ReBoot (TV Show)

The cool thing about ignorance is that it leaves plenty of room for our imagination to go nuts. The best science fiction was written before man made it to the Moon and found out there are no black monoliths up there. Before Windows 95, back when modems sounded like crickets on acid, the cyber-space was the new outer-space.

Ian Pearson, Gavin Blain, Phil Mitchell and John Grace did the first thing humans do when they discover something new; imagine a cool society complete with a God, a teenage anti-hero acting as law enforcement, old asian wise man, scientists and a megalomaniac super-villain in there.

The idea for ReBoot came up in the 1980s but there was a small problem, though. Let me put it this way; CGI sucked!

Although that problem was usually bypassed by using CGI to represent things happening in computers where everything is supposed to look weird and blocky and computerey and stuff, the closest thing they could get to a human shape was three stacked blocks with limbs stuck to them.

Meet the binomes!

Fortunately, by the time of the actual production, technology got better so the main cast was upgraded from robot-like "binomes" to "sprites" with humanoid bodies;

Bob is the guardian of Mainframe. (Guardian is Rebootian for "cop", more or less.) Comes from the Super Computer (back in 1990 so it probably had as much power as your Mp3 player). Bob would have been deleted long ago if it wasn't for Glitch, a tool that's a cross between a swiss army knife and an iPhone, except it doesn't make Bob an automatic hipster douche. He is a clumsy, laid back teenager with the hots for Dot.

Dot owns a diner. She's a workaholic/fun police who essentially runs Mainframe. She is the sister/mother figure of Enzo, whose hobbies include, as a child; annoying Bob, looking up to Bob, tackling Bob and playing with his big-ass dog. As an adult, his hobbies include playing with his badass gun.

Megabyte is one of the most badass cartoon villains in cartoon history since the Joker! He's a computer virus. Instead of sending his henchmen after the good guys, he goes after them himself and it's always awesome to see. He is strong, he has super agility and can jump bug-like distance and yet with all that toughness, he still has some room for smarts. He is the ultimate mix of brains and brawn. Not to mention that he has sophistication and charm worthy of James Bond himself, british accent included, making him the only CGI robot to ever give this straight female a wet dream.

Come on, girls! Who doesn't sound totally fuckable with an English accent?

Hexadecimal is Megabyte's sister. The Catwoman of the show with boner-inducing curves and boner-chopping insanity, worse than your ex on PMS! Also, her whole face is a mask. I'm not saying she wears a mask, I'm saying her whole face IS a mask. Remember that next time you complain that girls wear too much makeup, okay?

All those people live in a place called Mainframe.

Woah, dude! Anyone else thinks it looks like a metal pizza or is it just my pot munchies speaking?

And one last thing; games drop in Mainframe. Literal video games that the sprites must win or be turned into worms called "nulls". Those games are introduced and played by the mysterious "User", the God of cyberspace. He is never seen, but we guess that he's either a twelve-year old with a computer in his bedroom or someone with a desk job who plays PC games while his boss is not looking.

When ReBoot first aired, it was on YTV and ABC, who censored the show into stupidity.

Now, we all hate bleeped out F words and pixelized flip offs are an insult to our intelligence but if you think Parents Against Adults went nuts after Nipplegate, think that it couldn't even happen to Dot Matrix because she wasn't allowed to have breasts! For the two first seasons of the show, Dot's chest was a single uniboob while her rivals Mouse and Hexadecimal were allowed to have real-life knockers because they were evil.

Will somebody PLEASE give the ABC people a book on the madonna-whore complex?

BSnP cracked down on violence, too. Enzo couldn't have real arrows in a dungeon game so the heads were replaced by clown faces. He couldn't fire a gun but it was okay if Frisket used a bazooka since he was a dog. Bob couldn't play hockey either, because supposedly the word had a dirty meaning in another language. He couldn't play hockey, dammit! What a sweet American way to say "Fuck you, Canookie tv show"!

First season was simply a kid's show. Cliffhangers were forbidden by BSnP because bad endings make little Timmy cry. By the beginning of every episode, you knew that nobody would die and that all would end well. First season still gave us Mouse's debut in Enzo's brain, the main cast having to go through a dungeon with a talking TV, Frisket swallowing an unformat command and, well, this epic moment;

By the time the second season started, ABC had been bought by Disney and Mainframe knew they weren't going to renew the show for a third season so they figured out they might just tell the ABC censors to fuck off and follow the looser standards of YTV.

And that's when the show got better. For the first time, you had episodes where you really had a doubt if the villain was going to win and a long story arc began with the episode "Nullzilla".

It all starts out when a creature from the Web attacks both of Mainframe's viruses and then random sprites and binomes. The Super Computer guardians send Mouse to "help", but in fact they trick her into carrying a bomb to blow up all of Mainframe when the web creature is discovered.

And Rodney King thought the LAPD were dicks!

The explosion triggered a full scale invasion of Mainframe by the Web. Viruses and sprites had to team up to resist the attack and in a dick move that doesn't remind us of the Lion King one bit, Megabyte threw Bob into the web portal just before it was closed, sending him in the ReBoot equivalent of outer space.

Not only it was the season two finale, but it was the last episode ever aired on ABC. This time, little Timmy needed Prozac.

...and don't you laugh this one, 'cause I cried too, okay?

Without a guardian against Megabyte, Mainframe gave Enzo a chance to play hero, cause we all know the twelve year old is the best person to protect you when your city's being taken over by a super villain (when you live in a kid's show, that is). Megabyte, being the smart-ass villain that he is, figured out that he could make some propaganda worthy of Rush Limbaugh and weaken Enzo without even killing him. It is also about that time that Megabyte became really evil. No more guitar battles, more kidnapping and torturing his own sister, Hexadecimal. It gave fangirls a scene that's just begging to be made into a BDSM fanfic!

Unfortunately, ReBoot wasn't a Pixar movie and Enzo wasn't invincible. He lost a game and AndrAIa found a cool loophole to stay alive; turn into game sprites (ie, become part of the game). They saved their lives, but they were taken away from Mainframe with no idea how to come back and little Timmy needed more Prozac.

Enzo grew up, became a tough, built-like-a-tank renegade who calls himself Matrix with a gun that would give a raging hard-on to any NRA member. His gun's laser targeting mechanism is directly into his freaky mechanical eye. AndrAIa, his mermaid-like girlfriend, became a 64-bit babe fit for Mario's favorite swimsuit calendar

MAMMA MIA!

In other words, those two had everything to give the ABC censors a heart attack.

After rescuing a damaged system, making peace between sprites and weird energy balls called "spectrals" in another and a tribute to "The Prisoner", Matrix met the head of the guardians. Turbo told Matrix that the guardians were dicks (wait, we already knew that) because they were infected by a supervirus called Daemon (more about her in season four).

Matrix and AndrAIa then teamed up with a pirate crew to get back to Mainframe, but they had to go to -yikes- the Web for that. Now, remember that the Web is ReBoot's outer space. There are no black monoliths there either just data storms, web riders and their part squid, part seahorse, part cow, part shark part sci-fi prop pets called web creatures.

And teeth! Did I mention they're about 80 percent teeth?

Matrix and the pirate crew picked a fight with the web riders and lost but by a fit of luck unheard of outside of a tv show, one of the web riders just happens to be...Bob! They party, Bob merges with Glitch and they get back to Mainframe. They find it in ruins, big time, like downtown Kabul or a Canadian city after a Stanley Cup final. Megabyte has moved into the Principal Office and is torturing old, wise man Phong to get the codes to the Super Computer and infect it.

Just as he had found Dot again, Bob is kidnapped by Hexadecimal to be her sex slave! Well, not her sex slave, but a girl can fantasize, can't she? So Matrix went to fight Megabyte alone.

Long story short (or if, like me, you're too lazy to watch the YouTube video), Matrix beat Megabyte but didn't delete him, on account of killing-you-would-make-me-worse-than-you, or maybe Matrix just let him go because of that kick-ass guitar battle on his birthday? We'll never know. Megabyte tried to make a run for a Net portal, but Mouse changed its address and sent Megabyte straight to the Web, giving him a taste of his own medicine.

Since life's a bitch even in computers, the system crashed anyway. It could have been the end of Mainframe but we see a black computer screen, hear some typing and the Almighty User restores the system. A sparkling new Mainframe drops from the sky. Even the binomes who have been deleted are restored.

Lame Deus Ex Machina? It would be if the story wasn't set in a computer.

If you're reading this, right now, you own a computer. Odds are it crashed on you at least once. What did you do, except cursing at the damn thing? You restarted it and restored the system if it needed it. Your computer came back the way it was before things started to go bad, with all the data as it used to be.

Happy ending, cute musical, the series could have stopped there, but Mainframe did two made-for-tv movies, "Daemon Rising" and "My Two Bobs"

Daemon has super virus powers and the body of a fourteen year-old girl. She thought the Net was a bit too violent, too diverse and thought she must brainwash everyone into accepting "The Word" and delete themselves to rid the Net of all that evil violence (not unlike BSnP, when you think about it).

That's right, she's a suicide cult leader!

After trying to get Bob for the whole movie and failing, Hexadecimal sacrifices herself and infects the whole Net so Daemon can't. The movie was 50 percent Hex coming on to Bob, 50 percent prequel. A bit on the emo side, but I guess it was all worth it to see Mike the TV dressed as a televangelist.

At the end of "Daemon Rising", Ray Tracer popped out of a Web portal with a guy who looks like Bob from season two, without the Glitch white armor and Web scars. Dot began to fall in love with the new Bob while the original one, the one that went to the Web, who fought Daemon, fought Megabyte and risked his life to save Mainframe, is rejected. On top of that, merging with Glitch left him unable to reboot in games and do his job as a guardian.

Life is REALLY a bitch when you live in a computer.

Bob tried to separate himself from Glitch, but the experiment went horribly wrong and he was left on some sort of a coma. Meanwhile, the other Bob asked Dot to marry him and she said yes. Original Bob was snapped out of his coma just in time to crash the wedding and Dot found out, at the altar, that the new Bob was Megabyte in disguise.

Oh, Lucky Dot!

Meggy was back, deformed by the Web, able to shape shift, stronger, awesomer than ever! He has an epic battle with Bob, takes over the Principal Office while fooling the good guys into thinking they got him and then this happens;

In 2006, the series regained popularity and Mainframe Entertainment produced a webcomic to give a decent ending to the cliffhanger. In the webcomic, Megabyte and his army of zombinomes are wiped out by a super antivirus named Gnosis who then turns against the Net.

Many fans were not satisfied with the webcomic and in 2008, Rainmaker (the guys who bought Mainframe Entertainment) announced a movie for 2010. The two trailers made for it weren't received very well. One of them showed a pixarified guardian who belonged more to the Incredibles than ReBoot. Rainmaker pulled the trailers out of its website and many fans suspected that after leaving them on a cliffhanger, Rainmaker Entertainment did another major dick move by teasing them with movie rumors, just to let them down after.

In March 2011, however, Rainmaker announced that they were still working on a ReBoot movie, but the company suffered a lot from the financial meltdown.

So, what would twenty-first century ReBoot look like? It is not the 1990s anymore. I took a look at the work Rainmaker does now and something scared me shitless; they work on Tinkerbell and Barbie movies! Suddenly, the pixarified guardian wasn't so bad, coming from them.

Like it or not, time passes and if we ever see some new ReBoot, it certainly won't be that of the 1990s. Already two of the original voice actors, Long John Baldry and Tony Jay (Megabyte) passed away and the ones still alive are now older so their voices have changed. CGI isn't what it used to be. It is almost life-like now and animators aren't trained to make CGI that looks "blocky and computery and stuff" anymore, but more realistic. ReBoot wasn't meant to be something life-like, but something from another World, with a perspective and appearance different from ours. In 2001, new technology was used to make the season four movies. Instead of making the sprites faces move realistically, it plunged them deep into the uncanny valley,

The great thing about ignorance is that it leaves room for our imagination to go nuts. There was a time when cyberspace was this brand new, futuristic other dimension even nerds knew little about. The parents of today's kids grew up with the internet in their bedrooms. It's in our back pockets now. Many people interact with computers more than they do with real people. So much for the unknown, futuristic other dimension!

The bad thing about ignorance is that once it's lost, it's lost.