Epilogue - ReBoot: The Guardian Code

Honestly, I'd rather not be talking about this. I'd be much happier to forget that this misstep exists and be perfectly content with just sticking with the original series that I hold so close to my heart. However, since I've said in previous posts that I would be touching upon 2018's 'sequel' series ReBoot: The Guardian Code and because I feel this retrospective would be incomplete if I didn't at least talk about it, here we are.

However, I have no intentions of watching all 20 episodes of The Guardian Code for the purposes of this. Nor do I have any intention of re watching the three mediocre episodes that I did watch. Instead, I'll just be discussing why this show is so mediocre and why we're better off just letting it fester and die in the depths of Netflix. But first, how did we get to this point? Before we get to talking about The Guardian Code itself, I have to touch upon the 11 or so years leading up to it's release in order to fully articulate how disappointing this was.

In May 2006, a ReBoot fan going by the alias of Glitch Bob online had an idea. After nearly four years of waiting for a conclusion to Season 4's cliffhanger, Glitch Bob decided that the fans should start a campaign to bring the show back and get the cliffhanger resolved. This would involve contacting both the show's voice actors and employees at Mainframe. A MySpace group for the Revival was created, which was then followed by a Facebook group and then a website of it's own. Glitch Bob is quite possibly ReBoot's biggest fan, which can be clearly shown by his obvious passion for the series. He's also one of the only people (if not the only one) who Gavin and Ian themselves have personally told what they had planned for the rest of Season 4, which is something that they have otherwise been keeping to themselves in case they get the chance to tell that story eventually.

Then in late 2006, Mainframe Entertainment was purchased by a company called Rainmaker, who then renamed the company Rainmaker Entertainment. In July the next year, Rainmaker announced that they would be bringing ReBoot back in the form of a trilogy of movies. Alongside this, they would be teaming up with the website Zeros2Heroes to create a ReBoot webcomic which would be written by fans and driven by input from the fans. 5 pitches for the comic were made and fans got to vote on which one got to be made into a web comic. The five pitches were as follows (according to my memory as these aren't really accessible online anymore):

ReBoot: Arrival - A continuation from Season 4 where Megabyte's hunt has turned into a net wide war and our heroes need to deal with a program known as Gnosis. Also features The Codemasters from Season 2,

ReBoot 2.0 - After the end of The Hunt, a program gets installed into Mainframe that changes how everything looks.

ReBoot: The Last Guardian - Set 17 years after the end of Season 4 and following Dot and Megabyte's daughter.

ReBoot: Regenerated - A comic following a wholly original cast.

ReBoot: The Last User - A weird post apocalyptic story involving aliens with a very tenuous link to ReBoot.

The Arrival pitch was the clear winner, and the first issue was released in late May 2008 following a countdown clock leading up to it's launch on reboot.com. Then the rest of the comic was released in two page instalments for several weeks from August 2008 to early 2009. The comic was not well received by the fandom, and is considered non canon since it featured no input from the original creators of the series.

As for the movies themselves, very little was announced regarding them. The plan was to structure it in a similar way to Star Wars and The Matrix with the first movie being somewhat self contained and then the next two being a two part story. A writer was announced and then let go of and then that was it. Rainmaker's head at the time Paul Gertz said that while he understood that the fans wanted a resolution, they needed to 'reach a broader audience' in order to make this a worthwhile venture. He also said that he felt that the demographic for the show needed to be 'aged up', which would have been interesting to see if done correctly and not by making it overly dark and edgy for the sake of it.

However, Paul Gertz left Rainmaker around 2008/2009 and was replaced by Catherine Winder. While Gertz was in fairly regular contact with the fans, Winder did not communicate with the fandom at all. A brief teaser trailer was featured on Rainmaker's website in 2009, but that wasn't announced at all and was discovered by a fan browsing their website, same with a brief shot of a guardian redesign discovered in a showreel in early 2010.

The Guardian reveal in particular wasn't met particularly well by fans. Following this, there was no announcements regarding the future of ReBoot asides from the DVD box set getting released in 2011 and a ReBoot web store where you could buy merchandise from the show (i.e. everything that Rainmaker had lying around their offices). Then in late 2010, Rainmaker went around taking down anything and everything related to ReBoot they could find online, even if a lot of what they were taking down came under fair use.

After Winder was fired in 2012, Michael Hefferon became the head of Mainframe and, for a while, it seemed like Rainmaker were on the right tracks to bring the property back. A website called 'Bring Back ReBoot' was launched, and in 2013, it was announced that Rainmaker would be renaming it's TV division 'Mainframe' and that they would be producing a new ReBoot TV series. However, over the next few years more details were released and the more that came out, the worse things seemed.

The first major warning sign was the press announcement in 2015 that detailed the new show's premise. The show would be a live action/CGI hybrid that would follow four human teenagers who would go inside Cyberspace and protect it from hackers and other threats. This rubbed a lot of fans the wrong way, but there was a massive divide in the fandom at this point between those who were declaring it as shit before it had even been released and those who were pleading the naysayers to 'give it a chance'. Hefferon said the reason for this new premise was because no networks were interested in bringing the show back like it was in 2001, which of course begged the question of why they didn't try something like Netflix or Adult Swim if conventional networks weren't interested.

Between then and 2018, more details trickled out. In 2016, a casting call was announced with descriptions for the new characters alongside a script sample which read like it was written by someone in their 30's or 40's desperately trying to appeal to kids. The first screenshots were revealed in March 2017 which lead to more discourse in the fandom. Then the first trailer was released in February 2018 and gained quite a lot of bad publicity.

Shortly after the release of the trailer, a 4chan post by someone claiming to be an anonymous Rainmaker employee was released. They claimed that a lot of the employees working at Rainmaker knew that this show was a bad idea and was just going to piss off ReBoot fans, but Hefferon refused to listen and just pressed on with the show anyway. Any ideas that Hefferon had needed to be included in the scripts no matter how bad they were, and he even brought his son into script meetings and any of his ideas needed to be used as well. On top of all this, it turns out that Austin, the show's protagonist, is named after Hefferon's son.

Then in March 2018, the first 10 episodes of ReBoot The Guardian Code were released on Netflix everywhere other than Canada. This was baffling since Hefferon had claimed that networks weren't interested in the original ReBoot, so the show was tweaked in order to appeal to the networks, yet the show was going straight to a streaming service rather than being aired on a network. Anyway, I've put this off long enough, so let's get onto the show itself.

The first episode starts with our four protagonists, Austin, Parker, Tamera, and Trey starting their first day of school. They are all in the top ranked team of a mobile game called 'Cyber Guardians', and they all receive a text asking them to come to their homeroom which is 'Room Zero'. This homeroom is hidden behind a holographic wall, and inside they find the 'Cyber Guardians' logo (the ReBoot logo) and lots of technology. They walk up to a device and get digitised in the net where they're greeted by their mentor, Vera. She tells them that they are all now Cyber Guardians, and they were selected for their skills in the Mobile Game. They are then sent to stop the Cyber Locusts sent by the show's antagonist, The Sourcerer - a hacker living alone in a warehouse who wants to destroy all technology and send humanity 'back to the dark ages' for some reason. Upon defeating his Cyber Locusts, the Guardians leave the computer and then Vera ends up getting transported to their world and is now stuck there for good. Then in the second episode, the Sourcerer reactivates Megabyte and 'upgrades' him. He then gets Megabyte to do his bidding and fight the Guardians for him. From that point, the show gets into the groove of the formula of 'deal with issues in the real world, fight in the computer world, the end'.

I'll get onto the third episode that I watched soon because that needs to be talked about separately since this show's biggest problem is that it's called ReBoot. If the show didn't have the ReBoot branding and was it's own thing, it would still be pretty mediocre, but it wouldn't have got anywhere near as much flack as it did. The young actors are trying their best with the material they are given, but given that said material feels like it was written by a 30 or 40 year old writing lines that they think a teenager might say, they aren't able to salvage the show. Megabyte's 'upgrade' looks more like a downgrade, and while new voice actor Timothy E Brummond is able to do a somewhat decent job of emulating the late great Tony Jay when he's not raising his voice, Megabyte as a villain is pretty lame in this show, lacking the menace that made him such a great foe to begin with. Visually, the whole thing somehow looks worse than the original show.

Now we get onto the show's absolute worst episode, and the only other episode I watched. When watching the show, I had no intentions of watching every episode. I watched the first episode to get the basic premise, then I watched the second episode as that's when Megabyte was introduced. Then I skipped all the way to the tenth episode 'Mainframe Mayhem' since that was the only episode that featured the characters from the original ReBoot. The other 19 episodes of ReBoot The Guardian Code are just mediocre and not really worth the energy to talk about at great length and it's better to just forget about them. This episode, however, is a massive dumpster fire that should be condemned to hell not just for how it mishandles the characters from the original series, but also manages to insult and belittle the fans at the same time.

The premise of this episode is that Megabyte goes back to Mainframe in order to recruit the assistance of Hexadecimal. Austin, Parker, and Tamara follow him in and meet up with Bob, Dot, and Enzo. Austin and Parker join Bob in a game of Starship Alcatraz and then Megabyte escapes with Hexadecimal. This episode's main failures come from it's treatment of the original characters. Oh, and we find out that Austin's dad installed Mainframe in Room Zero. Even though they did bring back the original voice actors for Bob, Dot, and Hexadecimal, even they can't salvage how out of character they are. Not only do they look worse than they did in Season 1, but Bob lacks all of his charm and is introduced by quoting his lines from the original intro which feels incredibly contrived and awkward, Enzo isn't in it enough, and Hexadecimal changes masks onscreen which breaks the number 1 rule of her character. As well as this, Hexadecimal is more than happy to work with Megabyte for no real reason when before, while they did sometimes team up when their goals aligned, Hexadecimal would have just blasted Megabyte if he stepped foot in her lair.

The character who's treated the worst, however, is Dot. As I have stated before throughout this blog, Dot's one of the best characters in the original show, which is because she is equally as capable as Bob and isn't simply a damsel for Bob to rescue every week. This episode throws that all out the window as while she isn't in it much, she cowers behind Enzo when a drone nearly crashes into her and she reacts with fear when Tamara mentions Megabyte. As well as this, the episode acts like Seasons 2 to 4 didn't happen. The worst part of all this? This isn't even the worst part of the episode...

Partway through the episode, we're introduced to 'The User' of Mainframe who's a middle aged, overweight neckbeard wearing a 'Bring Back ReBoot' T-Shirt and living in a room decked out in ReBoot merchandise. He's introduced running from the bathroom excitedly as Mainframe comes back online, allowing him to play Starship Alcatraz again. This whole set up makes zero sense, since if Mainframe is in Room Zero, how can he be The User and access the system, and why can't he just run Starship Alcatraz on a different system? Him living in a room with ReBoot merchandise makes just as much sense as was ReBoot a TV show that existed in the universe of TGC?

Of course, this is all just a means to mock and insult ReBoot fans as petty revenge for them rejecting The Guardian Code before it was released. When The User nears victory in Starship Alcatraz, he proudly declares 'I'm finally going to win! And Mom said all this time in the basement was wasted!' This scene is clearly meant to imply that ReBoot fans are all losers living in the basement of their parents house.

This character was played be the episode's writer, Mark Leiren-Young, who is also the credited writer for the last two episodes of ReBoot's second season, 'Trust No One' and 'Web World Wars'. A few months after ReBoot: The Guardian Code premiered on Netflix, MLY started writing a series of blog posts about working on the show. Here he mentions getting informed of the show's backlash, and how he thought that ReBoot Season 3 would have got similar backlash if Twitter was around in 1997 (when posts on alt.tv.reboot around that time tell that the opposite was true, and fans openly welcomed the change in tone) and it appears that he took this on board to mock ReBoot fans. Then he went and wrote posts about his time working on the original ReBoot where he takes full credit for writing the episodes he did and brags about how he was the writer who 'killed Bob' in spite of the fact that the 'story by' credits on both episodes list multiple people along with him including Gavin Blair and Ian Pearson themselves and he probably was working on an outline for a story planned out by the showrunners.

Now, we go back to Michael Hefferon and why the show ended up the way that it is. If you look at Hefferon's IMDB page, you will see that he is credited with creating a cartoon in 2006 called 'MP4orce'. Obviously, no one knew that the show existed until this point but upon further research, the premise of the show is literally exactly the same as ReBoot The Guardian Code. So rather than the show being the result of ineptitude in handling an existing IP, instead it's the result of Hefferon trying to use the show's brand recognition to relaunch his failed TV show that no one remembers. Thankfully, it backfired thanks to both the show's incredible mediocrity, and possibly the most bizarre release for a TV show ever.

As stated a few paragraphs ago, the first 10 episodes premiered on Netflix in March 2018 everywhere other than Canada, it's country of origin. This lead to those first 10 episodes being pirated and circulated online very heavily. Then the entire series was aired on YTV in June 2018 with one episode airing daily. This lead to the last 10 episodes getting pirated and circulated heavily online. Then the last 10 episodes came to Netflix in September 2018 as 'Season 2', making it seem like the show has two seasons when really it's only one season that they cut in two.

It's not all bad, however. While this show was bad, it did manage to get people to revisit the original ReBoot and remember how great it was. As for me, it's made me appreciate the original series a whole lot more. Sure, The Guardian Code was bad, but that doesn't take away from my experiences I've had watching the original ReBoot. The original show still exists, and I shall continue to revisit it while The Guardian Code slowly but surely gets forgotten about if it hasn't already.

And with that, we now end this retrospective look at ReBoot. I've had a lot of fun rewatching the show over the past year or so and watching how the show grew and evolved over time. It's been great to analyse every episode and talk about what I liked and didn't like about them. While some of my initial opinions have remained the same as when I started doing this (my overall thoughts on Season 3 as well as Enzo the Smart being my least favourite episode), I've found that I've gained a new appreciation for the first season even if it took a while to find it's groove.

I'd like to thank everyone who has read even one of these posts of mine. If you're a fan of the show, I hope you've enjoyed my look at the show and possibly learned something you didn't know regarding behind the scenes info or any references that might have gone over your head. If you've read this without having seen the show before, then I hope that reading this has at least inspired you to check it out.

Before I go, I thought I'd provide some links to some other great ReBoot content:

ReBoot Revival - the website promoting the show's revival with the aim of getting the show's cliffhanger resolved

Incoming Game Podcast - Part of the inspiration for this blog, this was a podcast where a longtime fan of the show and someone who's never seen the show before watch one episode at a time and then discuss their thoughts on it. The podcast also has post season wrap up interviews with Gavin Blair. The podcast finished about a year ago, but it's definitely worth a listen. I was a patreon backer for the podcast and as a result, I got given this awesome portrait of myself as a ReBoot character:

Bull Session - A YouTuber who has done a retrospective on ReBoot as well as some other shows that Mainframe produced in the 90's - Beast Wars: Transformers and Shadow Raiders. 

What will happen to this blog now? Well, for now it will remain dormant. It will still be online for those who wish to read it or those who stumble across it, but no new posts will be made. If by some miracle Gavin and Ian get given the opportunity to make another season of ReBoot and conclude their story, then I will be more than happy to discuss it here whatever form that venture takes. But until then....

Stay Frosty.