Hat Shrapnel

Reboot: A Shadow of Things to Come

 

I consider it an immense shame that most of the world has not been exposed to a great computer-animated show of the 90’s called Reboot.  This was an amazing program that revolved around the lives of ‘people’ whose world existed entirely within a network of computers.  I’m not sure of the mechanics of this world… whether they exist when the computer that housed their city was off, whether they lived on the hard drive, or if they were purely electronic entities, but I do know that they routinely participated in computer games as the sprites against the evil and mysterious ‘user’.

 

This is what awesome looked like in the 90’s.

 

What made the show so great, however, was not the premise.  Rather, it was the way the show evolved over time.  Here’s a synopsis of a typical plotline for an episode in the first season:

It’s little Enzo’s birthday and his sister, Dot, and the ‘guardian’ for the system in which they live, Bob, are trying to put together a giant surprise party.  Even Enzo’s dog, Frisket, is doing his part to prepare for the celebration.  Attracted by all of the activity, the ruthless tyrant virus, Megabyte, crashes the party with his violent minions.  With most of the citizens of the entire system at his mercy, Megabyte forces the populace to listen to him play a heavy-metal riff on his giant, tweaked-out electric guitar.  Bob, who cannot let Megabyte get away with this, grabs his own guitar and joins Megabyte in a hair-band style guitar duel.  After the last few notes of the song die down, Megabte gives his guitar to Enzo as a present and promptly leaves.

Awwww.

 

 

Now here’s a synopsis of a typical plotline from season three of Reboot:

Bob has been locked out of the system by Megabyte in the heat of a battle that has claimed the lives of most of the citizens of the system, leaving Dot and Enzo to defend the remnant of the system from the virus.  Meanwhile, Enzo also has to take Bob’s place in the games to prevent the ‘user’ from destroying what’s left of the system.  Having bad luck in the games, Frisket is shot in the face at close range by a user with a shotgun (barely surviving) and Enzo loses his eye in another game.  He eventually loses a game and is ejected from the system.  He spends years as a renegade traveling through the games hopping from one system to another trying to find his way home, which has become a dystopian, hellish nightmare world dominated and almost obliterated by Megabyte.  In his travels he grows hard, angry, and bitter which drives an emotional wedge between him and everyone he used to love, including his sister, his only living family, when he finally finds home. The battle is now less focused on defeating the bad guys and more on the question “Is it worth going on?”

 

And this is what Armageddon looked like in the 90’s.

 

Wow.

 

I like to think that Hat Shrapnel will take a similar path over time.  Today I’m writing funny observations about the physics of toast, but as I grow angry and bitter at the world, I will start getting darker and darker until I post my manifesto here and then proceed to systematically wipe out all of mankind.