For the benefit of their guest, Gavin Blair and Phil Mitchell have temporarily abandoned their workplace - a labyrinth of messy offices outfitted with millions of dollars worth of high tech machines - and are happily drinking ale at a Vancouver seafood restaurant. Blair, who is neither tall nor fat but somehow manages to come across as a hulking Boy Scout in his shorts and Doc Martens, is the most outspoken of ReBoot's top animators. With his small round glasses and mischievous smile, he's almost a dead ringer for XTC's front man, Andy Partridge. In the rock star look-alike department, Mitchell would do a good job passing for former member Bob Mould. There's an intensity about him that makes it easy to picture him banging out dissonant guitar chords with abandon, though in reality Mitchell is more likely to be found hunched over a computer screen, tweaking an animated character's features to perfection. Like Blair, he received top honors for the computer-animated commercials he made during the London part of his career. We're soon joined by the third member of the ReBoot triumvirate, Ian Pearson, who appears to be the most businesslike of the bunch. Then again, he's hardly your average corporate drone. His heavy Geordie accent - Pearson is from Sunderland in the northeast of England - sets him apart from the crowd. In a display of his assimilation into North American culture, Pearson wears a baseball cap. The reason the ReBoot team ended up in Vancouver, in early 1993, is simple: money. Importing pricey computer workstations and high-end video equipment to England to start up the show was not an option. The gear would have been twice as expensive as in North America, after shipping and  middlemen markups. "And an office building in London similar to the one we have here - forget it," says Blair. "You're talking millions of pounds." The team didn't want to move to the obvious alternative, Los Angeles. What was the point of giving up one smog-filled metropolis for another?

Then a colleague suggested Vancouver, and Pearson went on a reconnaissance mission. Recalls Blair: "Phil and I got this phone call in the middle of the night from a very drunk Ian: 'Oooooh Vancouver is beautiful, you've got to come and see it.' So we all packed our bags and came here, despite the fact that back in England everyone thought we were insane. After all, Canada was just for mounties and polar bears."

What the animators found was a great place to do business: a bustling, international creative community - not to mention a government that gives substantial tax breaks to foreign businesses that provide employment. Grant money and other subsidies for artists have long been part of Canada's cultural fabric, and the animation business, among others, has been allowed to experiment and expand as a result. Vancouver, thanks to its agreeable weather and its relatively close proximity to Hollywood and Silicon Valley, has found itself playing host to a growing movie and animation scene.

Through the early 1990s, money had been very much on the team members' minds. "You can't just knock out a pilot for a computer-generated series, and then if people like the pilot, you do the show," Blair says. "Because to buy all the gear, build all the models, all the characters, and all the sets to do a pilot - that's an enormous investment. You've got to do 13 episodes or none. Also, the people we asked to sink millions of dollars into the project were a bit jittery because they weren't sure we could do it. We couldn't prove we were up to the job because nobody had ever done something like this before. So for them, it was a big leap. A huge gamble."

In 1993, ABC TV said yes. So did YTV in Canada, as well as Limelight, an international film and video production company. The Brits were in business, but in some ways, their troubles seemed to have just begun.

Battling a Hexadecimal

Now the ReBoot team had to deliver. Their inexperience showed when, well into production of the first script, they discovered it was about 100 percent too long and they were forced to make cuts that didn't help the clarity of the plot. The whole first season, they say now, was too frenetic, too fast-paced. "We wanted to put everything into the first shows," Blair says. "We had this huge cast of characters. We had three heroes, two villains, their sidekicks, plus all the ancillary characters. We had a city to explore. These days, we've got a better handle on what we're doing. So we have 21-page scripts instead of 44-page ones, and we don't try to do too much in any one show." Another problem that had to be overcome was ABC. The network's own internal Broadcast Standards and Practices unit (BSP) raised objections to many a ReBoot script. Few of those admonitions carried much merit and some defied common sense, according to the show's creators. (The people at BSP and ABC's public relations department repeatedly declined to talk to Wired.) "We can generally see the logic to what BSP is trying to do," says Blair. "If you have a kid run through a plate-glass window on TV and he's OK, you might find that actual little kids start running through plate-glass windows thinking they'll be all right. It can't hurt to have someone point that out to you so you'll be extra careful and responsible."

But ABC's disapproval focused mainly on sexiness and interpersonal violence. The network was under the gun. Just weeks after it agreed to finance and air ReBoot, one of the network's executives told Congress that ABC proposed to create a safe haven for children on Saturday morning. The fact that Disney later acquired ABC didn't do anything to soothe the ReBoot creators' nerves. "We'd just sold ABC an action adventure show, and now we couldn't even have a punch-up because that was violence," says Blair. "Also, we couldn't have jeopardy. Meaning we couldn't end an act with Bob falling off a cliff and him yelling 'Aaaaahh' as we cut to a commercial - because that's jeopardy, and we'd upset the kiddies."

The ReBoot team was particularly baffled by the directives it received concerning sexual content. It's a safe bet that even dirty-minded lechers would not find much titillation in ReBoot, but ABC, apparently, begged to differ. BSP insisted that Dot's shapely figure be toned down. Never a particularly large-breasted character to begin with and never one to expose much cleavage, Dot's chest had to be completely desexed. "So she acquired this longish horizontal lump on the front of her torso," muses Blair. "Her breasts sort of come out at the side and then go straight across the front without a hint that there are two of them." The animators started merrily referring to this peculiar accoutrement as Dot's monobreast.

It wasn't always so funny. When Dot, for once dressed in a long, glamorous gown, sang to her kid brother on his birthday, the script called for her to sashay over, wink, and give him a sisterly kiss on the chin. ABC wouldn't hear of it. "It was obviously  incest," Blair says BSP told him. "We were implying an incestuous relationship between brother and sister." Pearson pipes up, and his Geordie accent is suddenly steely. "I can't honestly get my mind to think in those terms. I think that's one of the sickest  things I've heard. Those people, how do they sleep at night?"

Things didn't get any better when, according to Blair, BSP outlawed the word hockey on the grounds that it's apparently slang for a mixture of semen, urine, and feces. Next they outlawed the term wuss because it is not just "a weak, cowardly, or  ineffectual person," as the dictionary might have you believe, but a vulgar word meaning "wet pussy" - or so BSP claimed.

There was not much love lost between the ReBoot team and ABC when they parted company after just two seasons. Thankfully, the fans didn't suffer. More than 100 independent TV stations throughout the United States subsequently purchased the right to show the series. (For a list, see www.inwap.com/reboot/Claster.html.)

Pearson says that there's an upside to the separation from ABC; ReBoot has started to fulfill its potential. "I think the third season is blowing the first two out of the water. We haven't gone hideously violent or anything like that - it's just more action-filled and fun-filled."

And, no doubt to the horror of a handful of moral guardians, Dot's monobreast is now in stereo.