ReBoot Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
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 Walt Disney Company 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.
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2 History and summary 3 Humor 4 External links |
The main characters are:
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. Season 3 is 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 2004, only the two movies of the fourth season have been released on DVD in North America.
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.
"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 TV classics such as Star Trek and The Prisoner.Characters
Secondary characters include:
History and summary
Humor