“Alphanumeric!”: The cheesy, forward-thinking ReBoot gets a retrospective
People fall into one of three camps when it comes to ReBoot, the first-ever computer-animated TV show: they either love it, find it ridiculous, or don’t remember it at all. It is ridiculous, to be clear, in the same way that any mid-‘90s attempt to understand computers and the internet was, full of references to “the net” and dot matrix printers. Its characters had a weird, plastic sheen to them; here is a video of two of those characters having an extremely ’90s guitar shred-off.
However, the show’s ardent fans have clung to it, in part specifically for those clunky attempts at emulating the interior life of a computer, and in part for its surprisingly urbane scripts, full of in-jokes and pop-culture references. A new article on BuzzFeed goes in-depth on the history of the show, saying, “It was like prestige TV for kids, the way people hailed The Sopranos as Hollywood-level drama that you could watch in your pyjamas at home.” The article’s full of interesting creative details, such as how the core team was assembled for Dire Straits’ legendary “Money For Nothing” video, and the fact that the show’s central conceit, of being set inside a computer, was mostly an excuse to not have to render things realistically.
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