Reboot-a nostalgic rememberance

Remember back when decent computer graphics were still alien to us? It used to be so difficult to utilize graphics in shows and movies that it wasn't exactly a common site, and a nice poster child from the early 90s is Reboot. It wasn't the first of its kind, so it didn't get the same hype as Toy Story (which was the first fully computerized full-length film). In fact, most of the people in my life I would have expected to have heard of this show can't remember its name.

So why is it that Reboot, despite being aired on numerous channels including the popular Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network, has been swept into a dust bin of forgotten titles?I re-watched the entire series seeing as to how I myself could not remember the bulk of the series. I found a lot of things I expected and experienced dejavu often enough, but just as many that I didn't expect either because I simply couldn't remember it or I hadn't seen it. So here's the summary of the series and why it got swept under the carpet.

The first season can be grating because of all the computer puns, but after a while it becomes natural to hear and it feels weird NOT to have them. It's so ingrained into the characters and the world, that the puns we see are the equivalent of idioms we use, and after a while they kind of grow on you. You get introduced to almost every character you need to know as they go through "random" games and adventures in Mainframe. While you get some sense of a story being developed in the first season, there isn't a very strict script, though honestly this freedom probably makes this season the most amusing.

The rest of the series follows a rather dark road: the virus Megabyte takes over Mainframe, Enzo gets lost in the games, Bob gets trapped in the web, and Dot is stuck trying to find a way to save what's left of Mainframe. Enzo goes from being a happy stupid child to being a grungy renegade searching for Bob and Mainframe. He and his partner, Andrea, Age super quickly due to the time warp in the games, so they are adults and very little else has changed. At least it has an explanation in this show, unlike the time warp Bulma goes through in between the Dragon Ball series's. (This is something I'll rant on later.)

So he eventually finds Bob by accident and they all return to a dying Mainframe and defeat Megabyte by throwing him into the web. They manage to save Mainframe and end up with two Enzos and a new plot with a new virus named Daemon. She's a super-virus and is really interesting until you realize how typical of a virus she really is. It's actually Hexadecimal that defeats her, which is a really cool episode by the way.

Oh, I should have mentioned this earlier, but Hexadecimal is probably the most interesting character in the game. She's much more like a virus than anything else, other than Daemon. Unlike Megabyte, who wishes to control everything, she wants to create chaos and destruction, and nothing can stop her except an occasional contradiction. (In one episode, Bob points out to her that her antics with the "medusa" virus code had actually made Mainframe more peaceful and tranquil, which causes her to wipe out the virus.)

Now, I've been avoiding too many spoilers up to this point, but from here on I'm hiding nothing. It just gets weirder after this when another Bob shows up and Dot has to pick which one she wants to marry, seeing as to how no one knows which is real and which is the copy. She finally decides over a couple of painfully troubling episodes which one to marry only to find, thanks to Glitch, that she almost married Megabyte. In the web, he had developed into a trojan virus and could shape shift. Now on top of all that other drama, Megabyte has Mainframe at the tip of his claws as he holds the principle office hostage.

And that's how it ends. It ends on a major cliffhanger, leaving room for rage and disappointment. Apparently the series was continued in the comic, but I've yet to locate the comic or even confirmed its existence. (e.i I'm too lazy to look for it and don't intend to for a while.) The series is good overall, and it's a classic gem I recommend to those who long for the old days of choppy computer graphics and adorably lousy puns. I really do enjoy this series, and Veoh has all the episodes if you ever decide to look it up, just know that after the Daemon saga ends, you'd might as well call it quits. Unless you find the comic, then post the link to it here.