This is one of the rare times we’re going to link you to a BuzzFeed page, but we have good reason today. The normally fluffy site has published a detailed history of Mainframe Studios — one of the world’s premiere computer animation factories. Starting with the Dire Straits’ Money For Nothing video in the mid-80’s and working upward with other small projects, their goal was to produce the world’s first CGI TV series, no matter how long it took.
In 1994 they would pull this off with the introduction of ReBoot. The article provides an overview of Mainframe’s history as a whole and doesn’t go into detail on — or even mention — things like the studio’s fallout with ABC and how exactly they gathered the money to make a third season that had no guarantee of airing anywhere outside Canada (to my knowledge, this story has never been told). There is some new info on the production of Season One, but only because Mainframe was just cutting its teeth at the time.
For ReBoot’s third episode, “The Medusa Bug,” a rogue program turned nearly everyone in the city of Mainframe to stone. “Of course,” Blair recalled, “if everybody gets turned to stone, there’s no animation.” In reality, this was just a clever cost-saving measure disguised as a plot twist.
It was actually the fourth episode, and it was followed by a hiatus of two months because the studio had fallen behind on its schedule and was fighting to catch up. During that period, ReBoot was replaced with Superhuman Samurai Syber Squad while short thirty-second spots about a second Medusa Bug played out to remind people the young show still existed. Those spots are now excessively rare, and could not be tracked down by Shout Factory for the DVD set.
Mainframe had ambitions of expanding to features, but in the biggest blunder of its brief existence, turned down an offer from DreamWorks to animate the movie Shrek. It was a pride kind of thing — they wanted their first movie to be their own idea, but they could never find the funding or the time. Ultimately all the founders of Mainframe would leave and the studio would be bought out, turning into Rainmaker Entertainment (which exists to this day).
