out of it so I e-mailed it to him. He must have really enjoyed that clip because the next time our class met, he shared it with everyone on the big projector screen. There was complete silence after the video finished, nobody thought it was funny. He of course then credited me with e-mailing him the YouTube video.
posted by sewellcm at 9:34 AM on November 29, 2016 [19 favorites]

The last two "seasons" were amazing.
posted by mikelieman at 9:50 AM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

Also "BEAST WARS!" Which had Larry DiTillio and Bob Forward, Jr. writing...
posted by mikelieman at 9:51 AM on November 29, 2016 [5 favorites]

I miss ReBoot!
posted by limeonaire at 9:54 AM on November 29, 2016

One thing I've wondered about is why so much professional computer animation software came from Canada. Maya, SoftImage and Houdini for 3D, Toonboom for 2D. It's a bit weird.
posted by clawsoon at 9:56 AM on November 29, 2016

I've never watched the fourth season because it was so hard to find back when it was new and awesome. Now I'm not interested in finding it because I'm ok with the final reboot that left two Enzos being the series finale. Still remember it fondly though. I watched for the novelty of the technology and stayed for the story.
posted by mattamatic at 10:03 AM on November 29, 2016

I always wanted to like it more than I did, if that makes sense. Fax Modem and Data Nully were inspired though.
posted by comealongpole at 10:06 AM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

It's not often you see a show aimed at children take major cues from The Prisoner.

All I know is everything is alphanumeric. (Sung to the "I Am The Very Model Of A Modern Major General")
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 10:13 AM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

Interesting that the article doesn't mention that Rainmaker is working on a sequel. Reboot: The Guardian Code which will strangely enough be a mix of animation and live footage.
posted by cirhosis at 10:15 AM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

It's not often you see a show aimed at children take major cues from The Prisoner.

That one is pretty much my favorite episode, closely followed by the episode that was a 30-trope pileup of comicbook and Star Trek references, written by D.C. Fontana.

Also RIP Tony Jay.
posted by radwolf76 at 10:35 AM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

I loved the seasons where they finally got a proper internet connection and the weirdness amplified by 300%. Art imitating life, that.
posted by byanyothername at 12:20 PM on November 29, 2016 [4 favorites]

Also, ew:

The Cecil... a strip club... became an extension of the office; they even did job interviews there. “The theory was, if you could get through an interview focused at Cecil’s then you could probably get through life at Mainframe, because there was a lot of distraction, a lot of drama,” said Paula Fellbaum, the studio’s first recruiter and head of HR. (She did, eventually, convince them to stop conducting business at a strip club.)

It's always great to read about some nostalgic 90s childhood staple with a "relaxed" work environment that sounds really toxic and waves a ton of red flags. If nothing else, it's a reminder to take off the rose tinted glasses before bed.
posted by byanyothername at 12:39 PM on November 29, 2016 [15 favorites]

Also "BEAST WARS!" Which had Larry DiTillio and Bob Forward, Jr. writing...

That was such a lovely time for animated television. I have vivid memories of rushing home after school, grabbing something out of the fridge and sitting down to watch these shows.
posted by Fizz at 12:50 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'm presenting a paper at a big defense modeling and simulation conference this week, and presenting work at our exhibition booth. A while ago, an attendee asked if I'd read "Snow Crash." I responded that "Snow Crash" is probably 10% of the reason I'm in the computer graphics and simulation industry. ReBoot, though, is a big chunk of the reason why I read Snow Crash (or at least one of the things that put me on a path where Snow Crash was a thing I would eventually read).

I always wondered what happened to Mainframe and why I heard less from them after the Beast Wars shows. Sad to hear how it ended, and how icky some of it looked at the time (strip club interviews? Really?!) but it'/me nice to know the story. Good link!
posted by Alterscape at 1:27 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

One of the most frustrating pop culture urban legends that I've tried tracking down was that Bill Clinton was a big fan of Reboot. Who would invent such a thing to say?
posted by creade at 1:41 PM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

This show was so critical in the formation of me being a nerd as a little kid. Watching this, watching star trek TNG and TOS reruns, and then like a year later the N64 came out. Right around the same time, i got a computer with internet access.

Having gone from 2d saturday morning cartoons and NES games to this show, 3d games, and the internet(especially super clever floating frame faux-3d myst-esque sites like "the arcade", which still vaguely works if you jump around archive a bit) made me feel like by the mid 2000s, we'd all be in holodecks or something.

Turns out the only things i was right on was that there'd eventually be a cheap VR game console and computer headsets*, and that computers would eventually get to be so cheap no one would care. It really didn't feel like anything was going to slow down back then.

*This was after playing around with a mega-expensive primitive CRT VR system at the pacific science center in yea... like 1997. It was something almost exactly like, if not specifically this.
posted by emptythought at 2:00 PM on November 29, 2016

I have been trying to remember what this show was for literally 15 years.
posted by bq at 2:18 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

Man, I loved ReBoot. The later seasons (which didn't air in the US until Toonami, grump grump grump) got especially good. Even rewatched that one episode after we watched The Prisoner.

I still remember how I used to believe that one of the revival efforts might actually happen at some point.
posted by DoctorFedora at 2:26 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

We had a Canadian connection that sent us VCR tapes of the later seasons of the show, that's the only way we could find out what happened to Dot, Enzo, and crew as they tried to fill in the gaps when Bob was sent into the Net.

Thankfully, Shout Factory sells a Mainframe edition now, it's really good.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 2:46 PM on November 29, 2016 [1 favorite]

My memory is foggy but I remember disliking the grimdark Enzo seasons. The shift to a more mature tone squashed the fun and cleverness of the first seasons, as if scripted by a writer suddenly wanting to be taken more seriously, or something. They did provide a more episodic narrative, which was interesting, but the halves felt like very different shows.

I would remember how I felt about Reboot while reading the Harry Potter books, which I feel aren't any fun from Order of the Phoenix onwards.
posted by infinitelives at 2:54 PM on November 29, 2016

My university housemates and I used to get nice and...refreshed and watch this show.
posted by The Card Cheat at 3:43 PM on November 29, 2016 [2 favorites]

I still remember how I used to believe that one of the revival efforts might actually happen at some point.

They're advertising for some positions on the show at their site, so who knows. "Revival effort" seems like a clunky phrase though, I feel like there is another term the film industry generally uses when an intellectual property is given a do-over. Regeneration? Renaissance? ReDo? It's not coming to me.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 4:13 PM on November 29, 2016 [7 favorites]

Well, ReBoot has been perpetually on the brink of coming back since fifteen minutes after the last episode aired.

I still remember as a kid the giant cliffhanger downer ending for the last episode that aired on ABC, and my distraught realization that that was HOW IT ENDED
posted by DoctorFedora at 4:28 PM on November 29, 2016

Annnnnnnd now I've been reminded of the amazing amount of time I wastedspent in alt.tv.reboot back in the late 90s, and how much we enjoyed chatting with Actual! Mainframe! Staff! (Mairi Welman, wife of Director of Software Development Chris Welman).
posted by hanov3r at 4:32 PM on November 29, 2016 [3 favorites]

I have not thought about this show for about 20 years! Whoa, what a visceral nostalgia hit.
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 10:23 PM on November 29, 2016

I still remember as a kid the giant cliffhanger downer ending for the last episode that aired on ABC, and my distraught realization that that was HOW IT ENDED

I always heard that ABC had a policy in the mid-to-late 90s that flat out said that no newly produced Saturday morning cartoon would get more than two seasons, which was BRUTAL when it came to the gems in their lineup. Not just ReBoot, but also Tales from the Cryptkeeper, the better of the two Sonic the Hedgehog cartoons of the era (referred to by the Sonic fandom as SatAM to distinguish it from the syndicated afternoon series that was good for little more than making crappy YouTube memes years later; at least the SatAM version of the Sonic franchise got to continue on as the setting for the Archie Comics), and maybe worst of all, Pirates of Dark Water, which criminally only got one season.

At least Mainframe Entertainment got one last jab in on their way out. When it became clear that no matter how awesome their scripts were for the second season, no matter if they brought in guest star cameos, and no matter how high their ratings were, they weren't going to get renewed in the US, they took advantage of the fact that their plot had the series' virus villains team up with the good guys against a greater scope threat at the end of the season. Of course, being the bad guy, Megabyte eventually orders his troops, in their Armored Binome Carrier tanks, to start attacking the heroes anyway, prompting a minor character on the heroes' side to observe "The ABCs have turned on us, the treacherous dogs!"
posted by radwolf76 at 12:30 AM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

"The ABCs have turned on us, the treacherous dogs!"

There are so many wonderful stabs at ABC throughout the show. Some more subtle than others. One of my favorites is Bob telling Glitch "BSnP" to teleport him into a castle, since the ABC censorship people wouldn't let him crash through a window. [source]

This show ranks up there in my top 10 shows of all time. I think it 100% had a hand in sending me down the path to IT. Even today in my late late 20s I still find jokes I missed.
posted by Twain Device at 4:59 AM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

Yeah, there's always a plan on to "reboot" ReBoot. They all seem to launch with great enthusiasm, and then wander off into the wilderness and disappear.

I did some contract gigs for Rainmaker in a different life, mainly on an attempt to create a sort of "ReBoot: the Next Generation" through what amounted more or less to crowdsourcing. They had several different teams of writers and designers working on competing series pitches which were then voted on online by the fans**. My job was to write fake "coverage" for the teams which was actually meant as web site content for the fans. It was whatever I wanted to say. It's not like I was getting input from the producers or anything, and it's not like the creative teams did anything with it (though one guy did get really, really butthurt about it, as I recall).

As I recall they ran the gamut from straightforward continuations to some truly bizarre takes on the material. I've still got that stuff somewhere on a hard drive. The pitch material, and the stuff I wrote about it. I'll have to dig it up tonight for the nostalgia trip.

** That was a model that was sweeping through Vancouver's creative industry like wildfire at that point. Talk up the dream and get people to generate shit tons of free content. If any of it's actually any good, take it from there, but you've got no risk going in. There was another startup with at least informal connections to Rainmaker that was crowdsourcing comic book projects with the idea of developing the winners into animation or other franchise properties. I actually pitched several concepts through them. They picked up one of them and did some development work, but again it eventually went nowhere, and whatever was left of the company returned the rights a couple years ago.
posted by Naberius at 7:09 AM on November 30, 2016

One of my favorites is Bob telling Glitch "BSnP" to teleport him into a castle, since the ABC censorship people wouldn't let him crash through a window

Broadcast Standards and Practices...

After 20 years the BSnP song finally makes sense!
posted by Reyturner at 7:39 AM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

"It's fun to play in a non-violent way!"
posted by hanov3r at 7:40 AM on November 30, 2016 [1 favorite]

(that song is at 4:55 into that video as I apparently can't into YouTube links)
posted by Reyturner at 7:58 AM on November 30, 2016

Reboot is also one of my prime examples of my rule "Anything that breaks the 4th wall, is probably self aware enough to be good quality"
posted by Twain Device at 10:36 AM on November 30, 2016

Wow, I have never heard of this. And at that time I was definitely into CGI anything, so I would've eaten this up. Of course, this was when I was in college and stopped watching a lot of TV, so it makes sense in that way.
posted by zardoz at 10:59 PM on November 30, 2016

Man, I had such a crush on Dot Matrix!
posted by starscream at 12:59 PM on December 1, 2016