Attack of the Monoboob.

I come from the Net, through systems, peoples and cities, to this place: Mainframe. My format: Guardian - to mend and defend. To defend my new-found friends, their hopes and dreams - to defend them from their enemies.

They say the User lives outside the Net, and inputs games for pleasure.  No one knows for sure, but I intend to find out! 

REBOOT!

It would appear that summer has arrived on the West Coast, and as such, sunshine has once again become a familiar sight. As a result, I'm starting to walk downtown on Saturdays for lunch and some shopping.

Sadly, HMV has closed the doors on its flagship store on Burrard Street, so I've been forced to switch my DVD and Blu-ray shopping over to FutureShop on Granville.  This week I was pleased to see the collected Reboot! on the shelf for a mere fifteen dollars per two-season set, and without hesitation picked up the entire run.

Created by Vancouver's Mainframe Studios, ReBoot's 1994 debut on ABC made it the first fully digital commercial cartoon, preceding Toy Story by a full year.  (And, I might add, with six and a half hours of material rather than Toy Story's 81 minutes.)  For readers unfamiliar with the series, Reboot was built around the concept of computers as urban centers, virtual cities if you will, inhabited by binomes - the various bits and bytes that made up the operating system. The hero of the show was Bob, a Guardian tasked with defending a system called Mainframe from the various perils of game downloads (which, when won by the User, caused massive damage to the system) and viruses such as the evil Megabyte and his sorcerous sister, Hexadecimal.

Intended as children's programming, it was also loaded with geek references and computer jokes, ranging from the obvious, such as Megabyte, Hexadecimal, and Bob's love interest Dot Matrix, to the more obscure - did everyone realize that Enzo the boyish sprite was named after the initials of microprocessor flag bits? (Enable interrupt, Negative, Zero and Overflow.) Or Phong, the Command.com/mayor of Mainframe, who was named after a shading algorithm used in rendering 3-D files.*

The producers of ReBoot were surprised to find themselves in almost constant conflict with ABC, who demanded that Dot's bosom be less anatomically correct (ergo the infamous monoboob of the title), refused to let her kiss her brother on his birthday due to the sexual connotations (no, honestly), and, adding insult to injury, told the Canadian company that they had to remove a reference to hockey.

The end of the second season saw a parting of the ways with ABC, and a move to syndication. (And, as you'd expect, a more realistic bosom for Dot.)  It also saw improved animation and rendering, and an extended, more mature story arc dealing with Enzo's search through the Web for Bob, who was banished from Mainframe by Megabyte at the end of Season Two.  Season Three saw the end of the series as such, but there were two follow-up feature-length films that were broadcast in North America as a truncated fourth season.

It's great to watch the show again, and very gratifying to once again see the astonishing amount of creativity and attention to detail that made it so enjoyable for adults as well as children.  Ironically, the DVD episodes don't appear to be digitally rendered files, or if they are, they weren't rendered at DVD resolution.  My guess would be that they were either upsampled from lower resolution files, or perhaps transferred from some sort of digital video format.  

I wonder if the original pre-render files are still in existence?  Funny to think of them slowly eroding away bit by literal bit in some abandoned hard drive array or on backup tapes in a closet somewhere - in fact, that's actually very close to the final fate of Mainframe.  Sadly, if that has happened, it won't be possible to save those files as easily as Mainframe was saved in the series.

And how was Mainframe saved?  How else - by a reboot.

- Sid

*I've heard various theories regarding the provenance of Bob's rather prosaic name.  Wikipedia says that it's "likely" a reference to Amiga computer Blitter OBjects, but I've always fondly hoped that it came from Marathon, Bungie's 1994 Macintosh breakthough game.  There were cannon fodder characters in Marathon called BOB - Born On Board.  I guess it depends on whether the Mainframe team were Amiga fans or Apple believers.