While I can’t say that I never noticed the ABCs joke at the time, I will admit to laughing in retrospect. Reboot was a series that I enjoyed a lot as a kid, one that I always lamented its exit. Just about any chance as a kid, I caught the reruns when I could.

Can’t say that I ever imagined it would face such insanity. Kids shows kind of cleaned up by the 90s, I guess. But when you get to the point that you can’t even say the word hockey, I have to wonder what the hell the censors were thinking. I always assumed that Dot was designed that way, but this video made me glad that they never touched Hex, because Hex was cool (and perhaps a mixture of sweet and psychotic wrapped up in a multiple personality disorder).

While the game cubes that occasionally loaded lead to references to films targeted at adult audiences, such as Mad Max and Evil Dead, the show really wasn’t that bad. Heck, far worse than Reboot certainly aired. Having played the PlayStation game they reference, I would say that it wasn’t very violent or dark compared to many games on the platform at the time but I digress.

Which also makes me remember eons ago when G.I. Joe had a brief rerun on Cartoon Network, allowing me to revisit the series when I was a teenager. It’s a series that I tend to think of as a good hallmark for the era that I grew up in. Episodes of G.I. Joe often involved considerable violence, like I never thought about it as a little boy but at a teenager it was more like wow, how can no one die or be seriously hurt with this much action!? Another aspect that I often look back upon is that cartoons of that era often ended with some kind of moral story or positive advice woven into the plot or as ancillary matter, or as Flint and company used to say, “And knowing is half the battle!”

By contrast, kids shows that came out later in my childhood or afterwards tended to gravitate towards either pumping you full of facts and figures like a text book, or may have intentionally be aimed at rotting your brain. Reboot on the other hand was a show that entertained me a lot as a kid, and that I always found a fascinating concept–it was a fairly good choice of McGuffin having games “Drop” on city blocks, and surprisingly original. While the notion of being “Good” may have been woven into it, often times it focused more on the adventure.