Why all the hype and anticipation over the sequel? The original was an absolute snoozefest (a good looking snoozefest, I concede, but a huge, yawning bore nonetheless). As I recall, it wasn’t exactly an enormous cash cow, either. Yes, the homonymous arcade game was pretty nifty (Discs of Tron… not so much). And from what I’ve seen of the sequel, it seems as if it’ll be more of the same, only this time with dodgy CGI/mocap.
So, honestly, what’s the appeal?
It has cult appeal, and it was visually unique for its time. I imagine ten year olds loved it, and now they’re all approaching 40.
The buzz for the sequel is, now everything Tron tried to be can be realised properly. Plus it actually looks like they did it right.
Hmm.
I was 11 when I saw it, and I actually dozed off multiple times during the movie. That was a first for me at the time (and didn’t happen again until years later, when I saw Men In Black in theatres). And I was hella-hyped to see the movie at the time.
As far as I was concerned, it was certainly no Empire Strikes Back or Wrath of Khan. Now, those were the real deal.
I keep hearing about how great a job they did de-aging Jeff Bridges as well.
Tron was a pretty big deal, particularly if you were twelve at the time.
The design is fantastic - Moebius and Sid Mead working together? Spectacular!
I have surprised myself by actually being interested in the sequel. It will be a nice nostalgia trip, and the art direction is something that will lend itself way to decent 3D. The gimmick of having a frozen-in-time Jeff Bridges in there is pretty neat, too.
Also, what kind of monster likes the original Tron arcade game better than Discs of Tron? I still dust Discs of Tron off from time to time. The first one is more like a series of minigames.
One thing that I do have reservations about - while the Tron universe was a hoot for kids in the eighties, they will have to work hard to develop it into something that adults who have any familiarity with IT will be able to get through. Maybe they can just lampshade it - “Well, son, back in the '70s, when we were designing our corporate network and vendors were pushing either Token Ring or Ethernet, we went with our own in-house protocol suite, ENP. They all said it would never work, blah blah blah… Necronomicon… Stonehenge… Buckminster Fuller…”
Really? In the clips I’ve seen, CGI Young Jeff Bridges is deep in the Uncanny Valley. It’s creepy as hell (although maybe that was the point, I don’t know).
When you watch it, keep a sharp eye out for Peter Jurasik, Londo Mollari from Babylon 5. He has a quck scene as a nerdy “accounting program” who’s about to be forced to do battle (I think).
I liked Disks of Tron - I could beat the computer pretty handily. The key was to keep moving left and right. The conventional Tron game got hellahard too quickly. By level 3 it was damn-near impossible.
And the movie was okay, though even at that age I knew enough about computers to spot the hokum.
NYT article: Marketing for “Tron: Legacy” Brings Hardest Sell Yet
I think the ideas in the original outdid the presentation. Man vs. machine where the machine brings the man into his own playing field.
Light cycles. What’s more exciting than battles fought on futuristic crotch rockets?
Light discs. No guns or swords, just fighting with your own deadly frisbee.
Some great ideas that were before their time special f/x wise.
Tron Legacy should hopefully make up for the shortcomings our 12 year old minds blindly ignored.
Yeah, the’ve got the specularity level in the eyes wrong, and they don’t focus on the right point. I would’ve thought Avatar eliminated this problem.
And the lip movements are out of sync with the dialog.
Wouldn’t all that make sense, though, if the young version of Flynn is a computer simulation of him anyway?
It’s retro, it’s got Jeff Bridges in it (again) and Daft Punk produced the soundtrack.
What more do you want? 
The first movie was so far ahead of its time, it suffered for it. Now there is a chance to take a very cool concept and do it “right”. I put that in quotes because the first movie is not so bad, it just over reached.
Also the recent (well few years old) PC game was awesome (albeit frustrating because I hit a game stopping bug) so I know they can make a good movie out of this 
I’m 23 and I just watched the original. I had a lot of problems taking it for what it was with the graphics. Retro animation for people my age is Toy Story .
I’m excited for the remake, I can put the ‘wow these are horrible effects’ to the side.
Watching the making-of was cooler than the movie. Those animators were hardcore.
The movie was a mess – poorly plotted and just plain stupid. It looked cool, but so what? The characters were dull and whenever they needed a deus ex machina, out it came.
Remember – despite the hype, only about fifteen minutes of the film was actually computer animated (according to Wikipedia – back at the time, they were saying less than ten minutes were). It was essentially a fraud that people bought into.
Note: I’m not “Tron Guy”.
I love the original film. Love, love, love it.
I’m 32, but I still remember seeing the trailer for Tron in '82. The early (blue) version of the MCP freaked me out totally, but I still watched it on TV a few years later and was captivated. I later rented the video multiple times and then bought it in the late '80s. Watching it every summer was like a ritual for me. Meanwhile, I was writing programmes in BASIC on my TRS-80 CoCo2. It was all very inspirational.
I now do research in machine learning and data mining. Tron indirectly lead me to this.
The genius of the film is in how the design worked with the CGI limitations rather than against them. It has a totally unique look, thanks to the aforementioned Sid Mead and Moebius, coupled with the vision of Steve Lisberger.
Beyond that, Alan Kay was a consultant, which ups the coolness even further.
It really is one of the most daring mainstream films of the '80s. It’s deserved greater recognition, and it’s finally getting it.
Film is a visual medium. Art direction, production design and cinematography are key elements in the language of film.
Good films may require more than that, but a film’s aesthetics should not be so easily dismissed.
That may be their excuse, but it’s a poor one. Everyone knows that eyes are the hardest thing to get right, and it’s far past the time when they should’ve found a solution. It really shouldn’t be that difficult to figure out where it’s going wrong and adjusting to fix, even if it’s a kludge.
I don’t know the particulars, but I would’ve thought they had Jeff Bridges himself playing his younger self, so that voice, mouth, eyes, and body were tracked realtime. If they didn’t do that I would love to hear their excuse. If they did do that they need a kick in the backside for still hitting the Uncanny Valley despite that.