Review of ReBoot

This was one of my all-time childhood favourites and it still is today. The animation style was so out of this world and was nothing remotely like anything I'd ever seen before and I was hooked, from the first show. Every once a week it was a little bit of super-fun happiness at the thought of getting home and watching ReBoot! How it looks is still kind of startling to this day, even to me, and I still get take aback for a second when I haven't seen it in a while! It had such a rich spirit of fun and adventure to it, and as it went on and was eventually free to do so, it skillfully introduced a little welcome darkness and tragedy into the mix as well. The iconic intro always got you in just the exact right kind of mindset to get into the world of the show, and of all the variations, I liked the one with Megabyte the best. Such an utterly fantastic and commanding villain. Calm and cultured, calculating and deadly. It may not have seemed so at first glance, but of the two viruses, he was the truly destructive and malevolent one. What a performance from the late- great Tony Jay to leave behind, you can really tell that he relished every last second that he got to voice the role. Heroes and villains alike, all the characters were terrific and I just loved to watch them. The Binomes are a bit annoying and stupid at first but they do grow on you a lot, they used them in a lot of funny referential skits. I liked the Mulder and Scully ones! My favourite character is insane chaos personified, Hexadecimal because she was often hilariously outrageous, but you also always got a sense of the awesome power that she commanded. And I loved the spidery way she glided around and would wave her hand over her mask to give it a new fixed expression, I found the idea of her fascinating and a work of art in itself. Also her warped and often scary but genuine love for Bob was touching and she actually undergoes the most character development, going from a straight-up villainess to a real hero who sacrifices herself to save everyone. As a kid I never saw beyond the episode where Bob is shot into the wild Web by Megabyte and Enzo claims his badge as the new Guardian because that was when CITV decided to stop broadcasting it. It was the better part of 20 years before I got to see the rest and really take in and appreciate fully just how much the series evolves from what it starts out as. It was such an amazing concept that the sprites' realm of Mainframe may have been an individual computer from the other side and was like an island floating in space, and their whole universe was part of a vast web/internet - whatever you wanna call it, and that the "User", presumably the human being who operates the computer in the 'real world', may as well have been god as far as the Sprites were concerned, and that when a game was put into the system, to the User it was harmless fun, but to them it was a sporting, but still desperate struggle that they absolutely had to win, 'lest a giant cube-shaped chunk of their city be permanently obliterated! The metaphorical implications can practically be interpreted in a hundred different ways! This was a show that had everything, and it's just as enjoyable today as when it first aired. And no way in hell is it just blind nostalgic fandom that keeps it alive, it really is a show that holds up beautifully. The amount of references to pop culture, video games and computer technology that is excellently integrated into near-every episode alone adds hugely to the fun appeal and watch-ability factor of it. I'll always love this show, it'll never lose any of its magic or lustre in my eyes. Thank for ya time, and with that..heck all I can think of to say is "REBOOT!!!"