Computer Warriors was a Mattel toy line from 1989. An animated pilot was also made, but never picked up, and went direct to video.
The story behind it was that an experimental government supercomputer called Parallax accidentally suffered a power surge, triggering an unplanned core dump that created a group of evil "virus" creatures. To hunt them down and keep them from causing harm, Parallax automatically created a group of "anti-virus" beings to oppose them. To escape their enemies, the leader of the viruses made a daring plan to "go beyond the bistream" and ended up coming out of a disk drive in a regular kid's house and taking on physical form. This enabled the Computer Warriors to take over ordinary objects and turn them into combat vehicles. By the end of the pilot the viruses had been trapped on CD-ROMs launched from the computer's disk drive, but before the good Computer Warriors could collect their prisoners, the kid who owned the computer absently picked up the CDs and took them to a friend's house to study on his computer. The heroic Computer Warriors then emailed themselves to the friend's house to hopefully recover the viruses.
Computer Warriors provides examples of:
- Beauty Equals Goodness: The "good" Computer Warriors have sleek, human-like appearances, while the viruses are all jagged and monstrous.
- Canis Major: One threat the Computer Warriors face is the (relative to them) kaiju-sized dog the kid owns.
- Everything Is Online:
- Somehow, a secret government supercomputer connects to a random kid's desktop PC. In 1989.
- The Computer Warriors being able to interface with everyday objects, including especially ridiculous examples with no electronics whatsoever. Like books and cans of soda (where does the soda go?).
- Infodump: When the good Computer Warriors are created, a solid minute and a half of the twenty-minute pilot is devoted to the computer explaining the premise, and introducing all the characters and their functions.
- Left Hanging: The pilot ends on a To Be Continued, but it was never followed up. It's not entirely clear if this was because the toys were a flop, or because kids were supposed to play with the toys to continue the story.
- The Masquerade: The Computer Warriors use regular objects as vehicles because they need to make sure ordinary humans don't learn of their existence.
- Mouse World: The premise is of two-inch-tall people fighting an unknown war inside a regular human house.
- Never Say "Die": The concept's mentioned pretty often, actually, but they always say "neutralize".
- Product Placement: One toy sold for the line was disguised as a can of Pepsi soda, and proudly featured in the pilot episode. The pilot also has an unremarked-upon action figure for fellow Mattel property He-Man.
- Technobabble: As was pretty common for cartoons of the time with a high-tech premise, there's a lot of this. Maybe the starkest example is when Megahert threatens to "neutralize" his minions who don't follow orders "faster than a Wozniak". note
