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TV, Movies and Games > ReBoot: The Guardian Code

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message 1: by Trike (last edited Feb 22, 2018 06:39PM) (new)

Trike | 11195 comments The ReBoot, er, reboot, aka Power Tron Rangers. Dear god this looks f***ing terrible.

How is it that a brand new show has worse CGI than one made 24 years ago? Whose idea was it to cast 25-year-olds as high school students? How did anyone think this pile of steaming hot garbage was a good idea?

https://youtu.be/l8B5dqjsZUs


message 2: by Rick (new)

Rick Where's the laughing while vomiting emoji?


message 3: by Trike (new)

Trike | 11195 comments They turned one of the most brilliant TV series ever into this warmed-over sewage. It’s a crime against art, is what this is.

They were like, “Hey, you know all those interesting characters and clever worldbuilding? Screw that, it’s out. We’re turning it into another Super Samurai Syber Squad show.”


message 4: by Sean Lookielook (last edited Feb 23, 2018 07:06AM) (new)

Sean Lookielook Sandulak (seansandulak) | 444 comments This has ruined my childhood and my adulthood. Basically all my hoods. What a two-bit knockoff of one of the most clever and innovative shows on TV.

01010100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01110011 01101000 01101001 01110100 00001101 00001010 - Glitch



message 5: by Trike (new)

Trike | 11195 comments I hope they’re noticing the extreme negative reactions. 485 likes and more than 6,000 dislikes.


message 6: by Sean (new)

Sean O'Hara (seanohara) | 2365 comments Q: Who the hell watches ReBoot and thinks, "What this needs is live action sequences"?

A: People who still refer to "cyberspace" in two-thousand and freaking eighteen.


message 7: by Allison (new)

Allison Hurd | 227 comments Sean wrote: "Q: Who the hell watches ReBoot and thinks, "What this needs is live action sequences"?

A: People who still refer to "cyberspace" in two-thousand and freaking eighteen."


XD


message 8: by Rob, Roberator (new)

Rob (robzak) | 7204 comments Mod
I loved reboot. WTF is this shit!?


message 9: by Tassie Dave, S&L Historian (new)

Tassie Dave | 4076 comments Mod
I feel so old. I literally have no memory of the show you are talking about. I'm not that much older than Trike ;-)

Even Googling it brings no memory :-?


message 10: by John (Nevets) (new)

John (Nevets) Nevets (nevets) | 1903 comments US only thing?

I'm pretty sure I'm younger then trike and liked several animated shows from around then, but barley remember this one existed. Let alone have fond memories of it. I also may have been a bit snobbish and looked past the 3D animation that was "lesser" then the traditional animation I enjoyed at the time (the mid to late 90's was when I got into Anime and the Batman cartoons). Obviously in hindsight 3D animation has become a game changer, and while it has improved greatly, it had to start somewhere, and this was near that beginning.


message 11: by Phil (new)

Phil | 1452 comments It was actually a Canadian show which is why it may not have made it down to Dave's part of the world.


message 12: by Serendi (last edited Feb 23, 2018 10:02PM) (new)

Serendi | 848 comments I was wondering what the heck you guys were talking about. I'm guessing Rob grew up close enough to Canada that's how he saw it. Either that or it was from a time I was ignoring TV.


message 13: by Tassie Dave, S&L Historian (new)

Tassie Dave | 4076 comments Mod
Phil wrote: "It was actually a Canadian show which is why it may not have made it down to Dave's part of the world."

We got a lot of Canadian kids shows. All the Degrassi High variations, You Can't Do That on Television, Arthur etc
We got a mix from all english speaking markets (US, UK/Ireland, Canada, NZ and Australia)

I would have been too old for Reboot in the 90s, but I know what the children in my life were watching then and this wasn't among them.


message 14: by Rob, Roberator (new)

Rob (robzak) | 7204 comments Mod
I did grow up close to Canada, but I'm pretty sure I watched it on American TV.


message 15: by Trike (new)

Trike | 11195 comments Yeah, it was broadcast on ABC in the States, which canceled it and they had to scramble to find alternate financing for syndication, leading to a longer-than-usual hiatus.

That’s why in the finale of the second season they exclaim, “The ABCs have turned on us!” The in-universe explanation was that the Mainframe cops are called ABCs, but we all knew the real reason for that line.

The show was made by the same guys who did the Dire Straits video “Money For Nothing” (https://youtu.be/lAD6Obi7Cag), and they set it inside a computer to explain why the graphics are so blocky and primitive. Between the time they pitched the show and they went into production the tech had evolved so rapidly that they were able to do better renderings on the cheap.

The extra-long hiatus gave them an additional boost in sophistication, which is why the 3rd and 4th seasons look so much better than the first two.

Admittedly the show was much more silly in its original incarnation and was aimed at a younger audience than my then-29-year-old self, but there was enough cleverness in those early episodes to intrigue me. Later on it tackled slightly more sophisticated storylines and character motivations, which is when Western animation started coming into its heyday and was enjoyed by adults.

For the remake I was hoping they would take the existing cleverness of the show and merge it with more complex storytelling that we’ve seen in shows like The Legend of Korra, but sadly they’ve clearly gone in the opposite direction and stupidized it.


message 16: by Sean (new)

Sean O'Hara (seanohara) | 2365 comments Trike wrote: "Yeah, it was broadcast on ABC in the States, which canceled it and they had to scramble to find alternate financing for syndication, leading to a longer-than-usual hiatus."

Part of the problem was that ABC wanted a pure kids' show, whereas the producers were aiming for older audiences, which led to fights with the networks Bureau of Standards and Practices. You can definitely see why with the Evil Dead/Doom parody episode.

One thing that stands out about the original is that the writers actually knew about computers, so while the story plays fast and loose with some details (it's implied they're on a UNIX system, but the User plays PC games and they're worried about viruses) the story makes sense in a way that Tron and the like never did.

(I so wish I could set Alexa to respond to "Command line.")


message 17: by Trike (new)

Trike | 11195 comments My brother, his friend and I did some sleuthing when it was on and discovered the emails of the folks at Mainframe Entertainment, so we just cold-mailed them one day and started up a conversation with one of the programmers/animators that lasted for a couple years.

This was ‘94-‘96, before most people had email, but we had already been online since ‘85, so we felt like genuine netizens in the days when it seemed like you could almost know everyone on the net.

One of the reasons why the show distinguishes between the Net and the Web is because back then they were two very different things. AOL, Prodigy and CompuServe were just getting started and people began flocking to them just as ReBoot debuted. So there was a bit of snobbery about people who merely “surfed the Web” by old timers who “lived in the Net”.


message 18: by AndrewP (new)

AndrewP (andrewca) | 2667 comments It seems that quite a few of these 'remakes' turn out like this. Has anyone watched the 'new' versions of Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet on Amazon... terrible.


message 19: by Trike (new)

Trike | 11195 comments Here’s something to take the sting out of the ReBoot debacle: Ralph Breaks the Internet.

https://youtu.be/DIBw9dSVKdU

This is the sort of creativity the ReBoot remake needed. Wreck It Ralph is an amazingly great movie and this certainly shows potential.

“Bunny gets the pancaaaake.”


message 20: by Trike (new)

Trike | 11195 comments ReBoot v2.0 is even worse than I had feared. Don’t bother.


message 21: by Sean (new)

Sean O'Hara (seanohara) | 2365 comments But is it worse than the new Lost in Space? Truly Netflix is raising the bar for crappy sci-fi shows.


message 22: by Trike (new)

Trike | 11195 comments Sean wrote: "But is it worse than the new Lost in Space? Truly Netflix is raising the bar for crappy sci-fi shows."

What are you blathering about son? Lost in Space was awesome.


message 23: by Gridcube (new)

Gridcube Lost In Space was Amazing, this reboot thing... no, it's just no


message 24: by Sean Lookielook (new)

Sean Lookielook Sandulak (seansandulak) | 444 comments I just watched the pilot. It truly mixes all the awful overacting of an after-school special from the 80s with the cutting edge computer graphics of…well, the 80s. It is Power Rangers without the subtlety. It is Tron meets Small Wonder. It is horrible.


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