Behold, The Beast!
I recently re-watched the entire run of Mainframe’s Shadow Raiders (1998–99). It was as exciting and inventive as I remembered and, 25 years after its debut, is re-confirmed as one of my all-time favourite science fiction television series. Mainframe was a Canadian computer graphics and animation production company, responsible for the ground-breaking video for the 1985 Dire Straits single, Money For Nothing, and for the first fully CGI television series, ReBoot. They were also responsible for bringing the series of far-better-than-they-have-to-be Barbie movies to the screen — Island Princess (2007) being a favourite of mine — developing into Rainmaker Entertainment Inc, before reverting to the Mainframe brand and partnering with several major media companies that now include Netflix, Mattel, Sony, Dreamworks, and Nickelodeon. The following interview feature was first published in 1999 and appears here with a few small revisions.
War Planets: Shadow Raiders — a show for kids right? If being a kid means enjoying imaginative and inventive stories, serious plot developments, convincing characterisation, gorgeous CGI art, dynamic action sequences and an on-going and involving arc — well, yeah, it’s kid stuff…
Shadow Raiders is just one of an array of spectacular series created entirely from…
