Brace yourself, because it’s very likely I am about to make you feel old. Next year is ReBoot‘s 20th anniversary.
For all the youngsters who are now Googling “reboot,” realizing that’s useless, and then instead Googling “reboot cartoon,” and then laughing at the image search results, your elders would like to explain to you a thing. Once upon a time, back in 1994 when the internet as we know it was still kind of a mystical thing that only scientists and weirdos used, and the ideas of “realistic” and “video game graphics” were only just starting to go together (I mean, the first Tomb Raider was still two years away), Saturday morning television had it’s very first half hour long entirely computer animated series about anthropomorphized computer components.
The main characters waged a never ending war against anthropomorphized viruses like Hexadecimal and Megabyte, and also against the User, whose proclivity for video games endangered whole sections of their world, Mainframe. Laugh all you like, but later seasons involved child characters grown into hardened virtual warriors revisiting earlier settings of the story ravaged by their enemies years earlier and despite its obscurity I can’t claim to know anyone who watched it who wasn’t hooked on it. Mouse was even a runner up on our Fictional Female Hackers list.
Folks who are still skeptical may get a chance to get hooked themselves, since Rainmaker Entertainment, who acquired the show six years after it went off the air, have announced that it has its first two series in development and one of them is, yes, a ReBoot reboot, just in time for the 20th anniversary. There aren’t a lot of details on it yet, but you can check Geekosystem for more.
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