Does anyone here remember ReBoot? One of my favorite shows of all time. Lately Shout Factory's Youtube channels have had livestreams of it going 24/7, and I've just been leaving it on in the background whenever I have nothing else to watch. It holds up tremendously. The early episodes do have animation that shows its age a bit, but by the end of Season 1, it's already noticeably better, and I'll go out on a limb and argue that by Season 3, it holds up favorably against modern CGI cartoons.
Recently some fans got together and made a very in-depth and professional 8 part documentary series about the making of the show. It is basically all made of interviews with the creators. They got basically all the creators and animators and directors who are still alive (including one of the top guys who tragically passed away before the documentary was released), and get tons of good information out of them. Of interest to /co/ is that one of these people is Dan DiDio, former EiC of DC Comics. He sometimes gets some hate from comics fans, as all EiCs do, but I liked most of his era, and I love his work on ReBoot and other Mainframe series.
While making the documentary, the crew also found the original tapes of the series. It apparently took them months to then source the obscure and outdated machines required to run this particular kind of tape, and then they had to repair the machines, and I guess there is more work required to transfer all the material, but they uploaded the first episode in high quality to the Mainframe Youtube channel, and it does look markedly better than the already good DVDs. They even did a theatrical showing of the series and included one of the two IMAX rides from the '90s. There are some recordings of the first ride, but only partial recordings of the second, and of course they aren't in good quality. Some clips in the documentary show that they have access to the uncompressed versions of the cutscenes from the PS1 game. Hopefully they just release both the IMAX rides (and pre-ride material, and the uncompressed PS1 cutscenes, onto Youtube.
The documentary also discussses how in Season 1, they were so behind on the animation that they couldn't deliver episodes on time, and instead made a series of commercials that tied together into a little story (called "The Trias Effect") to keep kids watching for a month. Most of these are on Youtube from the original airings, recorded onto home VHS, so not great quality. One seems to be lost, though. But these people seem to have found the tapes, so hopefully that gets released, too. I mean this is a series that is officially uploaded onto Youtube on several official channels, along with official livestreams. Hopefully nobody involved would be opposed to just also uploading higher quality versions of the episodes, along with some otherwise lost-media spinoff bits.
Anyway, this documentary is excellent, and if you haven't watched the original series, you should. It starts off as episodic comedy, but the way it transitions into a much more adult continuing storyline is very cool. The animation was groundbreaking, pre-dating Toy Story, and once they got the ball rolling, it really holds up even today.
Also, they hilariously go on and on about how they would all like to bring the series back, but they never once directly refer to "The Guardian Code." Such an abomination that they pretend it doesn't exist. Except when most of them do mention that they'd like to come back, they always say "but only if (creators) Gavin (Blair) and Ian (Pearson) were involved." Seems like they were swiping at The Guardian Code. Unfortunately, one episode is dedicated to Ian Pearson, who apparently died after all the interviews they got with him, but Gavin Blair seems to still have all the ideas. Part of me still has hope that he'll get to put those final episodes out there some day. At the very least, I wish he would just be a bit more specific about what the last episodes were supposed to be. He does talk about it a little bit, though, including clearing up the cliffhanger...
They don't go into extreme detail, but since it's the main thing fans probably want to know, I'll give a very condensed version of their condensed version. Season 4 was supposed to be three four episode arcs. It then ends on a cliffhanger at the end of the second arc. Creator Gavin Blair mentions, however, that actually that cliffhanger wasn't intended to lead into the third arc. Actually they intended to release extended-edition DVDs, so all the episodes were supposed to be longer. When Cartoon Network reneged on their contract and fucked them over, the third arc and the extended edition DVDs were both cancelled. This then resulted in their merchandising deals getting cancelled, and toy company Irwin going out of business. Mainframe then scrambled just to try to finish what episodes they could get what they had out the door before they completely ran out of money.
So the first two arcs of Season 4 are actually very condensed compared to what was originally intended, as they tried to keep certain things from the extended DVDs by cutting and trimming other bits. One bit that got trimmed was the last act of the last episode of the second arc. They figured it would be better to keep more of the rest of the episode/arc, and then hope that maybe the cliffhanger ending would be cool enough to work as an ending, and hopefully let them come back. But actually "The Hunt" that Megabyte refers to in the last line of the series was actually just going to be the final act of the episode. That's only about seven minutes. Then "there would be another double-cross" (referring to the previous time he was defeated) and the episode and arc would end. They don't mention what the third arc of the season would have been, but it wouldn't have been Megabyte hunting down all the protagonists, which is what fans assumed for the last 23 years. It would have been a new story after Megabyte was defeated. They do imply it was still gonna be part of a larger season arc, but they don't say what it would be, just that it wasn't gonna be Megabyte.
PS: AndrAIa is best waifu. A Mouse is fine, too. Dot's a fucking cunt, though.
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