ReBoot (1994): Life Inside the Machine — TV's First Fully CGI Series

ReBoot (1994): Life Inside the Machine — TV's First Fully CGI Series

While live-action 1990s TV treated cyberspace as a place humans jacked into (VR.5 (1995): Telephony, Subconscious Cyberspace, and Mid-90s Virtual Reality Fever, Wild Palms (1993): Virtual Reality, Holographic Demagogues, and Media Manipulation), the Canadian animated series ReBoot (YTV, September 10, 1994 – November 30, 2001; 48 episodes) set its entire story inside a computer¹. Produced by Vancouver's Mainframe Entertainment, "It is notable for being one of the first made-for-television CGI series" — built on Silicon Graphics workstations running Softimage by a team that had made the CGI characters in Dire Straits' "Money for Nothing" video. The Los Angeles Times announced it in November 1994 under the headline "'ReBoot' Is First Series to Be Fully Computerized," and Wired's March 1997 retrospective was pointedly titled "Before Toy Story, there was... ReBoot" — the show beat Pixar's feature to screens by nearly a year.

The premise is a complete computer-anthropology. Guardian Bob, Dot and Enzo Matrix defend the city of Mainframe against the viruses Megabyte (Tony Jay) and Hexadecimal; the User is an unseen deity whose game-loading manifests as "an electrical violet cube lowered onto part of the city"; anyone caught inside becomes an NPC, and if the User wins, the sector is destroyed and its residents reduced to leech-like Nulls. Even the internet appears, literalized as a hostile beyond: season 2's story arc "introduced an external threat to Mainframe: the Web," an ocean outside the computer's borders populated by creatures and web-surfers like Ray Tracer.

Production constraints shaped the fiction itself: "The setting of the inner world of a computer system, known by its inhabitants as Mainframe, was deliberately chosen due to technological constraints at the time, as the fictional computer world allowed for blocky-looking models and mechanical animation." The show also fought ABC's Broadcast Standards and Practices — which famously forced the animators to reshape Dot's chest into a "monobreast" — and lampooned its censors in-show, with the Village People-parody Small Town Binomes singing their hit "BSnP (It's fun to play/In a non-violent way)."

What this means: ReBoot is the era's most complete act of machine-world anthropomorphism — a generation of kids absorbed computer vocabulary (COMMAND.COM, viruses, nulls, the Web, the User) as geography and cast, the same years The Net and Hackers were teaching adults the same lexicon as paranoia. It belongs in this topic as the children's-television wing of the 1990s cyber boom in The 1990s Cyber Cinema and Virtual Reality Boom.