RoadBoot

Hi, everyone. I haven’t a clue how often anyone checks our blog, but since we haven’t updated in almost a year, I’d wager it’s not that much. If you do find yourself here, though…

Peter and I are getting ready to do some pretty exciting stuff. I don’t want to say much more, as it’s all tentative at this point, and we’re not really sure what it all entails.

Watch this space, there should be some pretty cool things developing in the next little while.

Those of you who make a habit of browsing the Java Hut will have seen the post by Jim Su describing new merchandise, as well as some mystery project, the details of which he would release December 3rd.

This morning Jim told the story to CC, who happened to be standing in front of him with a video camera.

You can download the high-quality video here (~16megs), or go watch the YouTube version. There is also an audio version(~4megs), and a transcript below.

“Hi, my name is Jim Su, and I’m here exhibiting the first official ReBoot merchandise in over five years. It’s a ReBoot poster that I drew. The drawing actually took place in 2003 as a pitch. I originally was working on season four of ReBoot, as the senior character modeler. And so what I did is, I also decided maybe it would be interesing to do a comic book of that series. And so I drew the artwork and tracked the picture to Phil Mitchel and Gavin Blair, who were still at Minframe at the time. Unfortunately those things didn’t take off, so I decided to license it as a poster[…] three years later.[…]

“Mainframe was my first CG animation job, I started in 1999. My first project that I worked on was Transformers: Beast Machines, and so I enjoyed my time at Mainframe very much, I was there for four years. They kinda call it “Mainframe University”. A lot of students that just graduate from places like Vancouver Film School or Sheridan, they wind up at Mainframe and start working on some terrific shows. […]

“I think that there are some very loyal and rabid ReBoot fans, they don’t call them ‘fans’ for nothing, short for ‘fanatics’. And I think that there is a groundswell of people who want to see ReBoot back on the air, in some form or another. I think what’s more important than the actual medium, the CGI, is that the stories are great. And so you can see it in all sorts of different forms, maybe in a comic book, or in traditional animated series. It doesn’t ncessarily have to be CG, and I think the fans would still be satiated for their need for more ReBoot Material.[…]

“Well, the special announcement is that Beachstudios and DMF Comics, we are releasing a ReBoot Artbook in February 2007. And that artbook will contain new material such as ReBoot re-imagined by leading comic book artists, as well as reprinting original character designs, CGI rendered images, promotional stills, and even some stuff that even the most hardcore ReBoot fan will have never seen before.”

Jim Su is selling the ReBoot Poster from his website, Beach-studios.com.

Now for some speculation. I think it interesting that the concept of a ReBoot comic book was pitched as early as 2003, since the idea only occured to me last week! (It has to mean something!) Even more interesting is the fact that Jim chose to focus on the adaptability of the ReBoot storylines to different mediums, almost as if he had been thinking a lot recently about how ReBoot could be easily ported to, well, everything he mentioned.

He’s right of course. When we were kids we loved the show because it was new, it was nothing we’d ever seen before. As has been pointed out numerous times since 1993, ReBoot was the first of its kind, the brainchild of true pioneers. But (and this is a big ‘but’) there are many ways of telling any tale, and method must always take a back stage to story. ReBoot’s story was better than the animation, which is what kept us fans coming back. The graphics eventually got old, but the characters never did and never will. (I mean, Matrix might have in season 4, but you know.) As a production and as a show, ReBoot never descended to become what I call “all-style-and-no-content”. In its day it was a perfect harmony of cutting edge eye-candy and timeless, endearing characters.

If we are serious about seeing more ReBoot then we need to convince some people with money that there is profit to be made. We can do that by buying things, silly as it seems. So buy it, my brothers! Buy it all! And buy me one too!

Now, in an idle moment I might ask Jim what it would take to get us a Reboot comic book. If I was asking myself that question (which I would NEVER do) I might say something like this:

“It would take a proper order of steps. First, a small test batch of something collectible and promotional, like a poster. Second, another test of something a little heavier, perhaps experimental, meant to celebrate the past and look to the future, and still promotional. Something one could take to a producer and say ‘we’ve already gotten started, and this is not a new, but a tried-and-true property’. Something like an art showcase, or a book.”

Then, with sales slips and bated breath I would sneak softly (oh, so softly) into the chamber of the snoring beast that poses, during the day, as a publishing house executive. Yes, with sales receipts and bated breath I would wait beneath the window for the sun to rise, knife at the ready, my left hand poised just so…….

The urge to travel overtook me recently, so I found a pretense to drive down the coast again. I had to steal wireless internet at a Regency Inn in Fremont, but after some careful parking in just the right spot I managed to access google maps and then find my way to Joe Smith’s house.

Joe Smith was working on computers when the big machines were spitting out punch cards. He was collecting anime and posting to usenet before I was born. Joe Smith made the first ReBoot website, long before MFE even had their own. The site still stands as the definitive ReBoot reference site, despite not having been updated for several years. Then again, ReBoot itself hasn’t been updated in years.

Thursday.

When I arrived at Joe’s house he ushered me into his shag-carpeted garage, which he excused by claiming that the house used to be owned by jehova’s witnesses. Filling the room to the ceiling were piles of old computer equipment, ancient hardware, and what appeared to be Moses’ network router. In a dark corner I discerned a shape that strongly resembled the Ark of the Covenant, with a midi cable coming out the back.

Out of the garage he pulled box after box of Irwin action figures, ReBoot playsets, and merchandise I never knew existed. I didn’t count them all, but their numbers must have approached a hundred. Spread out on the ground they took up slightly more space than the footprint of a mid-size car.

Ten or so years ago Irwin contacted Joe. They didn’t have their own website yet, and were looking for a place to put up their glossy action figure advertising pics. Would Joe be willing to put them on his site? That is how this box ended up in Mr Inwap’s garage; in addition to being on Irwin’s payroll for a few months Joe “Lucky” Smith received quite a few original action figures, gratis.

After the interview we visited El Patio for lunch. Joe drove his Toyota Prius, waxing eloquent about it’s superior craftsmanship and economy. I pointed out that its mechanical complexity and high humber of moving parts would cause it to break down comparatively often, at which point he stabbed me in the chest with a ball-point-pen. However the waitress at El Patio used to work on a fishing trawler (so she said) and expertly sewed up my wound with a gut leader, after disinfecting it with tequila. We tipped well, parted ways, and the next day I drove to Santa Cruz.

Friday.

Zen Tao-Journey Jimalric Stevensson-Zenith ran what was probably the second-oldest fan site ever, the long defunct Kit’s sector, or Rock, or the Edge of Beyond (TEOB). Ten years ago he started Mystery ReBoot Theater 3000, now hosted at Slack’s Reboot Site, and he is part of that really old group that used to frequent the IRC #reboot chat.

We met in a coffee shop in Santa Cruz and drove out to the beach for the interview, where he reminisced about the old days. He said a lot of the things I wanted to hear about internet relationships and childhood phases, etc. We actually spent most of our time chatting about homeschooling, since we were both educated at home all the way to college. This was one of those surprising times when a couple of strangers discover that they are more similar than they had any reason to suspect.

I just put up a captioned gallery in place of the old photosets. There are 187 photos, in no categories. The gallery requires flash to view, so if you don’t have it you are out of luck.

Quite a few episodes and people are missing from the collection, and many of our adventures are not mentioned there. By way of excuse I can only say that there simply were things that we neglected to capture with stills. For instance we totally forgot to snap a picture of Slack, even though her interview was the longest of all.

Otherwise I hope you enjoy the slideshow.

Btw, L.Acid was quite liberal with the veracity of his comments. It would not be a stretch to say that at least half of the words in the gallery contain some element of falsehood. More than a few are bold-faced lies.

CC finally received Pandora in the mail, and says that the tapes play fine. My fears about erased audio and other nastiness are gone. One more step toward a finished documentary.

While waiting for my flight back to the US at Incheon International Airport I found a little internet cafe. Checking my email I discovered this cryptic message from our contact at MFE:

Quothe the Raven:

Did you see the most recent Press Release? Did you get what’s on the table? No more ‘Mainframe’ per-se!

So the question is - if Mainframe didn’t exist anymore, who would the ReBoot fans complain to about finishing it etc.?

Yes kids (love you Hanako), Rainmaker has reached a deal to acquire the remaining outstanding shares of MFE’s stock. TechFinance.ca reports all.

Particularly telling are these figures: Working Oppurtunity Fund will dump its MFE shares at a loss of 4.1 million, and IDT has unloaded for 2.5m less than its original investment.

Check out Google Finance’s page on MFE here. At the time of this writing MFE’s shares have already dropped a cent since the press release.

Now, I realize that this has very little to do with us little people in front of the tube, but consider this statement from TechFinance:

Upon completion of the transaction, the businesses of Mainframe and Rainmaker Animation & Visual Effects will be fully integrated under the name “Rainmaker Entertainment Inc.”

Also this paragraph from WorldScreen.com:

Rainmaker Entertainment (REI) will be the largest animation and visual effects studio in Canada with over 300 employees. Warren Franklin, the president of Rainmaker, will be the CEO of REI; and Rick Mischel, the CEO of Mainframe, will be the president and COO of REI.

(Rick Mischel was the guy all tied up in telephone cords when Chris and I visited 2025 Broadway. Don’t complain to him.)

So really, who WILL we spam with our annoying “Please Please Make More” love/hate-notes? Not the future REI, surely. They are too big for us.

The answer is the same it has always been: television networks. Spam the networks. Leave the poor salarymen at the production facilities alone.

On a side note, when at 2025 Broadway it was revealed to the Innocents Abroad that the ONLY reason MFE had managed to stay afloat since season four was through the continuing interest of Mattel. The Barbie movies may have sparked more than a few spiteful comments in the fan community, but even though a pauper has asked for bread and butter he does not sneer at pumpernickle and lard.

Mud Bay Coffee, where I long planned the road trip, is still the same. They still roast their own beans, they still serve up delicious espresso, they still give me free refills even after I’ve been inside all day. I love this place. I want to hang a certain big painting over the door to the conference room, if I don’t first give it to some friends Up North.

There is a story about what has been happening since the trip ended. CC, as you all know, made his way back home after we got lost in Portland, and is currently gearing up to return to a heavy workload at school. I spent my last pennies building a box to house and edit the many hours of footage we took over the summer, which was more than a chore. Hard work builds character.

So do problems. The new set-up had problems capturing from the 30 tapes that comprise our minidv collection. After troubleshooting through four different capture utilities, switching between three different cameras, and even performing a test record on a portion of unused tape I determined that my camera screwed up the A/V sync while recording, messed it up enough to make it appear that there is no audio. I remember CC mentioning something about timecode problems while we were on the road, but I thought nothing of it.

I board a plane to Korea tomorrow afternoon. CC has graciously offered to attempt a capture operation of his own, for which I am very grateful, and toward that end I have mailed him all the tapes.

So there you have it. Right now the embryos of RoadBoot Brainchild are making their way through the stratosphere, patiently awaiting more cruel experiments at the hands of desperate amateurs. Before mailing the package I wrote “Pandora” on the box lid, just so that CC knows what he is getting into.

Darn it! I should have written “Hope” on a scrap of paper and put it underneath all the tapes! Ah, for lost opportunities.

Through the glass doors and up the elevator. Push the button “2″. Doors open and we see…

Corrugated metal. It’s like being inside a giant refrigerator with a “Mainframe Entertainment” sign embedded into the wall. At the end of a short hall is a big glass wall with a big glass door. There are ReBoot icons stenciled (or ground, I can’t recall) across the middle of the whole thing, and beyond it we can see a reception area with a desk and a corporate-looking person talking on the telephone. The door, we come to find, is locked, so we wait to be admitted.

Finally the corporate-looking person notices us and lets us in. She cheerfully chats with us for a bit while subtly extracting information about who we are and what we are doing. After getting that straightened out she sits us down on some couches while we wait for her to prepare two Non-Disclosure Agreements.

In the corner is a life-size Mike The TV with a real television in his face. He’s playing the Mainframe Ent. promotion reel. Against the wall is a locked glass case containing show merchandise displayed like trophies. After a short wait our guide, Virgil, walks into the room. We all shake hands, sign our forms, get our escort badges dished out, and he takes us around the facility. (I am convinced that it must have been built with confusion in mind, as I got lost more than once in the twisty corrugated passages of that place.)

In large open bays row upon row of graphic designers sat hunched over large touchscreens. In a huge office in the corner of the building the CEO was completely suspended in telephone cords; as fast as his assistants could unwrap him he became entangled in more. But the deals were being made, and business was moving along. We met him for a few moments.

Hello, how are you, we are fine, we’ll let you get back to work now. Good luck with those telephone cords.

Way in the back, past the tech department and past the ANCIENT PAL-based video gear was a closet that held all the master tapes. The original ReBoot episodes were on these tapes, and on other tapes our guide, Virgil, said there were things that never made it to air. One of the tech guys plugged one of the tapes into the machine, and we saw on the monitor the suspended head of Bob, saying lines not heard in any episode.

All over the facility hung original concept artwork. Bad Bob and Megatruck, the original image of the Tor… CC and I spent some time looking at things which to us represented cherished moments in our childhood.

In a tiny little closet ReBoot merchandising that never made it to the shelves sat in cardboard boxes. Our guide, Virgil, showed us loads of weird stuff, including (don’t laugh) hexadecimal baby socks. There were backpacks, posters, watches, (no toothbrushes unfortunately), bedsheets, and strange articles of clothing not designed for human beings. There were board games and picture puzzles, VHS cassette tapes of the first four episodes in Spanish, in Japanese…. These things were brought out of storage, paraded before our eyes (and camera) and put away again.

The kitchen area, we were told, was built with Dot’s Diner in mind. We kinda saw it, in the color schemes, et cetera…. but not really. The coolest part of the whole tour came when our guide, Virgil, drew back a sequined curtain to reveal the embalmed body of Mark Ralston in a Megabyte-themed coffin.

Actually, I lied about that last part. Nugget Man is alive and well, shoveling up minerals in Nowhere Ontario.

The best part of the tour REALLY came when Virgil led us into a tiny glass elevator full of buttons, which covered the walls and ceiling. CC pushed the big red one, and we zoomed up and up and up, bursting through the roof and past the cumulii, soaring higher and higher into the clear air where a flock of birds, whistling cheerful death dirges as they floated through their native environment, snapped their delicate necks against our glass walls.

After a nice dinner and water-side interview with BlaqueWidowe we decided to drive around lost for awhile, until the MerBz overheated and I was forced to vent the radiator at a gas station, which resuted in a violent expulsion of green coolant all over downtown. Two gallons of antifreeze and a quart of oil later we were back on the road, with a new map and some directions.

We pulled into a parking space next to 2025 West Broadway, a three-story building situated across the street from a grocery store. Very homey. Very dark, since it was close to midnight. We strolled around a bit and peered in through the windows. MFE was upstairs, on the second and third floors. At one time, when they were huge, they had occupied the entire building.

We drove back downtown and secured the last room in the Vancouver Hotel. Checking my email I saw that I had been instructed to call our contact in the morning, but not before googling the news. We slept.

The news was pretty spectacular. Three hours before we awoke (no doubt due to time differences across the continent), Rainmaker told the press that they had agreed to purchase IDT Ent. Inc.’s stock in MFE. At the time of this writing the deal still has a weekend to go before closing, but as far as I understand it Rainmaker intends to acquire the rest of MFE later on this year, effectually merging the two companies.

Joxer was surprised when I mentioned the merger in an email, but that came later. Directly after calling MFE we threw our stuff in the car and hoofed it back uptown, parking in the grocery store lot. A few camera adustments, some quibling about tapes and batteries, a last check in the mirror….. lock the door.

We sauntered across the street in slow motion, turning out our toes at a 40 degree angle. Our shoulders were square and our arms were hanging naturally. You could have dropped a plumb line from our chests to our shoelaces. A passing bevy of schoolgirls sighed in unison, and several windows broke, while a flock of birds momentarily whistled our death dirge obscured the sun. A colorful hardhat came flipping up from an open manhole, as the baritone strains of a cheery work tune floated into the bright morning something something anything but air.

CC slapped me in the face. “Snap out of it!” he hissed. “You can’t do this to me now! I need you HERE!”

“Oh, right,” I mumbled. “…..where are we?”

He sighed. “The parking lot. Here carry the camera bag.”

I took the bag and looked across the street. 2025 West Broadway looked a lot bigger in the daytime. Turning back to the car I watched CC wrestle a fresh tape into the camera. Across the parking lot a bunch of schoolgirls were pointing and giggling, and there were some nasty birds up on a powerline shrilling out some avian funeral march.

“We got batteries?” I asked.

“I can’t find the third one” CC said, banging around in the back seat.

“Yeah, I we left it at Rebootmaster’s.”

“Oh.” He pulled out of the car. “Then I guess we’re all set.”

I locked the door, and together we waited at the corner for the light to change.

Color. What color is sprite blood? Is it the glowing energy seen coming from Matrix’s arm when he donates to AndrAIa? Is it the dark stuff seen when Dot is abducted by the web creature? This debate is years old.

Google Sprite Blood

According to Joxer, sprite blood corresponds to the color of the sprite’s skin. Dot’s blood is green, Bob’s is blue, Ray’s is yellow.