Video

[Video] Wish List - Reboot on Blu-ray

By Stone ⋅ October 26, 2009 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

There were a lot of misstep’s in the early days of the TV to DVD goldrush. The Muppet Show got a bizarre series of “best of’s”, due to both rights issues and the tentative nature of DVD offerings at that time. Farscape was another prime example (funny that they both involve the Henson Co.?) , where semi season’s were offered in odd spurts at inflated prices. Some things have been re-issued; proper, fuzzy covered full season’s of The Muppet Show, and now Farscape as a complete boxed series comes out Nov 19th (sadly not on Blu-ray).

So here’s my wish-list offering this month. REBOOT!

I loved this show! Being a Canadian, I may have a special point of pride with this Canadian made show. It has pop culture references galore, all sorts of computer jokes, it’s action packed AND smart and the evolution of it’s animation quality is fun to watch. To slip in a geek moment, the best part of this show is that it is “self-aware”. While it draws on pop culture and classic story telling styles, it is very self contained and really draws you in because of that. It may be one of the few times I really felt like I was watching a NEW world, not just a slightly different version of ours or a variation on one of the classic archtype worlds. And for the god’s sake, the finale was a recap musical stage play.

Yes, it was heavy handed in it’s plots and groan worthy at times, but these are the things that made it great; it was such an amalgam of ideas that it just ran riot with it’s storytelling. It is packed, jam packed with things every minute of every episode and oscillates between fart jokes and existential themes with ease and variety.
The VHS and DVD releases of this show have been sporadic and unsatisfying at best, with a series of oddball distributions in the US and overseas which may have kept it from ever really hitting it big, despite being the first fully computer animated series.

But with continued fan interest, a webcomic and plans to make three features, you would think someone might want to generate some extra attention and profit at this point. And a company that has been so “plugged in” as Mainframe Entertainment/Rainmaker Animation, the opportunities to use Blu-ray’s online interaction capabilities seems like a no brainer, let alone the possibility of how good this all-CGI series could be made to look if it were re-rendered in HD.

Rainmaker is aware of how much fans want a boxed set, but it can’t hurt to remind them and maybe tell them what you think of Blu-Ray.

Tags: Animation, Anime, Blu-ray, bluray, bob, Canada, CGI, dot matrix, enzo, farscape, gigabyte, hack and slash, hexadecimal, Jim Henson, mainframe entertainment, megabyte, rainmaker animation, reboot, The Muppet Show