Two British Columbia documentary directors are one step closer to filming a new film on the hit sci-fi series Restart.
The show was produced by a Vancouver company and aired on television from 1994 to 2001.
Decades later, this cartoon still has a following.
Global News originally reported on super fans Jacob Weldon and Raquel Lin in December when they obtained the original tapes of the show from Mainframe Entertainment for their documentary, Restart Reverse.
The recordings were made on a rare digital tape format called D1, a technology that Weldon said was cutting-edge when Mainframe used it, and very rare.
Tape recorders are hard to find these days, and Mainframe had no equipment to play tapes.
Back in December, Weldon and Lin appealed to the public to help them find a Bosch BTS D1 recorder that would play the tapes.
The pair said that after receiving hundreds of tips and messages, a German-language email was the breakthrough they had been waiting for.
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“We asked someone to translate, and then someone told us which three decks we needed,” Lin said.
The two then purchased three Bosch BTS D1 turntables from Germany, spending more than $10,000. After paying another $5,000 for shipping, the turntables have now arrived in Vancouver.
But the filmmakers ran into a new problem. A manual had gone missing, and they had no idea how to operate the recorder to play the old tapes.
The documentary is still set to premiere later this year, and now we have to race against time to figure out how to use these decks.
Crews are now appealing to the public again for help.
They need someone familiar with the technology to assist them.
“It’s a miracle, frankly, that we found these things,” Weldon said.
Anyone wishing to help the documentary crew can contact them
They can be contacted through their Facebook page Restart Reverse.
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