Rethinking the ‘Supersystem’: Film Reboots and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

The ‘reboot’ appears as a kind of discursive mutant, able to shift and morph to take on different meanings in different circumstances. For William Proctor, for instance, the reboot operates intertextually much like a remake but aims to generate additional cultural texts within the same ‘hyperdiegesis’ or story world shared among characters across multiple texts (Proctor 2012: 4, 6; Hills 2002: 137). Although Proctor’s is primarily a text-based definition of reboots, it is important to note that it invokes industrial activities, namely the perpetuation of a franchise. Alternatively, Joe Tompkins (2014) defines reboots as a discursive phenomenon, and he directly