Pyrate News

By: Martin Rand, III
Date: Ocotber 23, 2011

Recently, my friend on Facebook posted a link on my page to a video mash-up of the great TV shows from the 90s. Majority of the shows I did watched as a kid; but I couldn't help but notice, some of the other shows I grew up watching wasn't included in the video.

Reboot was one of my favorite shows as a kid. Unfortunately, so many others missed out.

Although, I shouldn't be surprised. Whenever I mentioned these shows with my friends during those "shows we used to watch as kids conversations," they never had a clue about what I was talking about. They looked at me with puzzled faces, like I just asked them to explain E=MC2.

But, I still don't understand. These shows were on all the channels we watched as kids: Kids WB, Nickelodeon and ABC Kids.

Here are five shows I watched but no one else did (click on the title to see the intro to the show):

• Reboot
  This show takes place entirely in a computer. What I loved most about the show were the names of the characters. They were all computer related, with the exception of the main character whose name was Bob. Huh? But, Bob, Dot and Enzo battled Megabyte (a computer virus in Mainframe). Whenever the user inserted a game, a purple square would come down on Mainframe and they could jump in the game and start battling each other.

• Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad
  Another computer based show. The show was about a boy named Sam who could get transported into his computer. When Sam is in the computer world, he becomes Servo, a cypertronic suit that would battle the evil Kilokahn. It was very similar to Power Rangers in style, but I loved this show. I even had the Servo action figure.

• Beast Wars: Transformers
  This show was exactly like the regular "Transformers." The names were similar, with a few tweaks here and there. For instance, the leader of the Maximals (the Autobots of BW) name is Optimus Primal, instead of Optimus Prime. I recently watched the entire series and it was a much deeper show than I could've imagined as a kid. It dealt with issues like aliens putting humans on Earth and giving them technology to help them survive.

• Max Steel
  This was a definite classic for me. This show was about a teenager who gets covered in some kind of green ooze substance. The ooze gives him superpowers and he uses them to fight terrorists for his dad who's in charge of spy agency. This show was a lot of fun with action throughout each episode. There was even a game for "Max Steel," which was one of my favorite games to play on Sega Dreamcast. How did people not know about this show?

• Animorphs
  This show was based on a book series of the same name. A group of kids meet an alien and the alien gives them the power to change into the first animal they contact. With this power, they would have to fight evil aliens which were spreading around the world. This show was on Nickelodeon so I'm surprise more people didn't watch it.

I have tried to figure out why I seem to be the only one of my friends who watched these shows. Maybe it was the style of the shows. All the shows were mostly made using CGI. With the exception of Syber-Squad (which used human actors but when they transferred into the computer, they used CGI) and "Animorphs"(which also used human actors except when they were morphing into animals).

TV shows using CGI wasn't as common or popular when I was a kid as it is today. But I loved shows like that because they were different than anything else on TV visually.

Or, maybe it's because they didn't stay on the air long enough. Other than "Reboot," none of the shows lasted longer than two years. People probably just didn't get enough time to get into the shows. The odds of me or anyone else catching these shows on TV had to be pretty slim.

Whatever the reason, I seem to have been on an island all by myself with these shows. Hopefully, now when I mention them, people won't look at me like I'm crazy.