ReBoot: A Look Back at the First Fully CGI Animated Half Hour Television Show

If you grew up watching Saturday morning TV on ABC, then you may remember a little CGI animated show that was way ahead of its time — ReBoot. Though CGI animation had been used in some forms prior to the debut of ReBoot, the show was the first to use it as the sole means of animation for a television series. Back in 1994 when the show debuted on ABC and Canada’s YTV, the animation was truly cutting edge, though if you watch it now it looks, shall we say, rudimentary. But this was some new stuff back then, and I personally remember thinking it was, like, so cool.

ReBoot was not only CGI animated, the story itself also focused on characters that lived in a computer system. The star of the story was a Guardian named Bob, who was responsible for keeping the Mainframe safe from viruses and other threats. He worked with Dot Matrix and her little brother Enzo to fend off such evildoers as Megabyte and Hexadecimal. In much of season one and season two, the group must deal with games that the User of the computer loads into the system, symbolized by large electrical violet cubes that take over part of the city. Anyone within the cube becomes a Non-Player Character (NPC) trying to defeat the User. If the computer characters lose, that part of the city would be destroyed, and the characters trapped inside would be reduced to these leech-type things called Nulls.

Basically, Bob, Dot, and Enzo would enter these games and work to defeat the User to keep the inhabitants of the Mainframe safe. What was fun about this concept was that the characters would be inside all of these different games, which ranged from car racing to a medieval role-playing game, or even track and field. The show lasted for four seasons and featured some major changes in seasons three and four, including Enzo growing up into a hardened adult, so you may be asking yourself, why don’t I remember any of that on ABC Saturday mornings?

Well, that’s where the ole trials and tribulations of producing television come in. Though ABC had been airing ReBoot, they also had a lot of notes along the way that really hampered the creators. ABC was really concerned with making sure the show was extremely kid-friendly, to the point where they nixed a sisterly kiss on the cheek Dot gave Enzo on his birthday, claiming it was incestual. They also thought Dot’s body looked too sexual, and made the animators turn her two breasts into one monobreast. They even made them not use the word hockey, saying it had bad slang connotations. What in the world?

In the end, when ABC was acquired by Disney in 1996, they gave ReBoot the boot. But that wasn’t the end of the show, no sir. The show was picked up for syndication, which essentially means that local channel affiliates bought the show to slot into their programming. Without the corporates breathing down their necks, the creators got to create the show more along the terms they wanted, with a serialized story running throughout, more complex narratives, and darker themes aimed at the tween crowd rather than just children. Now, you may be like great, then they got to finish up the show in the fourth season the way they wanted to, right? Sadly, no. Due to deal and budget constraints, what was meant to be three story arcs broken up into 12 episodes followed up by a 13th musical-special episode was reduced to just 8 episodes, and the show ended on a cliffhanger.

But, with a title as classic as ReBoot, you may wonder if they ever decided to, you know, reboot ReBoot? Well, there was a reimagining of the show released in 2018 called ReBoot: The Guardian Code, but it is absolutely nothing like the original show at all, instead featuring human characters that go into a computer to fight off viruses and hackers. What the heck? Will we ever get a true conclusion to ReBoot from the original creators? We may never know.

Did you watch ReBoot? What are your favorite memories of the show? Let us know in the comments!

ReBoot was initially conceived in the 1980s by creators John Grace, Ian Pearson, Gavin Blair, and Phil Mitchell. After years of development, three of the creators moved to Vancouver, British Columbia to begin making the show to help keep budgets low.
To give some context to how much work it was to create a show like ReBoot back in the ‘90s — while the film Toy Story ran about 80 minutes, ReBoot produced around 16 episodes per season, which translated to 320 minutes of CGI per season. That’s a lot of work!
The creators of the show were CGI animation industry veterans — two of them created the Dire Straits music video for their song “Money For Nothing” in 1985. It was one of the first uses of computer-animated human characters and received 11 nominations at the MTV Music Video Awards, winning Video of the Year and Best Group Video.
In 1998, a video game version of the show was released by Electronic Arts for the Playstation. In the game, you would play as Bob, who worked to stop Megabyte by mending tears and destroying deadly adversaries in the six sectors of Mainframe.
Many episodes referenced pop culture or other geeky type stuff. One episode in particular, the season two episode “Trust No One,” featured the characters Fax Modem and Data Nully, two CGI Special Agents clearly meant to parody Fox Mulder and Dana Scully from The X-Files. Gillian Anderson even lent her voice to the character of Nully.

ReBoot was initially conceived in the 1980s by creators John Grace, Ian Pearson, Gavin Blair, and Phil Mitchell. After years of development, three of the creators moved to Vancouver, British Columbia to begin making the show to help keep budgets low.
To give some context to how much work it was to create a show like ReBoot back in the ‘90s — while the film Toy Story ran about 80 minutes, ReBoot produced around 16 episodes per season, which translated to 320 minutes of CGI per season. That’s a lot of work!
The creators of the show were CGI animation industry veterans — two of them created the Dire Straits music video for their song “Money For Nothing” in 1985. It was one of the first uses of computer-animated human characters and received 11 nominations at the MTV Music Video Awards, winning Video of the Year and Best Group Video.
In 1998, a video game version of the show was released by Electronic Arts for the Playstation. In the game, you would play as Bob, who worked to stop Megabyte by mending tears and destroying deadly adversaries in the six sectors of Mainframe.
Many episodes referenced pop culture or other geeky type stuff. One episode in particular, the season two episode “Trust No One,” featured the characters Fax Modem and Data Nully, two CGI Special Agents clearly meant to parody Fox Mulder and Dana Scully from The X-Files. Gillian Anderson even lent her voice to the character of Nully.