Twelve years after the 1982 movie Tron imagined life inside a computer, the computer-animated television series ReBoot reimagined it as a city called Mainframe, complete with restaurants and bad parts of town. The first two seasons (1994-96) are out this week on DVD from Shout! Factory, and hurrah for that.
Mainframe is home to blue-skinned Bob, a buff hero who zips about on a flying board and guards his friends from the bad guys, Megabyte and minions Hack and Slash. Megabyte looks like a metallic Satan and sounds like Jeremy Irons. Hack and Slash are the comic relief, two evil stooges who resemble shoulder pads on wheels, speak in overlapping chatter, and are forever being blown to bits.
Bob's chief concerns are green-skinned, gorgeous Dot Matrix, owner of Dot's Diner, and her little brother Enzo, who speaks in cyberslang. "Alphanumeric!" he cries when he likes something. "Major coolness out there, Bob. I heard you royally kicked Megabyte's bit map!" Ancillary characters include the diner's head waiter – a mobile computer screen with a mustache and a French accent. If you sense the writers were having fun, you're right.
ReBoot was a trailblazer. Its creators came from Britain, and its producer, Christopher Brough, from Los Angeles, where he had overseen animation for Hanna-Barbera. They set up shop in Vancouver, working with Blair Peters and others at production house Studio B. What emerged was the world's first entirely computer-generated animated weekly series. It was an instant hit on the U.S. network ABC and cable channel YTV.
But getting there was murder. The animator-programmers had to invent the technology as they went along. They would buy hardware only to discover it didn't work. "These huge manufacturing companies were giving us, this upstart company, source code to actually reverse-engineer the hardware that was being built so we could make it functional," Brough says in a commentary shared with Peters and animator-director Zeke Norton.
The project gobbled up money. They survived a major crisis, the collapse of a U.S. partner, only because Canada's Alliance Atlantis stepped in with millions of dollars. ABC's standards and practices branch frowned on Dot's large breasts – similar to those of later video-game heroine Lara Croft – until Brough pulled out a Barbie doll and suggested children watching on Saturday morning were well acquainted with such features.
The computer animation may look quaint today, like the interim stage between a rough sketch and a finished Pixar movie, but the design is endlessly inventive. The scripts cater to computer-savvy viewers and those who catch such pop-cultural references as Bob's swordfight with a skeleton, straight out of a Ray Harryhausen film.
Above all, there's the mystery of creator and creation. New video games are dropped into Mainframe each week ("Warning: incoming game"), and Bob must battle Megabyte in unknown territory. "They say the User lives outside the Net and inputs games for pleasure," Bob says. "No one knows for sure, but I intend to find out."
You'll never play another video game without feeling a twinge of guilt for what you're putting Bob and Dot through.