Before Toy Story… There was ReBoot

TL;DR

ReBoot (1994) was the world's first fully computer-animated TV show, and fans just finished rescuing its original master tapes from permanent decay.

Key Points

• 1.ReBoot was created by Canadian studio Mainframe Entertainment in 1994, predating Toy Story by a full year, but poor distribution and lost master tapes left it obscure for decades
• 2.The only readable versions existed on a pirated Russian DVD; the original D1 tapes required machines so rare that finding working ones took a desperate Facebook post and a German auction
• 3.D1 tape decks are 250 lb behemoths costing ~$330,000 new, housing 6–7 Intel 80186 processors on an internal Ethernet network, recording fully uncompressed digital video with no codec
• 4.The team paid $15,000 for three broken D1 decks, then spent months diagnosing a brake failure misread as a clock signal error, losing significant time before discovering the root cause
• 5.A retired German technician had two brand-new, never-used replacement tape heads worth $8,000 in his garage — a last-minute find, as the remaining parts were sold off within weeks
• 6.Kioxia SSDs replaced slow spinning hard drives, boosting the editing pipeline from 7 FPS to 25–35 FPS in real time, saving hundreds of hours across 260 tapes (47 episodes plus bonus content)
• 7.The final tape was captured on camera with ReBoot co-creator Gavin Blair present; the project preserved all episodes at their original quality for the first time in 30 years