Home Entertainment The REBOOT reboot gets a greenlight; will be live-action/CG hybrid

The REBOOT reboot gets a greenlight; will be live-action/CG hybrid

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Firstly, yes, this news is actually exactly a month old. I’m not sure how it passed my by, since I usually keep my ear to the ground for these things, but if it wasn’t for some prompting from regular reader Kromas yesterday, I would have missed it.

Secondly, the Reboot reboot is officially happening! Well, it’s been officially happening in some capacity for a while now, but a month ago it became official official as it was reported (via Stockhouse) that Corus Entertainment has given animation studio Mainframe Entertainment the greenlight to produce a 26-episode first season order for a new TV show which will be titled Reboot: The Guardian Code.

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For those of you who don’t know, and think I just like saying the phrase “Reboot reboot” – which I do – the original show was a ground-breaking, first of its kind fully CG-animated TV series that debuted on Corus’ kids channel YTV in the 1990’s (locally it aired on SABC’s otherwise ridiculous Tube). The show was actually set inside a city-like computer system called Mainframe where the various bytes of data were actual characters who got caught up in crazy, genre spanning adventures every time the godlike “User” loaded up a new game, which would drop onto Mainframe as a giant cube.

The show focused on main characters Dot, Enzo and Bob, with the latter being a Guardian, a powerful piece of software who could enter the “game cube” to reboot as a game character and battle the User. If Bob won, the game cube would just reset and everything went back to normal. However if the User won, the area of Mainframe where the game cube resided would be lost with all the inhabitants who lived there turned into mindless parasites called “nulls”. Meanwhile the infectious virus Megabyte served as the series main villain, constantly trying to take over Mainframe.

The show ran for three full seasons (followed by two movies which were then split up into a fourth season) and spawned a huge fanbase – all of whom were pretty pissed off when the show’s final episodes were mangled due to changing broadcast deals, leaving a bastardized version of the story on a big cliffhanger. Since then there was a shortlived webcomic which tried to tie up the story, as well as plans for a feature film trilogy, but nothing really panned out from the latter.

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This new show looks like it is definitely going ahead though, and is said to “feature the same action and comedy that viewers loved in the original series, but with an updated technological universe that will fascinate a new generation of kids.” One of those updates is to have the show actually be a mix of live-action and CG animation. Based on the blurb given by Corus, I’m assuming that the show will be taking place both in the real world (the live-action sections) and inside the computer systems (the CG animated sections):

Transcending age groups with appeal to kids, tweens and teens, ReBoot: the Guardian Code is an adventure-comedy series about four teens (Austin, Parker, Grey and Tamra) who discover that they’re next-gen Guardians with a mission to save the world, by defending it in cyberspace. The Internet revolutionized the world, but it also left it vulnerable to attack. With the help of VERA, the last surviving cyberbeing from the original Guardian Program, our heroes stream into cyberspace where they use their awesome code-based powers to battle viruses that have been unleashed by a ruthless hacker. Known only as the Sourcerer, he seeks to rule the world by controlling cyberspace.

When Austin, Parker, Grey and Tamra are not trying to stop viruses from overloading a nuclear power station, or remotely opening a dam to flood a city, or playing Criss Cross Crash Hour with a city’s transportation grid, our heroes are being typical teens: arguing with their parents over curfews; dealing with crushes; or trying to avoid getting suspended for skipping class when they’re really on a cyber mission to save the world!

Yeesh. I’m not feeling enthusiastic at all about how heavily kiddie-centric and Disney-fied that second paragraph sounds. And there’s zero mention of any games, which was the major appeal of the first show to begin with! I’m sure the awesome original show probably sounded similarly cheesy on paper, but at least we didn’t have to sit through Dot and Enzo going all Hannah Montana every few minutes.

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One minor concession is that it’s been confirmed that Megabyte will be back with a “major upgrade”, though there’s no mention of Bob, Dot or Enzo returning. Personally, I would love to see Enzo again, seeing as how he grew into the incredible badass Matrix in the show’s third season. And I have a feeling I’m going to need his badassery to balance out some of the other characters.

There’s no word yet on when Reboot: The Guardian Code will start airing.

 

Last Updated: July 8, 2015

One Comment

  1. Kromas,powered by windows 10.

    July 8, 2015 at 14:21

    Enzo was my least liked character till season 3. 🙂

    Also Obligatory “I come from the net …” remark. 😛

    Still looking forward to this. Hope it will be good.

    Reply

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