When I was little, I used to religiously watch a VHS tape my family owned titled Beyond the Mind’s Eye. Maybe you’ve seen it, but chances are, you haven’t. It was an obscure little series of music videos set to compositions by Jan Hammer (the composer behind Miami Vice). The music was enchanting, but the videos were even more enchanting: they were completely computer animated. That might not seem interesting enough except that it was made in 1991. This was very early-stage computer animation, but it was powerful enough to shape the way I dream. That was, for a long time, the standard I held most animation to. Sure, it’s been surpassed, but it’s still a brilliant work of art.
ReBoot came three years later, in 1994. It isn’t a show terribly far removed from shows that you’ll see in the Saturday morning block of today’s children’s television. It might even be a little bit better, as far as storylines go. You’ll just have to get over the animation.
ReBoot, which hits DVD on March 1, is animated in the same way that Beyond the Mind’s Eye was, except unlike Beyond the Mind’s Eye, the animation isn’t exactly of a high quality. It’s in fact quite bad — in watching it, there were times where I just couldn’t tell what was going on. The characters themselves are well animated, but their environments seem to suck them in. The animation has no depth. I can respect what the filmmakers were doing when they made the series, but by today’s standards, it’s awful.
The story, however, is quite good. The series takes place in the electronic city called Mainframe, apparently set inside a gaming console. The inhabitants of the city don’t do much other than play the games that the User plugs in – or fight the deadly viruses trying to take over the system. These villains, with absolutely no moral ambiguity, are given techno names like Hexadecimal and Megabyte, and while Megabyte is the over-the-top British-accented baddie that you would expect, Hexadecimal is actually quite magnetically crazy, and is undoubtedly the best part of the series.
The four-disc set is pretty well done, with nicely done menus and audio commentaries. This set only covers the first half of the show’s run, so I expect to see a second set coming from Shout! Factory soon.
I’m going to go ahead and predict that most people who purchase ReBoot are going to be doing so for the nostalgic element: maybe they watched the series back when it aired in the early nineties. Of course, there will be difficulty in recruiting new viewers, simply because ReBoot aired so long ago. But, speaking as someone who was recently (but not too recently) a ten-year-old boy, I have to say that ten-year-old boys will love this show. I would have loved it had I watched it. It’s definitely not the worst thing you could buy your kids.
ReBoot: Seasons 1 & 2 hits DVD on March 1. You can pre-order it on Amazon for $20.99.
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