Tron Special Edition On Sale January 15th

Muddie writes: "OnVideo.org reminded me that on January 15 , Disney is releasing the "Tron 20th Anniversary Collector's Edition" (1982) on DVD and VHS. Directed by Steven Lisberger, the film stars Jeff Bridges, Bruce Boxleitner and Barnard Hughes. The 2 disc DVD set contains the remastered film with commentary by Lisberger, producer Donald Kushner and visual effects supervisors Harrison Ellenshaw and Richard Taylor, a new 75-minute "making-of" documentary "The Making of Tron", deleted scenes, original soundtrack music deleted from the film and more all for $29.99. Check out all the happy details at Amazon's link"

Comments

Main Theme

[hrieke]

Wendy rocks.
That was one of the coolest musical scores that I have heard in a long time.
Very orginal, cross between eletronic and classical. Timeless.

did anyone save anything?

[L-Train8]

Is there really that much that they can put on here that beats out the plain edition? It's not like this is Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. Is there that big a fan market for this movie? I have the plain edition DVD, and that's enough.

I can't imagine after all these years that there is a lot of extra material to add. The movie wasn't so popular that people sqirrelled away stuff from it for this eventuality. I don't see them coming up with much interesting footage, either "extra" or "making of".

Re:did anyone save anything?

[acroyear]

Uh...this is Disney we're talking about, not the BBC (infamous for ditching and wiping tons of Dr. Who footage over the years making "director's cuts" next to impossible for many stories that need one).

Disney doesn't throw much of anything away. Given how much footage of the making of, say, Snow White and Fantasia is still around 60+ years later for their respective DVDs, I'm not surprised in the slightest that extra Tron footage exists. Whether or not its interesting is up to the viewer, of course...but I'd never be suprised @ Disney keeping things around.

Walt kinda made it a policy not to throw anything away, as "all good ideas will eventually find a home". See the making-of for Toy Story 2 to see that attitude still in action...but it was around back in the 40s as well, when some of the footage drawn for Pinnochio and left out eventually ended up intact in Bambi, including much of the forest fire sequence.

Re:Umm....

[curunir]

yes...we see the connection. But the "all for $29.99" with the link to buy it is pretty wrong.

I could understand if announced the features and had a link to the studio's page about it, but this is pretty much a blatant advertisement. I wouldn't be surprised if Muddie worked for Amazon or the studio that is releasing it.

Why pay for a banner ad when you can get way more attention by posting it as a news story?

Tron was a cult classic to all computer geeks

[drachenfyre]

Any computer geek who is bashing this movie obviously hasn't been around that long. Yes the movie was a financial flop as it was over the heads of 99.9% of the people who might have seen it when it was released in 1982, but the fact remains that a majority of its plot holds true to what the internet is today. Heck, I bet you could draw great parallels between Tron and the open source movement. Replace the MCP with Microsoft, attempting to squash all competition. Place the users and their programs seeking a free system, up against the evil MCP, and voila. Yes, the special effects are pitiful by todays standards, yes the acting isn't that great, but as a whole, the movie was and still is a great movie for computer geeks to watch.

Beautiful, insipid movie.

[Lemmy Caution]

I saw a special screening of this movie at the SF Museum of Modern Art. The director spoke afterwards. Here are my observations:

1. It is visually stunning, even now, even with a crappy print. I noticed that comic artist Moebius was involved with the art direction - it struck me how much of a debt the work also owed to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Metropolis, and even a little bit to the samurai genre, as well as Spartacus.
2. The script is still excrutiatingly bad, and the director didn't have a clue. He really had no idea. I wish we could have had, instead, the presence of the set designer (Roger Shook), the costumer designer (Eloise Jensson - who the director actually fired at one point) and the rest of the production design and art design teams. Some of the director's remarks were inadvertantly racist, his philosophical sensibilities were childlike, and his sense of his own importanceinflated. The fact that he hasn't done much else of note (see http://us.imdb.com/Name?Lisberger,+Steven) pretty much shows that he was definitely not the best factor behind Tron. But as far as he knew, he was all the director the world needs.
3. I wondered about the geneology of the idea of cyberspace - specifically, the projection of a metaphor of inhabitable space onto networked computers. Tron preceded Neuromancer. Did Lisberger know about Vernor Vinge? Is Tron really the first to avail itself of the metaphor of computers as a navigable space.
4. The directors made a comparison with The Matrix that was unfortunate, but interesting. In some ways, Tron is a traditional, evangalistic Protestant Christian film (our purpose is to understand the wishes of our User, and thus to fulfill our role in creation - the MCP is theologically comparable to Satan), while the Matrix is part of a tradition of Gnostic paranoia (the creator of our world is malicious and decieving - reality is something to be transcended) - sometimes with Messianic elements, sometimes without it - that sprung up in a lot of mid-90's films. (I usually think of trends in narrative structure as reflections of the anxieties and stresses of the times in which they occur.)

Re:Beautiful, insipid movie.

[Lemmy Caution]

For one thing, a work - even a bad one - can be informed by ideas that the author isn't aware of. In fact, many bad works are bad because the author isn't allowing things in except what they are conscious of: the best stuff usually comes from the unconscious and the intuitions of the author, not just his planning.

That said, the director was pretty consciously trying to make an allegory. In fact, it was somewhat hamfisted: he thought his point was so profound, that it would carry the movie, when it didn't. It was a bad movie on that basis: it was really great as a visual piece, as an adaptation of the aesthetics of the arcade into cinema. Largely, that work was done by art directors and production designers. Film, like video games, it should be noted, is a group work, not an individual one; most films are social productions involving hundreds of people. Usually, the director's instincts determine the direction - ha ha - of the film's sensibilities, but great people can smuggle excellence into a mediocre production.

Re:Blatant advertisement!!!

[Omerna]

My definition for advertising:
Anything that builds product awareness.

This means any news posted any time is advertising. The court case against Microsoft is/ was advertising. Katz' review of Orange County was advertising. Admittedly this is a little more blatant, but I'd argue since a lot of /.ers probably have fond memories of Tron they'd be interested to know they can pick this up.

Networking is more prevalent now.

[TheMCP]

the fact remains that a majority of its plot holds true to what the internet is today.

Actually, I think it's probably more true to the Internet of today than to computing in 1982... at the time, the concept of so many computers around the country being connected together was vaguely absurd to the common viewer. Now it's commonplace.

It's kinda funny, I picked this nickname for Slashdot in a moment of sillyness, and hadn't seen the movie in quite a few years, but I since bought the DVD and found that I actually like the movie much more as an adult than I did as a kid. I guess I'll have to get the new deluxe set and give my old DVD to my cousins.

Re:Blatant advertisement!!!

[curunir]

I would be fine with a Katz review of Tron in recognition of the re-release on DVD, but a link to Amazon (with a referrer id...this guy will $1.50 per sale that amazon makes) plus the words "all for $29.99" is over the top. Just tell us that there is a new DVD release of the movie and point us to the movie studio's page about it. I'm sure everyone on slashdot who has fond memories of the movie is fully capable of finding an online retailer who's happy to sell it to them.

All I'm saying is that this is blatant advertising and they should have done something more understated like this.

Random note:
Anytime I post with a subject that ends in "!!!" someone always mods it "Troll" When my posts end in "..." they're usually modded "Interesting"

A Very Lucid Moment

[philovivero]

You know, I was riding in the car today with two Malaysians, an African, and a New Zealander. We were talking about Zone X DVDs.

Turns out, one of the Malaysians purchased a 100% bonified good DVD (Final Fantasy, I think) and couldn't play it in his DVD player. The reason? His DVD player is region-free.

He commented that the pirated versions of the movies play just fine.

Then I said, and this really surprised myself: "I would like to be a DVD/CD pirate. No, not to make lots of money, but it seems like the right thing to do."

When I realised that I was serious, and that it really truly *IS* the right thing to do. Someone needs to ensure that when a guy buys a player and some media, that it will actually play.

What sort of idiots would allow a situation where someone can buy a player legitimately, buy some media legitimately, and not be able to use it? Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.

Re:remastered?

[Anonymous Coward]

You tell 'em. Not only did the Tron team have to use home spun hardware (Foonly F-1), but also home spun software.
Those snotty, arrogant kids who call Tron 'lame' couldn't even program their VCRs to save their lives, let alone build a mainframe, write software and build the film recorder. It's all too easy these days. Too many script kiddies and spoiled brats, no technical people with guts and balls.
Also watch Flight of the Navigator for effects by the same team. Cool.

What sort of idiots indeed.

[Obiwan Kenobi]

Turns out, one of the Malaysians purchased a 100% bonified good DVD (Final Fantasy, I think) and couldn't play it in his DVD player. The reason? His DVD player is region-free.

He commented that the pirated versions of the movies play just fine.

Why? Because they're region free as well. I'd bet my bottom dollar that he probably has an early Apex player. Those (as well as a few others) had the ability to turn region coding on and off at will (you can change it in the Setup menu).

The catch came when RCE (Region Coding Enhancement) became the norm a few years ago. I remember clearly that one of the first titles to utilize this feature was The Patriot (let's take note that Final Fantasy was released by the same company, Columbia TriStar). If you player didn't specifically state it was region 1 hardware-wise, it wouldn't play the DVD.

You know what the real irony of this is? Is that if you change your Apex player (or whatever brand, mind you) back to Region 1, you could fix the problem and play the DVD.

Then I said, and this really surprised myself: "I would like to be a DVD/CD pirate. No, not to make lots of money, but it seems like the right thing to do."

Christ, what kind of ego-driven self-serving comment is that? Yeah, you wouldn't make money off of it, you'd just do it out of the kindness of your heart. It's comments like these that tell not only your age, but your maturity.

Instead of paying the studios and filmmakers for their work you'd rather rip them off. If actors/directors/writers/etc don't sell units, don't sell tickets, don't move these products, they're out of jobs. So please excuse me if I don't jump on the soapbox and proclaim that stealing is somehow beneficial to the artist(s).

What sort of idiots would allow a situation where someone can buy a player legitimately, buy some media legitimately, and not be able to use it? Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.

Here's a question: what kinds of DVD idiots are

a) too dumb to turn the player back to its proper region (which will fix the problem)

b) buying pirated versions in the first place?

You can yell from the mountaintops how great it is to steal from people but the fact remains: there are plenty of folks who live off those DVD dollars. Movies aren't released around the world simultaneously (albeit a few of the bigger blockbusters), so sometimes a Region 1 DVD will appear in the states before it's even in theaters across the Atlantic/Pacific.

Example: Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back won't be released in Australian theaters until March. The Region 1 DVD comes out in February. Now if all those Australians get pirated copies of that great (and hilarious) film, who gets paid and who gets the shaft? Kevin Smith and his cronies for their hard work and great talent, or a money-grubbing hack who wants to earn a buck and cry "Free speech!" everytime someone accuses him of stealing?

People can complain about region coding all they want, but the solid evidence supporting the practice is right here.