Reboot The CGI Cartoon That Turned a Child Into a War Veteran
Dial-Up Days
278,426 views
ReBoot looked like a colorful Saturday morning cartoon about video games, computer viruses, and goofy digital puns. But if you stuck with it long enough, you know it became something much darker.
Before Toy Story changed movies forever, ReBoot made history as the first fully computer-animated half-hour TV series. It was strange, ambitious, and way ahead of its time — but behind the scenes, the creators were fighting network censors, impossible technology, and the challenge of making CGI television before CGI television really existed.
And then the show changed.
What started as a fun adventure inside a computer slowly turned into a serialized sci-fi war story about loss, trauma, growing up too fast, and one of the most shocking transformations in ’90s animation: Enzo Matrix becoming the battle-scarred adult known as Matrix.
In this episode of Dial-Up Dayz, we’re looking back at the full story of ReBoot — how it was created, why ABC was nervous about it, how it became darker after the network walked away, and why its unresolved cliffhanger still bothers fans decades later.
Did you watch ReBoot back in the day? Did you make it far enough to see Enzo become Matrix? Let me know in the comments.
Like, subscribe, and hit the notification bell for more nostalgic deep dives into the forgotten shows, movies, and pop culture moments that raised us.
20 Comments
1. the game doesnt take any of the sprites or the Binomes with them normally, it turns them into Nulls. essentially turning them into hamsters. Andrea had to change the code of Enzo and Friskets icon in order to stop that from happening to them, by essentially labelling them as an in-game asset, a reversible switch that allows them to hop, using the games.
2. Mainframe doesnt get reset due to a glitch, it was deliberately reset. the war with Megabyte had damaged Mainframe beyond repair, and was risking total deletion, so they reset the city. the issue was that Enzo's icon was still in in-game asset mode, not city-sprite mode, so instead of 'repairing his 'file structure', the system recreated it, and presto, young Enzo
Reboot The CGI Cartoon That Turned a Child Into a War Veteran
Dial-Up Days
278,426 views
ReBoot looked like a colorful Saturday morning cartoon about video games, computer viruses, and goofy digital puns. But if you stuck with it long enough, you know it became something much darker.
Before Toy Story changed movies forever, ReBoot made history as the first fully computer-animated half-hour TV series. It was strange, ambitious, and way ahead of its time — but behind the scenes, the creators were fighting network censors, impossible technology, and the challenge of making CGI television before CGI television really existed.
And then the show changed.
What started as a fun adventure inside a computer slowly turned into a serialized sci-fi war story about loss, trauma, growing up too fast, and one of the most shocking transformations in ’90s animation: Enzo Matrix becoming the battle-scarred adult known as Matrix.
In this episode of Dial-Up Dayz, we’re looking back at the full story of ReBoot — how it was created, why ABC was nervous about it, how it became darker after the network walked away, and why its unresolved cliffhanger still bothers fans decades later.
Did you watch ReBoot back in the day? Did you make it far enough to see Enzo become Matrix? Let me know in the comments.
Like, subscribe, and hit the notification bell for more nostalgic deep dives into the forgotten shows, movies, and pop culture moments that raised us.