Showbits

Courtesy reader GeneD comes news of a new $23.99 hardcover book: The Art of ReBoot. The book presents the sketches, development, and profiles of the cast of ReBoot, a Saturday morning CGI cartoon produced by Mainframe, an animation studio that went on to create several other well-known shows, including Beast Wars, a spin-off of the classic Transformers series. The book is available from the site and not via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or Borders/Waldenbooks, either online or in person.

Regardless, it's encouraging to see a new product from the line of one of my favoritest cartoons ever. Sure, CGI has come a long way since ReBoot premiered in 1994, but it was such a clever and rollicking program that played to the geek in me. In the spirit of TRON (which turns 25 this July), ReBoot is set inside a computer, with anthropomorphic representations of software and hardware: the protagonist is a "Guardian" program, defending the sectors of the hard disk-shaped city of Mainframe from the viruses Megabyte and Hexadecimal. When the unseen "user" inputs a game, the set morphs into the setting for that game, with our heroes fighting the human's avatar for control of the system.

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