I've watched this show several times over the past 25 odd years of my life. I've been meaning to give the series a rewatch from start to finish for a while, and have decided that for my next rewatch, I would write a review of each episode of the series as I watch. I don't really have a schedule in mind, so this project is going to fit around every other aspect of my life, but my plan is to have a new post for each episode out each week depending on how much time I have (potentially starting next week).
To start with, this week I'll be talking about the show's origins as well as my own personal history with the show (avoiding spoilers where I can):
ReBoot is the first ever full length CGI TV series. It premiered in 1994 (one year prior to Toy Story) and ran for four seasons before ending in 2001. While it was initially a more light hearted and episodic series, the show eventually got darker as it progressed and adopted a serialised storyline starting partway into Season 2 and then continuing until the end of the series.
The series was created by Gavin Blair and Ian Pearson, two British animators who had previously created the CGI music video for the Dire Straits song 'Money for Nothing'.
Following the completion of the video in 1985 (described by Blair as 'three and a half weeks of hell'), Pearson told Blair 'We could do a show like this!'. Blair rightfully told Pearson he was crazy for thinking of such a thought after all the troubles they had getting the Dire Straits video done. However, Ian wouldn't let the idea go, and the idea grew and developed, with Phil Mitchell, one of Blair's college friends, and John Grace, their lecturer (who had previously created the stop motion children's series 'Portland Bill') brought on board to help develop the series.
It was decided to set the show inside a computer due to the technological constraints at the time. Because of how expensive the show would have been to produce in England at the time, Blair, Pearson, and Mitchell moved to Canada (due to a tax break given to film and television projects in Canada), forming the company that would later be known as 'Mainframe Entertainment' to produce the show. By 1994, the show was ready to go, and had landed network deals with ABC in America, YTV in Canada, and ITV in the UK. You can see how much technology advanced between the initial idea and the show going to air in these three promo videos:
We'll go into more about the history of the show (as well as the show's cast of characters) as we go along. Now for my personal history with the show (which will probably explain my opinions as we go along, particularly with the earlier episodes of the show).
I stumbled across the show pretty much by accident. When I was about 3 years old, I bought the 'Hack and Slash Vehicle Bay' micro playset toy from Woolworths. I can't remember what drew me to that toy other than it looked cool, but alas, I ended up with the toy and I got a lot of play out of it in spite of being unaware of the TV series the toy was taken from.
I'm not sure how much time passed between me buying the toy and this next event, but one afternoon, my mum was flicking through the TV channels while I was eating my dinner, and there was this program with the 'bouncy spacemen' (Hack and Slash) from the playset. I said that I wanted to watch the program, so we watched the rest of the episode (which I would later find out was 'Game Over', the fourth episode of the third season).
I can't remember much about my first exposure to the show, but I definitely enjoyed it since I followed the show from that point until CITV stopped it mid season (we'll probably get more into that later on), video taping every episode that I saw, owning the action figures, and owning a VHS tape with two episodes of the first season. I watched the VHS tape I'd taped off the TV for years after the show vanished from UK airwaves in 1998, wondering what the fate of the characters were. It wasn't until 9 years later after the advent of YouTube that I was finally able to see the rest of the third season as well as the fourth, and then the episodes of Seasons 1 and 2 that I didn't see as a child. I feel that, while I probably would have still enjoyed those later episodes of Season 3 as a 4 year old, I don't think I would have appreciated them as much as I did at 13 when I finally got the chance to see them. It was at this point when I really fell in love with the show and realised how brilliant it was. Until I got into Buffy the Vampire Slayer in my late teens, ReBoot was my favourite show of all time, and it's still a close second behind Buffy for me.
So yeah, that's pretty much it for this post. Next week, I'll be taking a look at the show's first episode, 'The Tearing'.
