1x11 - Talent Night

Written by: Lane Raichert
Story by: Gavin Blair, Phil Mitchell, Ian Pearson

Fancy guitar work by a guy local to Vancouver
Song "You're Alphanumeric" written by Robert Buckley

Note: YTV listed this as "Talent Night in Hell", although the episode itself says "Talent Night". In the Canadian version, the YTV robot shows up. In the US, the big red robot does not have a logo on its chest.

Synopsis
Dot and Bob have a surprise birthday party planned for Enzo. With all the commotion going on, Megabyte wants to get into the act.

Story
The story opens with Bob and Enzo playing a game against a couple of binomes. "You're smoke" says Enzo. "In your dreams, birthday boy", replies Bob. (This scene is included in "The Recording Session #2", a QuickTime movie.) The game ends in a four-way tie. Enzo goes on ahead while Bob checks up on Dot. Dot is in the middle of auditioning acts for the surprise party she is holding for Enzo's birthday.

Things are not going well. Most of the acts are awful, and the interesting ones are nixed by Miss Emma Fee, the Prog Sensor. Dot tells Bob to keep Enzo busy until 24:50. The acts being auditioned are:

* "the fabulous, uh, acrobat guys". The One with its hair in an Afro style is launched into the stratosphere.
(His comment to this is something like "oo, er", and background is a great shot of Mainframe's Baudway sector.)
* A Zero that bugs its eyes and falls to pieces.
* The Dires, Sal and Harv, rather primative looking characters that Mike gleefully smashes.
* Johnny O'Binome, who does a joke of nothing but "1" and "0".
* Live Null Juggling (clown on red unicycle treats nulls as if they were balloons and twists them into funny shapes).
* Phong singing "Unforgettable" and forgetting the unforgettable words.
* Small-Town Binomes singing "B.S.'n'P." (to the tune of the Village People's "Y.M.C.A"). "It's fun to play in a non-violent way".
* The Primatives: a blue sphere, a green cube, and a red cone. (At the end, the cube rotates to a diamond shape,
the cone flattens to a triangle covering the top half of the diamond, and the sphere becomes a circle behind them.
They form a ReBoot icon.)
* Captain Quirk, doing William Shatner's rendition of "Rocket Man".
* One of Megabyte's viral binome's doing break dancing and moonwalking.

Megabyte notices the activity and tries to get information out of Bob (who throws Enzo into the goal of a rocket-pack game to keep Enzo from hearing about the secret activity). MB sends some of his incompetent spies to check out the commotion around Dot's Diner. They end up being part of the act. MB is rather pleased to hear that all those people will be gathered in one place - he decides to put into action "plan code 214".

Meanwhile, Bob takes Enzo to the Data Slides in the Beverly Hills sector. Enzo is tired and hungry, and wants to go back to the Diner. As he takes off on his zip-board, the guy with the Afro comes down, and Bob says "oo, er!"

[robot] The street near the Diner is filled with just about every single vehicle in Mainframe. (Some of these are shown in Alliance's Motor Pool, others can be found by Parsing Mainframe's Database; look for the Data Crane.) Enzo wanders backstage, past the fat Elvis, past the water-cooler sprite (who is speaking Robby the Robot's line from the movie Forbidden Planet: "would 64 gallons be sufficient"), past the big red robot, and on to the stage.

Everybody is there, and is counting down the time left. Right at zero, sparklies start at Enzo's feet, and he gets a new outfit. His shirt says 10 instead of 01. Dot comes out in a torch-singer outfit and performs "You're Alphanumeric" to a slack-jawed Bob and Enzo.

The fat Elvis gets ready for Aloha from Mainframe via Satellite, but gets flattened when Megabyte crashes the party (literally). Two A.B.C.s (Armored Binome Carriers) transform into giant speakers, and Megabyte comes out of a coffin held up by skeleton hands. (Hack and Slash are his drummers.) He pulls out a guitar, and turns the volume up to eleven.

Bob counters by telling Glitch to transform into a BFG (Big Fancy Guitar). The two men perform a wild guitar duet. At the end, MB gives his guitar to Enzo, and says "I've always wanted to do that". As MB's gigantic armored limo leaves, Mike the TV tells the crowd "Ladies and gentlemen, Megabyte has left the building". (Fat Elvis pops up and looks astounded.)

References
* "Talent Night in Hell" was the working title.
* The cars in the opening game are designed to look like floor tile pullers; two suction cups on a handle, used to pull up
2-foot by 2-foot squares to get to the cables under the equipment in a computer room.
* Binome Joke: "1010011011101110111001101111001110101100001100101110011101" Assuming A=1, B=10, C=11...Z=11010,
Johnny O'Binome says:

10100 1 1011 101 1101 11001 10111 1001 110 101
T A K E M Y W I F E
10000 1100 101 1 10011 101
P L E A S E

* The co-creators of ReBoot are always being refered to as "the people who did the Money For Nothing music video for the Dire Straits.
Gavin Blair said they were sick of having only that reference and wanted to show their displeasure by having the Dires get
clobbered on stage.
* William Shatner, aka Captain Kirk, recorded an album including his rendition of "Rocket Man" as a serious musical number during the psychedelic '60's. He was apparently unaware that everyone else in the music industry considered this to be a joke.
* "Live Null Juggling" appears to be a reference to "Live Cat Juggling" in Steve Martin's movie The Jerk.
* The clown on a unicycle is an homage to John Lasseter's computer animated short film "Red's Dream".
* The mock documentary film "This is Spinal Tap" has a guitar player who is very proud that the knob on his amplifier does not stop at ten, "it goes to eleven!".
* In the PC game "Doom", a BFG-9000 is a very desirable weapon.
* At the end of Prestley's concerts, the announcer would say, "ladies and gentlemen, Elvis has left the building" to convince people to leave.

The binome joke, Dot's singing and the guitar duel from this episode are on the CD-ROM that comes with the action figures.
Did You Notice
(See also the quotes for episode 201)

* This episode shows the Data Slide in the Beverly Hills sector. A second Data Slide just like it gets created in "Identity Crisis, part 2".
* Dot says "I like the red, not the blue" when picking out her dress.
* Small town = Village, Binomes = People.
* The sound of old Star Trek sliding doors as Captain Quirk's toupee falls.
* Dot's outfit is very similar to the dress worn by Marilyn Monroe when she sang "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" to John F. Kennedy.
* There is no concensus as to which rock star Megabyte is imitating. Could be Megadeath, Meatloaf, or any one of several other bands.
One fan says "Poison" (based onf the glowing green highlights).
* The guitar duel matches the musical style of one at the end of the movie Crossroads.
* Someone said they saw Megabyte missing his green chest logo during his guitar solo on the first showing of the Canadian version.
(In Canada, the big red robot has "YTV" on its chest. The version shown on ABC does not have "YTV".) The missing logo is there
on the reruns; BLT has been known to fix mistakes between the first showing and the first repeat.
* Piano player could be Liberacci.
* In the audience, there are about four binomes repeated, and in a few scenes they made a mistake and put about twenty
"yellow eyelass" binomes in a small group and twenty "Touques" together too.