As ReBoot turns 30, super fans launch a documentary on the groundbreaking Canadian CGI cartoon

On September 10, 1994, a Vancouver animation company called Mainframe Studios made history when the first episode of the world's first fully computer-animated cartoon, ReBoot, aired.

The show became a made-in-Canada hit, drawing in fans at home, then abroad with airings in countries like the U.K. and Germany, and launching a toy line, a tie-in video game and even two amusement rides. Among those fans were a young girl from Vancouver whose mother took her on a visit to Mainframe Studios, and a little boy from Langley B.C., who wrote a letter to the studio with the help of his mother.

Those two young children, Raquel Lin and Jacob Weldon, grew up with the show through the 1990s, and eventually met in person at Vancouver's Anime Evolution convention in 2009. Lin was cosplaying as Dot Matrix, one of the lead characters from the show, who she credits with helping inspire her to pursue a career in business administration.

"I didn't have time to take pictures, because everyone was taking pictures of me," says Lin. "For years, I was known as Dot in Vancouver. I always looked up to Dot, who is a powerhouse of a woman. She is a businesswoman."

From their first meeting, Lin and Weldon's friendship was anchored by their shared interest in ReBoot, which also included online forum posts and re-watches. A decade later, their shared passion led them to pursue the ultimate fan project: to make the definitive ReBoot documentary.

"It was two years ago that Raquel was doing another binge session of the show, and messaged me about it," says  Weldon.

"Me and Raquel have been privy to so many wild stories about the origin of the show."

Many of those wild stories came from Gavin Blair, one of the co-creators of ReBoot, who they also met at Anime Evolution in 2009.

"They were OG fans back in the day … two of the biggest OG fans I know of," says Blair. "I'd met them at multiple conventions, and now we're actually just friends in real life. They're steeped in the lore and the technology."

The budding documentarians initially planned to just interview Blair, but they soon realized they had access to other people involved in ReBoot, like co-creator Ian Pearson and producer Chris Brough, who were also in Vancouver. Lin and Weldon pitched their growing documentary to Telus StoryHive, who offered them funding, provided they expanded the planned feature film to a minimum six-episode series.

The documentary series, titled ReBoot ReWind, ended up being eight episodes, with a runtime of over six hours.

"We ended up adding two extra episodes because there was stuff about the toys, the video games and ride films we wanted to tell, and we felt like the amount of voice talent that we interviewed deserved their own episode," says Weldon.

Between voice talent, concept artists, production staff, Mainframe Studios' office staff and more, Weldon and Lin conducted interviews with 50 different people involved in ReBoot, amassing over 60 hours of raw footage.

As production on ReBoot ReWind kicked off in 2022, Lin and Weldon soon discovered they had another challenge on their hands: ReBoot had been recorded to a master tape format that is no longer in use today.

That format was called "D1," says Blair, which was state-of-the-art at the time.

"On D1 tape, [the episodes] were digital, so they were as perfect on the D1 as they were on our monitors," says Blair.

"After that, then you have to standards convert it and bump it down and send it off to networks for broadcast, so it's going down and down in generation and getting that quality loss. By the time it gets broadcast, it looks like 1994 TV. It looks like crap, basically."

When Lin and Weldon discovered that Mainframe Studios was still in possession of the original D1 master tapes, they realized they had an opportunity to retrieve the original footage in near-lossless quality. The only problem was that they needed to find a way to play the tapes in the first place. Their solution was to turn to the online fanbase to find a D1 player.

"That was the first thing that we posted online that blew up," says Weldon. "It went crazy. We were getting messages from all over the world, trying to help out."

In April, the online call yielded results when the team were alerted to three D1 players on a German auction site. In collaboration with several fans, some of whom were involved in digital preservation efforts, they shipped the machines to Canada. Lin and Weldon handed off the tapes to Mark Westhaver of Disappearing Inc. to begin retrieving the D1 footage and transferring it to modern digital storage, with Mainframe Studios' blessing.

That work is still underway, but on September 10, in celebration of the 30th anniversary of the show, Mainframe published "The Tearing," ReBoot's first episode, using a remaster from the D1 tapes, to their YouTube channel.

For Lin and Weldon, the fact they've helped renew interest in the show, with a preservation effort now underway, is the perfect cap to their documentary journey.

"There's so many people that follow us that are starting to show pictures of themselves showing ReBoot to their kids," says Lin.

"That is how you tell that a show transcends generations. It meant so much to people."

ReBoot ReWind will be released on Telus Storyhive starting September 24. Special advance screenings have already been held in Vancouver and other cities, with further screenings planned at cities across Canada in October.

For Blair, it's the ultimate tribute to a piece of Canadian and animation history.

"I think what we did was something special and something historic," says Blair.

"We made history in our own little way here in our little corner of the world. And that story should be recorded for people to look at."