12 Things You Didn't Know About The Evil Dead Movies
4. An Obscure Nineties Kids Show Parodied It
ReBoot was a painfully nineties kids TV show, using the cheesy CGI animation of the era to put across the story of a group of characters who live inside a computer system. The “Mainframe” setting meant they could get away with the blocky looking models and mechanical animation caused by their technical limitations.
Admittedly, there's not much similar to the Evil Dead films in that set up. And being a show primarily aimed at children, there wouldn't be much to gain by linking ReBoot with the schlocky eighties horror franchise. But that's exactly what the show's producers did, with a bizarre homage episode called “To Mend And Defend” which aired in 1997.
The characters find themselves loaded into a very game that's clearly modelled on the first two films, right down to the “User” taking the form of a lantern-jawed, shotgun-and-chainsaw-wielding badass. Who fails to collect all the pages of a book scattered about a spooky forest and becomes a zombie, commenting “I'm dead before dawn!”