I admit it. When the rest of my pals were watching “The Empire Strikes Back” obsessively, I was sitting more-or-less alone in a theater watching “TRON” over and over. (How to know if you’re obsessed. Can you point to where the Pac-man is, even if you can’t see it on a normal TV-sized screen? I can.)
Don’t get me wrong: By just about any rational standard, “Empire” is a better movie. The script is by Leigh Brackett, the acting superb (unlike the other two), the pacing perfect, the effects better.
But “Empire” didn’t click with me (at the time. I appreicate it far more now than I did then). Not like TRON clicked.
TRON was able to overcome bad acting (Boxleitner was pretty good, but most of the other actors ran the gamut from “wooden” (Cindy Morgan) to “Oh God. Put me out of my misery” (Bernard Hughes, who’s acting is so ungodly bad that it has to be seen to be belived)*, plot holes galore (why does Dillenger have two avatars, but Flynn and Alan only one?), the pacing is atrocious, there’s missing bits…but…
but…
There was something magic in that film for me.
The 10 seconds with the grid-bugs. The game-grid. The scene where they’re drinking energy. The bit where Flynn realizes he can write code/program from INSIDE (“You…shouldn’t be able to do that.”) The haunting Wendy Carlos score. The lightcycles. Pure magic to me.
And now they’re coming out with a Anniversary Edition! I can’t wait! I wanted to get the Laserdisk version, but didn’t have a player (and now they go for $100 or so on eBay). It looks like this 2 disk set’ll have all the Laserdisk material and more!
I can’t wait!
Any other SDMB TRON fans?
Fenris
*We’re talking Torgo, from “MANOS: the Hands of Fate” level bad here. Although marginally better than he was in Mr. Merlin. He’s improved though. He had risen all the way to nearly-competent in “The Fantasticks”
I was a Tron fan–I haven’t seen it in ages, though. I like the what-do-you-call-ems, the lightships that moved on the beams. And the scene where Flynn redirects the beam to save the ship.
Ooooh, you do know that they’re talking about doing a sequel, don’t you? Used to have all kinds of sound files from that on a PC and had the MCP saying, “End of Line” whenever the machine shut down. I’m such a geek.
A friend of mine worked for Cray Supercomputers when Disney was cranking out TRON. While I could have done without Ram’s death scene and other maudlin vignettes, some of the movie was pretty d@mn good. The solar sailer simulation was a good example. I still think that the new Audi TTTT looks an awful lot like the racing cars in the beginning of the film. The bit (“no no no no no”), was extremely funny. One of the things that saddened me the most was how the animators could have capitalized on a lot of existing artwork in the form of Rubyliths and other integrated circuit diagrams for their backdrops, and yet they didn’t. They squandered a critical opportunity to give the movie a degree of authenticity that would have rendered it a special place in film making.
Try to remember that many of the scenes were shot on a black stage with the actors wearing black leotards. The computer was doing all of the work. Each frame was 4,000 by 6,000 pixels and required 15 minutes per frame to be exposed using a steered laser to develop the film. Their output was something like 15 minutes of real time action per month. They eventually got their hands on a Cray XMP that had quad high-speed memory ports and were able to bump that figure up to 23 minutes a month (IIRC). By comparison, a Digital VAX computer might produce three minutes a year!
Not only was the computer-generated animation painfully slow to crank out, but those blue and red “light traces” on the actors’ bodies? I believe they had to be drawn in by hand!
Incidentally, from the time I saw Tron until the time I saw WarGames, Tron was my favorite movie of all time. I liked it even better than I did Logan’s Run, and that’s really saying something. (If Tron had had those flameguns from Logan’s Run, it might still be my favorite movie. As it is, though, my favorite movie is now Airplane!.)
I also kicked ass at the Tron game but lightcycles was my nemesis. Ya know, I even have a clean, well preserved movie poster in storage somewhere.
I met some of the guys who did CG for Tron, they had a Cray and Connection Machine facility in a nondescript building on LaBrea in Los Angeles. I was invited to their facility, wow, I never saw anything like it before. Damn, it’s been so long, I’ve forgotten their names. Anyway, they were using an interesting system from Symbolics which had a volumetric rendering (i.e. a sphere with transparency that varied with the radius, solid in the center, transparent at the edge), very sophisticated and rare even on today’s CG systems. But they were cursing that each frame took 15 minutes to render, even on the supercomputer, so they liked to avoid such time-intensive tricks.
Very cool game. I can’t remember all the bits though – there were the cycles, the tanks, the discs, and ???
Actually, I loved the separate Discs of Tron game – the little booth you stood in, the speakers behind your head, the little guy bounding from platform to platform. I kicked butt on that one.
Hibbert: Homer, this is your physician, Dr. Julius Hibbert. Can you tell us what it’s like in there? Homer: Uh…it’s like…did anyone see the movie “Tron”? Hibbert: No. Lisa: No. Marge: No. Wiggum: No. Bart: No. Patty: No. Wiggum: No. Ned: No. Selma: No. Frink: No. Lovejoy: No. Wiggum: Yes. I mean – um, I mean, no. No, heh.
Seriously, though, I haven’t seen it in many years, but I did see it several times when it was new, and I enjoyed it very much. I will, in all likelihood, buy the DVD when it comes out.
Tron was a great ol film. anybody else remember the Intellivision video games based on it? The one with disk-throwing was great, and the one where you went around on your light sail fixing things sucked rocks.
At some point in the mid 80s PBS had Tron on during one of their pledge drive movie marathon things. My parents recorded it, and I fell in love with that movie. I’ve still got that tape and watch it probably once a year. Too cool, definitely.
I read somewhere (I think it was on Ain’t It Cool News, but I couldn’t find the quote) that the director of Tron said he could make the same movie using today’s technology for less than $100,000. He was all gung ho about making another one, a fact which excites me to no end.
August 17, 2001… Moviehole spoke to Jeff Bridges agent who revealed the actor is considering reprising his role of Flynn in Tron 2.0. “Apparently his part is being written like Marlon Brando in Apocolypse Now,” the unnamed agent told Moviehole. “The other guy (Martin Sheen?) is looking for him but he’s fully entered the cyber world. It sounded like fun and Jeff is interested. We’ll see…”
Count me in as another Tron fanboy. I was a young teen when I saw the movie, but I was already geeky enough to catch the various computer terms in it – and to note that the character names were debugging commands from the Radio Shack TRS-80 BASIC language.
I especially loved the idea that a computer program was a digital avatar of the programmer, though I can’t imagine how that would work in this day of multi-programmer teams working on super-sized monolithic software. I’m sure Windows would look just like Bill Gates, though.
And I really wish I had one of those Light Cycle toys!
It’s a first- or third-person game where you drive the lightcycles around in the arena. Tons of fun, and it really requires good reflexes. Free, as well.
Oooooh! I had a Flynn and Sark action figure, plus a red light cycle. The figures were made out of an odd softer than normal plastic, and looked really unique.
But the light cycle was one of the coolest toys ever because its back wheel could be revved up by a rip cord and it would zoom off for a good distance. I remember one summer my friends and I amused ourselves by sending the light cycle off from my driveway and into the street. Unfortunately my Sark action figure was literally shattered into various pieces by a glancing blow from a passing car. We tried to superglue him back together but another crash broke him apart again. The light cycle escaped with only scratches and likely is still in usable condition today if I knew where it was. Very nice quality for a toy, something that can’t be said about most of the non-Lego toys of my youth.
