Reminds me of The Vicar of Dibley instead. I haven’t seen TRON since 1985 when I was in summer school to make up a semester of English and our teacher brought the tape in one day.
I worked in my brother’s computer retail business for a short time when the 286 had just come out. Those green screens are indeed bad for your eyes, they have a higher than recommended radiation output. In fact, the output is so high women were advised not to use them if there was even a possiblity of being pregnant!
I did! Thanks, Program! 
I was at the comic store yesterday, filling out my Previews order. In the toy section was this wondrous news! The pictures showed cycles and figures identical to the originals. Sadly, I can not remember the prices. I think the figures were $8. They should be available in stores theis January.
I was far too young to see Tron when it came out, but I’ve since become a fan. My username is always “tronvillain” and if I didn’t despise signatures mine would be “END OF LINE.” In fact I think I’ll watch it again right now.
Hey, me too! Me too! I loved TRON when almost everyone I know thought it was unbearably cheesy. Seems to have become part of the pop-culture Required Viewing List, though. Anybody catch the Dexter’s Lab takeoff of TRON? It was on again yesterday. Too funny.
My sister pointed this thread out to me…
TRON is my traditional New Year’s Eve movie. It’s best if I’m in the middle of it when midnight hits. I really don’t know how this got started…we were just watching it one time on New Year’s, and the next year I remembered and said “hey, let’s watch it again!”
The tape broke eventually and we rented it the next year…the list of rental places that carried it kept dropping to fewer and fewer until last year it was at zero and I was so ticked. Right after that I bought the DVD. Now I’ll have to get the new one…
Anyone else notice that in Alan’s cubicle on the wall (the scene with the thousands of cubicles fading in the distance, only visible on the widescreen version) is printed “KLAATU VERATA NICTO” ? There’s a fourth word before it; I don’t recall at the moment what it is.
Going to look around the Tronfan site now…
I’d love to see Tron 2.0 (with that name) and hope it comes to pass.
The first word is probably “GORT”. The phrase is used in “The Day the Earth Stood Still” to turn off the robot, Gort.
Fenris
<Cartman> "I…am…so…pissed…off…right…now…</C>
I downloaded Lightnin’'s game (which I’m already highly addicted to). I was about to demo it for Mrs. Tygr, but first I asked her “Remember the movie ‘Tron’?”
“No.”
“You’ve never seen Tron?!?”
“No.”
“Get in the car. We’re going to the video store.”
I run in to 'LackLuster Video" (thanks, Anthracite!) and I don’t see it on the shelves.
I ask the “help” and he tells me they don’t have it. He calls the store cross-town and they don’t have it either.
He proceeds to explain that the video of Tron is on something called a “moratorium”. The company/s that produced it are no longer doing so.
They just aren’t making the tape any more.
The thought makes my brain hurt.
This means I’m going to have to call around to every hole-in-the-wall video store in the area and I’ll wind up renting some badly-abused eight-year-old copy of a copy videotape.:mad:[sup] -And that’s JUST how I wanted my wife to see it![/sup]
I have seen the 20th anniversay DVD and it is cool indeed. A terrific movie plus enough “making of” stuff that I can answer your questions from November.
Zenster: 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.
Actually, it was a black stage (cheaper to light) and white costumes. The computer was doing little of the work. Backgrounds were mostly hand painted (“I got real sick of the airbrush”). This 15-minute renderings (yeah, stuff was slow back then) were of as little as they could get away with. Minimum-wage inkers were cheaper than time on a Cray. Even so, they were using just about everybody they could use back then.
tracer: 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!
The traces were black paint and tape on the costumes. The lighting was done by backlighting negatives of the uniforms with the parts they didn’t want lit painted out. There was an awful lot of stacking of Kodaliths in that movie.
pldennison: Frink: No.
I’ve long found that to be the most unbelievable line on The Simpsons. I assume that Frink and Comic Book Guy each have their own Tron homemade costumes that they wear when nobody is looking.
rjung: CLU was … oh, geez, I think it was a listing of some sort.
Central Logic Unit, Command and Launch Unit, Control Logic Unit. It has many geekish meanings.
Fenris: The first word is probably “GORT”
Yes, it is.
Tygr: They just aren’t making the tape any more.
It is currently available at Walmart for ten bux.
I bought the 20th Anniversary DVD when it came out. I’ve always had a soft spot for TRON. The 80s music, the video game theme, the soundtrack - it all melds into a delicious melange of 80s goodness to me.
I was surprised at how well it’s held up. It’s not a great movie by far, but it didn’t seem quite as dated as I thought it would. Maybe I’m biased.
The bonus scenes on the DVD were very surprising. By Disney standards, they’re practically pornographic.
I was disappointed there was no extended gridbugs scene. I’d always assumed it had been filmed, but cut, but that wasn’t the case. It’s a shame, because they look really cool, but instead leave us with this weird scene where we’re warned about something that’s hundreds of feet on the ground and seemingly doing nothing.
I too loved the video game. I even downloaded it last year and played it on my PC, but it just wasn’t the same as standing in the arcade, pumping quarters into the slot and waiting for the MCP to rotate just right…
By the way, could there be a cooler actor than David Warner. Let’s look at some of his oeuvre:
Tron
Time Bandits
The Omen
Star Trek V (okay, so it’s an odd one)
Star Trek VI (Yay, it’s even)
Hell, he was even the voice of “The Lobe” on Freakazoid! and the voice of Morpheus in Fallout.
The man has done some cool stuff.
The figures, including a Sark, and the lightcycles, are available at Suncoast Videos.
There’s also some really cool, but expensive, japanese import lego-like toys at www.imageanime.com that have a tank, a MCP, the stomper thing, and the light cycle.
Also Jon Irenicus in Baldur’s Gate 2 and Jack the Ripper in Time After Time.
And Gorion in BG 1. He also stars opposite himself in Quest of the Delta Knights, which ended up being an MST3K episode.
I’ve HATED most of his game work, though. Every line he says sounds like its’ the first line of a monolog. Good when he’s supposed to be funny. Bad when he’s supposed to be serious.
Warner is described in the commentary as “the thinnest man I’ve ever seen” (Bridges) and “positively frail looking” (Lisberger) but when that voice booms, “Take them away,” “For a moment I thought we were really going to die!” (Morgan).
A personal note: This movie has always had a place in my heart because Bruce Boxleitner grew up the next town over from where I lived at the time, Cindy Morgan went to college with me, but we never met so she never had a chance to shoot me down, and I used to know a waitress who went out once with one of the Bridges brothers. It’s as close as I get to earning a Bacon Number.
Also, I was getting into computer graphics as a profession about the same time as it came out. My path has kept me in CAD, but I’ve lived with the endless waits for 3-D renderings so I feel a kinship with the CGI guys who worked on it and blazed the trail for the rest of us.
Warner also did the voice of the Archmage for the Gargoyles cartoon, and a Cardassian torturer in two Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes. He personifies intellectual menace, much like George Sanders did when he voiced Sher Khan in Jungle Book.
I cringe a little when I hear the inaccurate tech-speak in Tron ("…watchdog the cpu…" ?! WTF?) but on the list of ridiculous comptuer movies, it at least as good as WarGames and miles better than The Net.
I found the secret to beating the Disks of Tron arcade game was just to keep running from side to side.