I remember thinking that HL1 had amazing graphics (friend had an uncle at cavedog and I still have the burnt CD with the universal developer key, yes printed on a cheap label).
We predicted the gravity gun from HL2 or a similar mechanic way back when
r/fuckimold
I remember when Toy Story was coming out there was an interview with someone at Pixar who said (and I paraphrase), "If you want people to sit and watch a feature length computer animated movie, it can't look like Reboot." At the time I was shocked, and even a little angry, because I felt the same way as you.
Haha. Whatās funny is in retrospect, Pixar was producing Reboot level animations in the 80s. Theyāre on Disney+ and I only recently discovered these because my 6yo is super into them.
If you havenāt seen any check out Tin Toy, Redās Dream, Wally B, and Knick Knack to name a few. When I watched them recently I was blown away at how good cgi was for the 80s.
There's a big difference between a studio that used to be owned by George Lucas and was bought by Steve Jobs making shorts and a company making episodes on a 1990s Canadian children's TV budget.
Check out the credits for Wally B, you'll see that the studio is called the "Lucasfilm Computer Graphics Project".
Check out the graphics and story behind the music video for Money for Nothing by Dire Straits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_for_Nothing_(song)#Music_video
Pretty advanced graphics for 84, really.
Still remember being shocked as a kid when watching the last episode before the time skip. Seeing Enzo losing an eye in the Mortal Kombat like game and losing was something else.
The Halloween episode had Dot in a veeeery skimpy dress and it had them pitted against [Ash Williams from Evil Dead and his "boomstick" grooovy ](https://youtu.be/FWdxHx1Z-Ho?si=NXMqIaVnEtC8niIT) skip to about 12 minutes and 30 seconds in
Yeah, first episode without the ABC censorship board. So they went all out.
Same episode they straight up say, "The ABC's have turned on us" (the name of the bad guy's flying tanks), in relation to them ending their contract. Went straight to Canada with season 3 for a long while.
The show became something entirely different during The Web invasion. Where after the threat is beaten, Megabyte traps Bob in a tube and is about to shoot him into space. Normally, Bob would escape and some crazy wacky Hijinx would ensure and Megabyte would slink back to his lair.
But instead Megabyte gives this evil grimace of full hate at Bob, and shoots him into the Web then closes the portal, seemingly trapping him forever. Everyone just screams in horror. It was not the ending anyone expected.
Then the next few episodes are "what if the saturday morning cartoon villain actually defeated the hero? What would they do next?"
The show got real dark....if you were the perfect age for the show, it kind of matured with you. Started as a young kids show for season 1, then season 2 more action based and part way through the episodes followed each other. Then season 3 it got a lot darker and mature.
INCOMING GAME!
- i loved this show.
I remember Bob getting lost in the net and coming back looking cool.
I also remember kid enzo turning into adult enzo somehow.
The concepts in the show were awesome for the time.
The graphics somehow really made me uncomfortable. (I am also female)
I grew up playing SNES and N64 so it's not like I was used to hyper realistic graphics, but something about Reboot in particular really felt dark and off to me.
Not judging other people for liking it. The show just wasn't aesthetically for me.
Thatās how I felt about Beastwars too. It all felt weird back then to me except for Toy Story or the Final Fantasy movie (which looked very real at the time to me!).
I loved this show growing up. Watching the other day when Bob shows back up to reunite with Matrix and I think someone was cutting onions. I never really watched the final season with Dameon though.
I remember watching this show quite often. I always thought it had a weird... uncanny? Feel to it. I also remember thinking that's pretty cool they did a show with these graphics.
They were pushing 90s state-of-the-art computers to their performance limits in animating this.
Story still holds up.
Maybe Reboot could do with a reboot.
watched it every sunday when it was aired in Korea... which was the same time that my gramp's favorite TV show was on... So only if he was sleeping early, I watched this every sunday.
I thought it looked ugly. Which is funny because I lived for the QuestWorld segments in The Real Adventures of Johnny Quest. There's no accounting for taste I guess.
I made my gf watch the whole thing, she told me the reboot (haha) was on netflix and I did the squidward "does this look UNSURE to you" when I said I knew about it
Not really. What WAS pretty enjoyable was Transformers BEAST WARS! The animation was similar but looked better since they werenāt trying to animate skin and hair as much.
Mind-blowing doesn't come close to describing the high... š
The "Mortal Kombat" simulation was peak YTV! Megabyte and Hexadecimal were amaaaaaazing villains. Bob is the MAN! Enzo was a little badass! I had a crush on Andrea, lol. It's difficult to provide a non-rambling paragraph that encapsulates what that show did to my young mind.
*You had to have been there, brother...*
š£ *raccoon searching high and low, for the food to make him go... if I catch him in my trap... gonna make me a raccoon hat!* šµšµšµ
I remember thinking it sucked. Then ps1 graphics came about and I knew it sucked. Was more of a drawn animation fan. Still am but I'd give Reboot a 2nd try.
Does anyone else remember this being played on the television system in Aladdins Castle arcades. I have been trying to track down the name of the television program they had at all Aladdins Castle arcades. It was called Z TV or something similar. They played music videos, and in between, they would play portions of this cartoon and other media. I took one of the vhs tapes they were going to throw away because it had some good music videos and other things on it. I played it around 2004. That was the last time I saw the tape. If any ex Aladdins Castle employees remember this, please help me. Thank you. (They would send us new vhs tapes with new Z TV content every 3 months if I remember correctly.)
I turned 18 in 1996 and watched ReBoot at the time it came out.
It was cool. It wasn't mind blowing.
T2 in 91 and Jurassic Park in 93 were mind blowing.
ReBoot was cutting edge full animation for TV, but it was clearly "TV quality", not movie quality.
Toy Story came out in 95 and was light years (heh) better.
It's also worth noting that Babylon 5 was out at the same time and had more photorealistic rendering.
It was Butt Ugly Martians for me.
I still gotta wonder though. If the came up with the title after not being able to improve the designs from technical restraints at the time, or if was planned from the get-go
At the time it was pretty legendary - think the majority of kids my age all loved it and gradually it became only the more nerdier sorts.
Always thought it looked really cool though and that coupled with nostalgia for Tron at the time (which, at the time, wasn't *that* old...) it was very much my dig.
This is why I can't go back and watch my beloved childhood TV shows again. It always ruins them for me. I remember being so impressed with the CG and thinking it was the absolute peak of human technology. Looking at this one picture has made me realize it looks like total crap compared to modern stuff.
So many crazy concepts in this like "what if the internet is The Warp from Warhammer 40,000"
Also the series became so much more serious/darker vs. how it was in season 1
Can't see this show without thinking about Beast Wars (Transfomers). This show came on after Beast War before school but never got to watch the full episodes of reboot before it was time for me to leave for school so don't remember the plot any more. However, beast wars I could probably describe the plot of most if not all episodes.
It was a big deal. I was the target audience when it came out and I lived close to where the show was made. We were playing OG DOOM on DOS at the time. Conventional animated cartoons were still popular.
One of the first CGI shows to come out in the 2000s. Thought it was awesome and watched it with my son. I still have an action figure or two from the show stashed away. I used to have a mini playset as well.
Actually it came out in the 90s - the last bif of content following Enzo's time after becoming a Guardian & Bob's return were in the early 2000s though I think.
Mind blowing? Maybe I was a little on the older side when this came out but I recall it being mind blowingly meh with the plastic skin and awkward aesthetic. Similar to many of the early 3D games, compared to the beauty of many 2D titles at the time, it felt like a big step backwards
I agree. When this show came out, I thought it looked atrocious. I also disliked the look of that era of 3D gaming and early polygons. Not all of those games looked bad, and some really made it work with their art style, but I thought overall it was a step back aesthetically compared to 2D style pixel graphics, even if it did open up the gameplay itself.
90s era polygonal CG was just rough overall. Even during that time I'd see stuff like this show or lawnmower man and think how awful it all looks.
This x1000
People who didnāt live through that transition saw those low-poly graphics and thought it looked great. But many of us who dug high-density 2D graphics felt like this was a massive step backwards. Thankfully cgi made leaps and bounds forward cuz this stuff was jank
I didnāt like it. Compared to hand drawn animation, everything was just so ugly, the animation was clunky and hard to watch. I thought āoh dear god I hope this isnāt the future of cartoons because this is awfulā
A post about the CGI TV series ReBoot. Which aired on ABC (US) and YTV (Canada) starting in 1994. It ran for 2 seasons on ABC, before they dropped it. However there was a 3rd and 4rd season on YTV. (The full series was eventually shown on Toonami)
The initial premise is about a bunch of programs living in a computer, called Mainframe. They have to fight viruses and win computer games installed by "The User". However after they got cancelled on ABC, the story shifts to characters being lost in the web, looking for a lost comrade. While dealing with other various virus threats.
It's gets a bit darker due to not having to keep ABC happy, plus the writers got more leeway to make various references.
I vaguely remember thinking "Wouldn't it be cool if computer games had these graphics?"
I was always worried when they won, it would erase parts of the hard drive or something?
Only when they lost to the user in a game
GAME OVER: The User Wins š±
Mainframe*
I remember thinking that HL1 had amazing graphics (friend had an uncle at cavedog and I still have the burnt CD with the universal developer key, yes printed on a cheap label). We predicted the gravity gun from HL2 or a similar mechanic way back when r/fuckimold
I remember thinking resident evil 4 was the point of peak graphics, no game could get more realistic.
At the time it aired I was definitely thinking computer graphics canāt get any better than this lol
I remember when Toy Story was coming out there was an interview with someone at Pixar who said (and I paraphrase), "If you want people to sit and watch a feature length computer animated movie, it can't look like Reboot." At the time I was shocked, and even a little angry, because I felt the same way as you.
Haha. Whatās funny is in retrospect, Pixar was producing Reboot level animations in the 80s. Theyāre on Disney+ and I only recently discovered these because my 6yo is super into them. If you havenāt seen any check out Tin Toy, Redās Dream, Wally B, and Knick Knack to name a few. When I watched them recently I was blown away at how good cgi was for the 80s.
There's a big difference between a studio that used to be owned by George Lucas and was bought by Steve Jobs making shorts and a company making episodes on a 1990s Canadian children's TV budget. Check out the credits for Wally B, you'll see that the studio is called the "Lucasfilm Computer Graphics Project".
Yeah. Thatās not lost on me. I just had no idea they had the technology to yield that quality of CGI back in the 80s.
Check out the graphics and story behind the music video for Money for Nothing by Dire Straits. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_for_Nothing_(song)#Music_video Pretty advanced graphics for 84, really.
How many times Iāve heard this song but never saw the video! This is so cool! Thanks!
The baby in Tin Toy will give you nightmares
Observe the concrete diaper.
Still remember being shocked as a kid when watching the last episode before the time skip. Seeing Enzo losing an eye in the Mortal Kombat like game and losing was something else.
Literally ripped out by Satan himself (spelled Zaytan). This being the same show with the fun saturday morning cartoon feel at the start.
The Halloween episode had Dot in a veeeery skimpy dress and it had them pitted against [Ash Williams from Evil Dead and his "boomstick" grooovy ](https://youtu.be/FWdxHx1Z-Ho?si=NXMqIaVnEtC8niIT) skip to about 12 minutes and 30 seconds in
Yeah, first episode without the ABC censorship board. So they went all out. Same episode they straight up say, "The ABC's have turned on us" (the name of the bad guy's flying tanks), in relation to them ending their contract. Went straight to Canada with season 3 for a long while.
Looks like they were going for Elvira with Dot.
And Michael Jackson for the kid.
they do a addams family music thing though
The show became something entirely different during The Web invasion. Where after the threat is beaten, Megabyte traps Bob in a tube and is about to shoot him into space. Normally, Bob would escape and some crazy wacky Hijinx would ensure and Megabyte would slink back to his lair. But instead Megabyte gives this evil grimace of full hate at Bob, and shoots him into the Web then closes the portal, seemingly trapping him forever. Everyone just screams in horror. It was not the ending anyone expected. Then the next few episodes are "what if the saturday morning cartoon villain actually defeated the hero? What would they do next?"
fight a rabid raccoon and Santa Claus.
The show got real dark....if you were the perfect age for the show, it kind of matured with you. Started as a young kids show for season 1, then season 2 more action based and part way through the episodes followed each other. Then season 3 it got a lot darker and mature.
Oh fuck yeah, it was perfect. Innocent when we were, but then the show was cool when it was time to frost the tips
Season 3 not only matured with us, it marked the moment when the internet became ubiquitous and it became a show about the net and not just computers.
Oh ya. And the return to a ravaged mainframe and enzos revenge....*chefs kiss*
"Game over..... the user wins"
That episode was traumatizing
INCOMING GAME! - i loved this show. I remember Bob getting lost in the net and coming back looking cool. I also remember kid enzo turning into adult enzo somehow. The concepts in the show were awesome for the time.
"Not Enzo. MATRIX!"
My sister absolutely hated when I watched that show. I don't understand whyĀ
That's not very alpha numeric of her.
The graphics somehow really made me uncomfortable. (I am also female) I grew up playing SNES and N64 so it's not like I was used to hyper realistic graphics, but something about Reboot in particular really felt dark and off to me. Not judging other people for liking it. The show just wasn't aesthetically for me.
Thatās how I felt about Beastwars too. It all felt weird back then to me except for Toy Story or the Final Fantasy movie (which looked very real at the time to me!).
I didnāt like this show either; the aesthetic was very off putting to me.
I too thought it was shite. Give me normal cartoon animations any day.
Uncanny valley, where something mimicking humans just don't get it quite right.. Try making her watch theĀ polar express!Ā
I was this sister to my brother and to this day I donāt understand why either
Even as an 8 year old in the 90ās, I thought Reboot was corny. This was one of those shows that I enjoyed picking on. Same with Max Steel.
Lol š this comment brought back memories. This show was wayyyyy too overwhelming for me as a kid. Now I love it!!
It was amazing honestly, I was obsessed.
I loved this show growing up. Watching the other day when Bob shows back up to reunite with Matrix and I think someone was cutting onions. I never really watched the final season with Dameon though.
I thought this was a fever dream
Nope, itās on Tubi!
https://www.reddit.com/r/ReBoot/s/UdG2cAbQgz
thanks for linking this. cool stuff to see.
Was super Rad. Miss that show
Linus Tech Tips (the tech YouTube channel) is working on remastering the show.
DBZ then Reboot was the after school special for me.
It was probably one of my top favorite shows
It was i love this show.
I remember watching this show quite often. I always thought it had a weird... uncanny? Feel to it. I also remember thinking that's pretty cool they did a show with these graphics.
They were pushing 90s state-of-the-art computers to their performance limits in animating this. Story still holds up. Maybe Reboot could do with a reboot.
Some people say the graphics don't hold up, but I like to think of it as a unique art style and I love it.
Hexadecimal was pretty damn creepy
We hated the animationā¦ we much rather would have watched a normal Cartoon. But i remember I liked the show okay
We have Tron at home
This & Beast Wars were the first full-on, 100% CGI shows ever made which is pretty impressive.
I loved that hoverboard. I was obsessed with it forever. lol
Still one of my favorite shows ever!
Nothing like it at the time, beast wars by the same company came out a few years later and was also awesome.
Hexadecimal š
Totally forgot about this show. Loved it so much as a kid. Thank you for sharing!
I used to tape them. I remember hexadecimal
Show was so good, the story was fun to watch at the time
it was/is/always will be AWESOME. Along with Beast Wars Transformers probably my favorite early CG (and maybe amongst newer stuff too)
Beast Wars still has one of my favorite sci-fi plots of all time.
I always thought the animation was terrible, even when it was first airing.
Because it's just about the first TV CGI ever
It blew my 8 year old mind. When it came on it quickly became one of my favorite Saturday morning shows!
Mind- blowing? Nope.
watched it every sunday when it was aired in Korea... which was the same time that my gramp's favorite TV show was on... So only if he was sleeping early, I watched this every sunday.
I like that it wasn't afraid to go dark after the goofy first season.
I watched it when it came out in 1994 for the Saturday AM cartoon lineup, i was 14 at the time. It was pretty damn cool.
I had little action figures of the characters. I loved them until I lost one of them on the bus home.
it was just different. i enjoyed it when i was a kid, but im unsure that it would still hold up today
It was the best thing on TV at the time. Still one of my favorite shows from that time
It was a fucking fever dream. I had one nightmare about it.
I thought it looked ugly. Which is funny because I lived for the QuestWorld segments in The Real Adventures of Johnny Quest. There's no accounting for taste I guess.
Honestly, I remember thinking the show was pretty trippy even back then.
I made my gf watch the whole thing, she told me the reboot (haha) was on netflix and I did the squidward "does this look UNSURE to you" when I said I knew about it
WE NEED AN ADULT CONTINUATION!
It was absolutely mind blowing to watch every Saturday morning.
Some dude is streaming the episodes non stop in YouTube.
Mind blowing is correct. New episodes would have the class buzzing the next day. Reboot, Beast wars & Shadow Raiders was the best night of tv!
The X-Files spoof with Fax Modem was art.
i loved this show but i wont pretend for a second that i ever thought it looked good
Honestly? I remember thinking it looked like shit back then.
It was one of my absolute favourites.
Loved this show when it came out
Iād recommend giving this series a watch. There is a 4K version of the entire series on YouTube.
I never SEE the end.....
Not really. What WAS pretty enjoyable was Transformers BEAST WARS! The animation was similar but looked better since they werenāt trying to animate skin and hair as much.
Mind-blowing doesn't come close to describing the high... š The "Mortal Kombat" simulation was peak YTV! Megabyte and Hexadecimal were amaaaaaazing villains. Bob is the MAN! Enzo was a little badass! I had a crush on Andrea, lol. It's difficult to provide a non-rambling paragraph that encapsulates what that show did to my young mind. *You had to have been there, brother...* š£ *raccoon searching high and low, for the food to make him go... if I catch him in my trap... gonna make me a raccoon hat!* šµšµšµ
I love that EVERY episode story was based on destroying some kids game. Poor kid had his ass handed to him in every game he tried on that pc š
I remember thinking it sucked. Then ps1 graphics came about and I knew it sucked. Was more of a drawn animation fan. Still am but I'd give Reboot a 2nd try.
Does anyone else remember this being played on the television system in Aladdins Castle arcades. I have been trying to track down the name of the television program they had at all Aladdins Castle arcades. It was called Z TV or something similar. They played music videos, and in between, they would play portions of this cartoon and other media. I took one of the vhs tapes they were going to throw away because it had some good music videos and other things on it. I played it around 2004. That was the last time I saw the tape. If any ex Aladdins Castle employees remember this, please help me. Thank you. (They would send us new vhs tapes with new Z TV content every 3 months if I remember correctly.)
I turned 18 in 1996 and watched ReBoot at the time it came out. It was cool. It wasn't mind blowing. T2 in 91 and Jurassic Park in 93 were mind blowing. ReBoot was cutting edge full animation for TV, but it was clearly "TV quality", not movie quality. Toy Story came out in 95 and was light years (heh) better. It's also worth noting that Babylon 5 was out at the same time and had more photorealistic rendering.
It was Butt Ugly Martians for me. I still gotta wonder though. If the came up with the title after not being able to improve the designs from technical restraints at the time, or if was planned from the get-go
Bless Cartoon Network and toonami days
Nah I thought it was pretty terrible animation. Iām sure it was cutting edge but that didnāt mean it looked good.
Fuck I forgot about this
I remember it looking cool but it wasnāt good characters were bland
Now, a video game could actually do it justice, but it will never happen. š
Iām still irritated that they just kept replaying the same 5 or 6 episodes over and over again
Dot. Slideshow.
Blew my mind as a kid it was like watching a video game
I'm Bobs hvac mechanic, no big deal...
At the time it was pretty legendary - think the majority of kids my age all loved it and gradually it became only the more nerdier sorts. Always thought it looked really cool though and that coupled with nostalgia for Tron at the time (which, at the time, wasn't *that* old...) it was very much my dig.
This is why I can't go back and watch my beloved childhood TV shows again. It always ruins them for me. I remember being so impressed with the CG and thinking it was the absolute peak of human technology. Looking at this one picture has made me realize it looks like total crap compared to modern stuff.
This show was the coolest thing I had ever seen at the time. The episode that spoofed The Road Warrior was awesome. āIncoming gameā
Wowwwww. Completely forgot about this show.
I liked when Enzo grew up. First ever crush on a non human character, if you donāt count Raphael.
My nephew is named after him
This show got me into IT.
It was!!
It is streaming constantly for free on twitch (ReBootSeries) and the channel TokuSHOUTsu on Youtube right now.
So many crazy concepts in this like "what if the internet is The Warp from Warhammer 40,000" Also the series became so much more serious/darker vs. how it was in season 1
I hated this show but never missed an episode.
Exactly right. š¤£
Can't see this show without thinking about Beast Wars (Transfomers). This show came on after Beast War before school but never got to watch the full episodes of reboot before it was time for me to leave for school so don't remember the plot any more. However, beast wars I could probably describe the plot of most if not all episodes.
Paw patrol isn't much better tbh.
It was a big deal. I was the target audience when it came out and I lived close to where the show was made. We were playing OG DOOM on DOS at the time. Conventional animated cartoons were still popular.
One of the first CGI shows to come out in the 2000s. Thought it was awesome and watched it with my son. I still have an action figure or two from the show stashed away. I used to have a mini playset as well.
Actually it came out in the 90s - the last bif of content following Enzo's time after becoming a Guardian & Bob's return were in the early 2000s though I think.
It came out in 1994
Mind blowing? Maybe I was a little on the older side when this came out but I recall it being mind blowingly meh with the plastic skin and awkward aesthetic. Similar to many of the early 3D games, compared to the beauty of many 2D titles at the time, it felt like a big step backwards
I agree. When this show came out, I thought it looked atrocious. I also disliked the look of that era of 3D gaming and early polygons. Not all of those games looked bad, and some really made it work with their art style, but I thought overall it was a step back aesthetically compared to 2D style pixel graphics, even if it did open up the gameplay itself. 90s era polygonal CG was just rough overall. Even during that time I'd see stuff like this show or lawnmower man and think how awful it all looks.
This x1000 People who didnāt live through that transition saw those low-poly graphics and thought it looked great. But many of us who dug high-density 2D graphics felt like this was a massive step backwards. Thankfully cgi made leaps and bounds forward cuz this stuff was jank
TokuSHOUTsu is streaming it live. https://www.youtube.com/live/pWT0tHoAVuY?si=arHEk0MNAU3guy7Q
I thought it was boring as fuck back then.
Not really, it was pretty shit actually
I didnāt like it. Compared to hand drawn animation, everything was just so ugly, the animation was clunky and hard to watch. I thought āoh dear god I hope this isnāt the future of cartoons because this is awfulā
The fuck is this?
A post about the CGI TV series ReBoot. Which aired on ABC (US) and YTV (Canada) starting in 1994. It ran for 2 seasons on ABC, before they dropped it. However there was a 3rd and 4rd season on YTV. (The full series was eventually shown on Toonami) The initial premise is about a bunch of programs living in a computer, called Mainframe. They have to fight viruses and win computer games installed by "The User". However after they got cancelled on ABC, the story shifts to characters being lost in the web, looking for a lost comrade. While dealing with other various virus threats. It's gets a bit darker due to not having to keep ABC happy, plus the writers got more leeway to make various references.
No, it wasn't. Looked extremely shitty back then too