Daemon Rising

### Starring the Voices of

Sharon Alexander, Giacomo Baessato, Kathleen Barr, Garry Chalk, Ian Corlett, Colombe Demers, Paul Dobson, Michael Donovan, Danny McKinnon, Scott McNeil, Shirley Millner, Richard Newman, Stevie Vallance, Dale Wilson

### Game(s)

"Austin Powers" Game (title unknown; User name: Morris Might)

"Daemon Rising" is the first episode of Season 4 of *ReBoot*, the first episode of the movie/arc *Daemon Rising*, and the fortieth episode overall. It originally aired on October 19, 2001 on Cartoon Network and November 18, 2001 on YTV.

## DVD Log Line

Daemon's viral forces open Mainframe to the Net, and Bob and Matrix argue over how to defend their home against the Guardians. Bob orders Matrix into a game cube to keep him from deleting them, and Hexadecimal comes to Bob's aid when his energy is drained by containing the invaders. Another NullZilla forms and seems to have a voice that Dot, Enzo and Matrix recognize: their father's. —*ReBoot: The Definitive Mainframe Edition*

## Computer References

* The Net is shown in map form: this forms a map of Earth, but with the undersea cables that connect the continents.
* When Mainframe is forcibly connected to the Net, it makes the sound of a dial-up modem.
* While it is never mentioned in the episode, according to the script and the character turnaround (see Portraits), the User in this episode's Game is named Morris Might. The "Morris" part may be a reference to the Morris worm.

## Cultural References

* Morris Might is, of course, a parody of Austin Powers. Matrix reboots as Dr. Evil, little Enzo as Mini-Me, AndrAIa as a fembot, and Frisket resembles Mr. Bigglesworth. There is even a shark tank (although the sharks do not appear to be equipped with frickin' laser beams). In a reference to James Bond, Matrix shoots Morris with a golden gun.
* The name "Morris Might" references Britain's iconic Morris Minor car of the mid-20th century.
* His '69' badge in the character turnaround is a triple reference: the slang term for oral sex, the 'Mars' symbol for the male gender, and *The Prisoner*, where the villagers wore badges with their numbers on (and, of course, Number Six). In the episode itself, '69' was changed to '1969' to remove the ruder joke.
* The Guardian's warships are designed to look like the game *Space Invaders*, which is especially obvious when they're seen on radar (in glowing green).

## Trivia

* **Production number gag:** "All guns, target 4.01! Lock and load! Prepare for viral attack!" (1st episode of the 4th season)
	+ This is the first production number gag that uses the season number rather than the year. This may be because Season 4 came out in 2001, making this episode 0101 by the old system, and starting all the numbers with 0 would have sounded odd.
* The 4-part *Daemon Rising* story is an adaptation of *Terabyte Rising*, a planned film follow-up written before S3.
* The back of the DVD Phong gives Enzo is the back of one of the real ADV DVDs! (But alas, at the time, there was no S2 DVD)
* Season 4 is noted for moving extremely fast. Years after the show ended, Gavin Blair revealed that "we deliberately wrote over-length episodes with the intention of making eight thirty-minute episodes which would each then be edited down two twenty-one minute episodes for TV and put together on the DVD as two-hour movies. That way if you bought the DVD you got extra content. We knew the TV version would wind up being truncated sort of blipverty version. However, it didn’t get produced that way! Half-way through production it got cut down and basically the decision was made not by me, not by Ian, not by Phil to simply produce them solely as twenty-one minute episodes. So a whole bunch of footage which we wrote and meant to animate and put in the show hit the cutting room floor."
* The title sequence for this episode serves as a recap of the third season, similar to the title sequence for To Mend and Defend recapping Web World Wars. It is also the only version of the opening theme to be entirely instrumental.

## References

1. ↑ Sitting on an Atomic Bomb: "Interview with ReBoot Co-creator Gavin Blair" (archives)