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

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.

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.)

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.