Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, August 16, 1995 TAG: 9508160056
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By SCOTT WILLIAMS ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium
ABC's Saturday morning series (WSET, Channel 13), television's first all-digital, half-hour, weekly series produced entirely by CGI (computer-generated image) technology, previewed its second season with a special episode last Saturday .
The series' regular season premieres Sept. 9.
It's the triumphant return of a ``children's show'' that mixes action, comedy, adventure and cutting-edge technology for the '90s with the same deft irreverence (and nonviolence) that ``Rocky and his Friends'' gave the '60s.
``ReBoot!'' asks the question, ``What goes on inside a computer?'' with the same imagination that Disney used in its landmark live-action and computer-animated feature ``Tron'' in 1982.
Unlike ``Tron,'' which was strong on visual effects but weak on story, ``ReBoot!'' is character-driven. Its stories depict the virtual lives of beings who live in Mainframe, a computer ``city'' in the Net.
They are blissfully unaware of our reality, which intrudes on theirs only when the unseen User inputs electronic games into their city, with the cataclysmic effects of a natural disaster in our world.
The protagonists are human-like ``data sprites.'' There's Bob, an earnest, straight-arrow ``Guardian'' who protects Mainframe; Dot Matrix, a smart, sexy (yes, SEXY) entrepreneur who's every bit Bob's equal; and, her kid brother, Enzo.
``I think the kids love Enzo,'' said Linda M. Steiner, ABC's vice president of children's entertainment. ``There's a broad range of kids, from young boys to older boys, who like Dot. She's a strong role model, smart and independent. And with Bob we have the superhero.''
Other, less-complicated bipeds also inhabit Mainframe - comic, robot-like ``binomes'' in oblong, spherical and numeric form, and even lower life-forms, blobby, protoplasmic critters called ``nulls.''
There are bad guys, too. Probably the nastiest is Megabyte, an evil computer virus who's half Black Knight and half Darth Vader, with the British diction and arch, urbane manner of Cyril Richard's Captain Hook.
There's also the demented virus Hexadecimal, a voluptuous, masked Medusa who is quite the irrational number.
And always, there's the computer humor that will tickle kids and savvy grown-ups. There's even an in-joke for you MTV hipsters: The animators briefly revive Hard and Sell, two computer-generated characters who appeared in Dire Strait's video of their 1988 hit, ``Money for Nothing.''
There's a William Shatner parody, a Village People knockoff, cool jazz from geometric ``primitives'' and a standup comedian who delivers his shtick in binary code: ``1--0-1-0-0-1-0? ... 0-0-0-1-0-1-0-0!''
Barrrrump-bump! Yatta-yatta!
If you don't get the jokes, there's no need to burn your discount coupons for Windows 95. The animation is always superb, sometimes beautiful, even breathtaking.
Vancouver, B.C.-based BLT Productions Ltd. creates it (in Surround Sound, no less) on SGI Silicon Graphics hardware using Softimage, the same software that brought the dinosaurs to life in ``Jurassic Park.''
It was a big bunch of glitches in that same software that nearly crashed ``ReBoot!'' shortly after its debut last fall, knocking it off the air for a month.
``We knew it was in the software, but we hung in there,'' Steiner said. ``This season, we're going to have all our shows by December.''
Even in reruns, she said, the show has delivered solid, if unspectacular, ratings, averaging a 4.4 rating to date - an audience of about 1.7 million kids (and the odd television writer).
Mainframe and its people, though digital, are fully realized. They have their own culture, their own mores, traditions and architecture. They have souls.
And, as a kind of memento mori ever-present in the background, zipping around Mainframe's conduits is incessant digital datastream: 00101001001100100001011101010 ...
That's not just Mainframe talking to itself. That bitstream represents the future of animation, television and the rest of the world.
``I think we're in a position similar to the position Disney was in when they originally did `Steamboat Willie,''' said Phil Mitchell, one of the series' four co-creators. ``We're basically on the first rung of a ladder that's going to go on for many years.''
by CNB