"Reboot" is a 30-minute Saturday-morning cartoon about a blue 20-something-looking man named Bob who "comes from the net" to defend his friends in their home of "Mainframe." Bob, a Matt-Dillon-meets-Johnny-Depp dead ringer, along with his green-faced Winona Ryder-ish friend Dot Matrix, and Dot's baseball cap sporting younger brother Enzo fight off viruses, aliens, and the deadly GigaByte.
"Reboot" is far more than eye-candy for children. Rather, the show employs cutting-edge technology that has rarely been used before. Specifically, Reboot's animation is rendered via ray-tracing technology -- a "photo-realistic" manner of computer generating images. Ray-tracing traces the actual path of light as it travels from a person's eyes back to a light source, and thereby models natural physical principles such as refraction and reflection.
Reboot is cherished by its almost cult-like audience. Most of the complaints about the show focus on the fact that the producers are not able to create an episode a week, as originally promised.
The bottom line: even though it sometimes appears that "Reboot"'s producers forgot to write plot-lines to accompany the neato graphics and computer-geek inside jokes, Saturday morning has not seen anything so creative since "Land of the Lost."
And that is why it is cool.
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Copyright 1996 Rebecca Eisenberg mars@bossanova.com