Here’s Our First Look at the Reboot of ‘Reboot’

It's been 23 years (my god) since ReBoot, a Canadian kids' show about sentient mainframe guardians, blessed the airwaves. As the first fully computer generated series ever, it broke new ground, yet today its brightly colored Tron-lite world seems woefully antiquated. In 2015, it was announced the series would be receiving a literal reboot, and now we're getting our first look at it.

For starters, the new show, called ReBoot: The Guardian Code, is a live-action remake geared toward "modern, tech savvy audiences." Okayyyyy. Its 26 episodes will follow four teenagers (the promo shows five), who "discover that they've been selected to become the Next-Generation Guardians of cyberspace."

Obviously, our brightly colored friends, Bob, Enzo, and Dot Matrix, are no longer. What's also different in The Guardian Code is that the "users" are now the protagonists—not the unseen, universe-controlling beings they were in the original. Only one Mainframe Guardian, "VERA," has been written to help the main characters battle cyberattacks.

Here's the plot synopsis:

After playing the multiplayer Cyber Guardians video game together, four teenagers are recruited by V.E.R.A (Hannah Vandenbygaart, Bruno & Boots: Go Jump in the Pool!), the Virtual Evolutionary Recombinant Avatar, to fulfill their mandate to mend and defend cyberspace. Austin (Ty Wood, The Haunting in Connecticut), Tamra (Sydney Scotia, Some Assembly Required), Parker (Ajay Parikh-Friese, Mr. Young), and Trey (Gabriel Darku, Shadowhunters: The Mortal Instruments) now must protect cyberspace from threats that pose true consequences to both the virtual and real world. It's more than these kids expected when they started at Alan Turing High. Way more.

We don't know much about the characters, other than what we saw in a casting call last year. Producers were looking for actors to play a skater, a "social media maven," a "techno-geek," and a jock (lol). VERA, who also happens to be "3D bioprinted as a 15-year-old girl," was intended to be Asian, because you can't have a tech show without the tech stereotypes, apparently.

When The Verge spoke to The Guardian Code's executive producer, Michael Hefferon, last year, he was concerned about the show synchronizing with today's technology. His choice to make the series a live-action one stemmed from wanting to make its characters interact with devices, instead of just exist inside them.

"The power of the game engine's capabilities to create vast cyberspace settings along with AI…for dynamic secondary animation fused with live action, will deliver a truly unique and engaging experience for viewers," Hefferon said today. "As groundbreaking as the original ReBoot was being the first ever CG animated series, ReBoot: The Guardian Code takes it to a whole new level."

I'm cautiously optimistic about The Guardian Code's ability to awaken life into code, programs, and hardware. Right now, the show just seems to focus on social media-savvy teens. It sounds preachy, rather than playful. And I'm sorry, but if it doesn't have a character named "Nullzilla," I'm really not that interested.