Airing a year before Disney and Pixar’s “Toy Story” hit the big screen in 1995, “ReBoot” was a four-season children’s show made entirely with computer-generated imagery (CGI). Created by four people, Gavin Blair, Ian Pearson, Phil Mitchell and John Grace, “ReBoot” was about a guardian, Bob, with his team, Enzo and Dot Matrix, protecting the computer world they inhabit, the Mainframe.
The episodes would require them to face threats from the evil Megabyte, as well as a disturbing purple cube sent by someone called The User. Although the animation may seem dated now, for a show aimed at children it is quite dark in places and dripping with melodrama. So much so that “ReBoot” ends on a cliffhanger after a long period away from the screens between 1998 and 2001. Season 4 was actually two TV movies divided into episodes for the United States, and due to studio intervention, it ended with a cliffhanger.
In a 2010 interview, Gavin Blair said that due to the removal of material, the episode ended up with a cliffhanger, but was intended to have some form of resolution. Blair says: “Basically we were going to solve the hunting problem, while leaving some things unresolved. » He also denied any notion of a possible real resolution, in case “ReBoot” is brought back. However, it has been almost 15 years since this was filmed, and in the 2010 interview he joked that he would have to “kill” the interviewer if he found out about any of the shots.
ReBoot against TV censors
Behind the scenes, the series was notorious for the Board of Standards and Practices ordering the studio to make changes to the look or story, while trying to make it “suitable” for children. Characters with breasts have been modified to form a “mono-breast”. This was changed again when the series split from ABC during season 3. As noted in a 1997 Wired feature, a scene of a character giving his brother a lucky kiss on the cheek was cut for fear of promoting incest, much to the creators’ disgust.
The violence also had to be toned down, with Blair perplexed that the action-adventure show they had sold to ABC couldn’t feature a ‘punchy’ or ‘peril’ situation as it might frighten children. ABC has had a history of this, including dealing fatal blows to “The Real Ghostbusters.” The word “hockey” was banned from use – despite its spread in Canada – because the Standards and Practices Council found that the word could have meaning in other regions for “a mixture of semen, urine and feces”. He also banned the word “wuss”, because the BSnP claimed it could mean “wet pussy”.
Several hits on the Council and ABC were carried out during the broadcast of the program. The evil Megabyte ends up having ships called “ABC”, while season 1 featured an episode in which the character Enzo discovers that every performance for a party has been banned, which annoys the board, and also features a “YMCA”, “BSnP” parody.
ReBoot has been in the works for some time
Despite setbacks and constant changes, “ReBoot” enjoyed some success and even reached syndication. Although it aired in 1994, it was made a decade earlier. Blair and Ian Pearson had worked together on Dire Straits’ “Money for Nothing” music video (both characters appear in the “Talent Show” episode) and wanted to create a full-length show. However, it would not be until 1990 that work on the series would begin in earnest. Over the next three years, numerous demos would be sent to television networks, before the series was finally sold for a 1994 debut date.
Silicon Graphics cases were central to the production of “ReBoot”. In a behind-the-scenes video, the team was using Onyx cases, and likely the more expensive RealityEngine2 version. Prices ranged from $159,900 to $634,900, depending on configuration. The case could support up to 16GB of memory and hold up to 2TB of storage. They were the same boxes behind the Nintendo 64.
The show’s master files are believed lost, but the original broadcast tapes have been recovered. Popular media studio and tech YouTube channel Linus Tech Tips has helped preserve the tapes since their discovery, which have since been made into a documentary. A live-action Netflix reboot of “ReBoot,” “Reboot: The Guardian Code,” aired in 2018 and was poorly received.
