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Interview with Tron Creator Steven Lisberger
NeoCode writes "AintItCool has posted an interesting interview with the Tron creator Steven Lisberger. He doesn't talk much about the sequel Tron 2.0 (because of a Disney gag order) but he reflects about the original movie with nostalgia. He talks about what influenced Tron and what Tron meant (and still does) to people. Have a read."
They really should call the sequel TROFF... or perhaps I need to get back on the medications.
From Tron to Babylon 5 to this.
There should be a moratorium on the use of the apostrophe.
Max V.
NeXTMail/MIME Mail welcome
Why do we need a sequel?
Tron was awesome because it wowed the audience with its technical advances. In these days with the Matrix and Star Wars and the like, technology isn't as thrilling. Sure, we like to see Pixar's next film, as they continually create more stunning characters and produce each sequential film is less time. That's cool. But it's not the drop-everything-OH-MY-GOD-let's-go-see-this film that Tron was.
Of course I'll go see it. I think that's a requirement of being a registered linux user, right? my point is that there are some films that had their day, still have their day, and should just be left alone. Tron is one of them.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
"Remind me. What was the Bit? "
The author sure did his research didn't he?
Did he even watch the movie?
Sure, the bit was a minor element in the movie, but come on.
First he states the tron is the best, then later asks: "Remind me. What was the Bit? "
/. do a 10 questions?
not really much of a tron fan.
then its?: I know you can't talk about tron 2, so here is a bunch of questions about tron 2...
blech.
Can
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Eisner: What kind of consumer is he?
Ghost of Disney: He's not any kind of consumer, Eisner. He's a geek.
Eisner: A geek?!
GoD: What's the matter, Eisner? You look nervous.
Eisner: Geeks... well, I mean... geeks wrote us. A geek even wrote you!
GoD: No one geek wrote me! I'm worth millions of their geek-years!
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
I thought Bill Gates created tron and troff ... OH... sorry, I'm thinking of GWBASIC again.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
I could be wrong but I believe it's called Tron Killer App
BTW, that DVD is great. The directors commentary is just flat spectacular.
-- 4 8 15 16 23 42
What's with this Disney gag order? I mean, come on! I, for one, would be more inclined to spend the $10 to see the movie if I had been able to read more about it from this interview.
Why must they do that?
--
http://nemilar.net - Not your grandmother's soup kitchen
Remind me. What was the Bit? It was just a bit--the increment that we could get out of computers at the time. The computer's equivalent to an atom? Exactly. A zero and a one. A positive or a negative.
*break to Tron scene*
Peter: Eric?
Eric: Peter!
Peter: Oh my God! I haven't seen you since high school! God, what are you doing these days?
Eric: I'm the red guy!
Peter: Oh my God!
Eric: What are you doing?
Peter: I'm the green guy!
Eric: No kidding! Is that Stacy Beecham?
Peter: Where?
*cuts off and destroys Peter*
I Support Fair Use
I wonder if the MCP will be an M$MCP? - Probably not, you'd only have to wait a while, and it'd crash all on its own...no fun there....
T.
by the monitor's "radiation king" standards back then -- that's 5 inches of hairline you won't be getting back. we will just leave alone the effects on the cornea and skin cancer and the coughwastedtimecough...
My life in the land of the rising sun.
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.
-- "Treehouse of Horror VI"
Since the interview was a bit sucky, here is the official site for Tron 2.0, its got a pretty neat flash intro....worth a peek
If it's from Microsoft, no one will take the leap for a buggy 2.0 release.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
It meant a really sore neck from sitting all the way at the end of the first row because my stupid friends couldn't get their act together to get to theater on time opening night.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
In fact, much of the "CG" in Tron was hand-animated by some outsourced firm in Asia. The first movie to have "realistic CGI" was The Last Starfighter, with 27 minutes of CGI. Tron, except for the "light cycle" scene, did not have significant CGI.
Read this history of the field.
It was just a bit - the increment that we could get out of computers at the time.
The computer's equivalent to an atom?
Exactly. A zero and a one. A positive or a negative.
NO! The bit in Tron wasn't a bit at all! It didn't have two states, on and off, yes and no, zero and 1... it had three states: 'yes', 'no', and 'stateless'. It would sit there until Flynn asked it a question and then it would answer yes or no. That's not two states. I don't mean to be a stick-in-the-mud, but it isn't.
Now, if they would have had the bit only say 'yes' when the answer to a question was yes (or vice versa: say nothing until the answer is no), then it would have been a bit. Nothing or yes, nothing or no: they should have picked one of those.
This is just something that's been bugging me since I was like 15 or so is all. Nothing to see, move along...
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
The MCP controlled access to the I/O system, or tried to. It died when a program got direct access to I/O. While it seemed to have the potential for much more, it spent a lot of its time on games. It obliterated other programs by absorbing their functionality. At its core, when everything else was stripped away, it had a teletype interface. Without it, the system had a lot more power (think CPU cycles). What it feared most was a debugging tool and it was destroyed by source code. (This last bit is clearly prophetic =)
Of course, as it turns out, it's very funny.
... Anytime a work like this can go from one generation to the next, it means something ...
At the time, the whole millenialist rigamarole, with computers serving as the mark of the beast, had not permeated popular culture.
Then, in this silly movie there are computer programs which get died red in order to show their obsequious obedience to antichrist, I mean to the Master Control Program.
It's an amusing transposition - much more amusing than it was at the time (oh, the commie/atheist/roman computer programs are forcing the christian computer programs to fight in gladiatorial games,) since computers themselves have had a lot of PR as instruments of Satan since then.
Q: Moby's live show has a grand finale where he takes a beam of light to the head and arcs his arm in a similar fashion to the grand finale of Tron... A:
Moby was born in 1965. He's 38 years old. Come on.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
... when I was about 8 or so years old I saw tron - and at night I used to go to sleep praying that god would give me one of those bars that turned into the motorcycles from that one scene where they were racing in the grid (cant remember it too well now). I would awaken in the morning and look under my bed - but no magical motocycle rod was to be found. I did this for weeks after seeing that movie.
Actually, its from Filter Magazine, not aintitcool.
BTW, that DVD is great. The directors commentary is just flat spectacular.
Is it really too much to tell us why you think it is spectacular??? Then we could make up our own minds whether it's worth getting or not. "I own this product and I think it's just great. You should own it too. The end."
GMD
watch this
Mmm hmmm. No doubt the motorcycle would have allowed you to "rescue" your mother from the perverse sexual depredations that your father continually subjected her to.
So is Tron 2 going to live up to the original, by sucking badly, and not make any sense to anyone except computer geeks? And then in 20 years we will all like it.
Seriously, I remember not too long ago hearing Steven Lisberger talking about how Tron "wasn't very good." It seems the new public's opinion and Disney's have somehow swayed his own.
Mod me down for being a skeptic.
http://www.space.com/sciencefiction/movies/black_h ole_retrospective_000602.html
if you had forgotten about that Disney ur-classic "The Black Hole."
Heres a cool lightcylce game: glTron
ZEN is a prime number in base-36
Remind me. What was the Bit?
It was just a bit--the increment that we could get out of computers at the time.
The computer's equivalent to an atom?
Exactly. A zero and a one. A positive or a negative.
I wish I could unread that.
"Probably the toughest time in anyone's life is when you have to murder a loved one because they're the devil." -Philips
This interview just bares this out. No interviewing skills demonstrated, meandering thought processes and the general kiss-ass attitude is just overbearing. This is hardly an endorsement for Filter Magazine. Sheesh, if this is what they call content, then I'm moving my mouse over to the X button in a hurry.
This is not a flame or a troll, but an expression of honest opinion. Mod as you see appropriate.
:-)
I hated Battlestar Galactica, but I thought it was much better than Tron. Understand that before you read further.
Are you ready? Okay....
Twenty years ago, Tron was not a good movie. It looked cheesey and cheap even then. The plot and storyline were so trite and unbelievable that it made Fantastic Voyage look like a good movie (and that should be impossible).
It also starred Bruce Boxleitner, one of the worst actors of any generation. Patrick Wayne is absolutely mesmerizing compared to Bruce. Christ, even David Hasselhoff is a acting god by comparison! In fact, now that I think about it, I can make the same comparison with Doug McClure...
Blade Runner came out the same year as Tron, and it is infinitely more-deserving of a sequel. It looked good then, and looks good 20 years later. Stylistically, it set a standard for SF movies that has never been equalled.
The Black Hole, another piece of drek, deserves a sequel before Tron, and The Black Hole is perhaps Disney's worst film ever.
Okay, I was 21 when Tron came out, and I suspect that many of its enthusiasts were, at the most, 12, but a bad movie is a bad movie. Watch it again and shatter your illusions, then write to the producer asking them to think again before any money is wasted on the sequel.
The Science Fiction franchise that _I_ would like to see reborn is Dr Who. Flame me if you will, but that was great Science Fiction!
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
He doesn't talk much about the sequel Tron 2.0 (because of a Disney gag order)
Ah yes, this must be one of those "stealth" marketing jobs, where they get signed agreements and/or threaten to sue anyone who so much as mentions a prospective film before its release. That way, nobody knows a damn thing about it until it comes out. I mean, we don't want to generate any buzz, develop a fan community, or leak out info that might drive potential customers mad with lust for the sequel, right? Right. I mean, it's all just so much darn work!
Where do I go to become a corporate marketing genius like the folks at Disney?
The only tool you've got against psychosis is experience.
Free Traficant Now!
This should protect you one flame. I would gladly pay to see the Daleks done with a bigger budget.
Sleep is for the Weak
Armagetron, TRON, java, better java, MetaTRON, BMTron (java), and of course this
ZEN is a prime number in base-36
I think you really missed the whole Tron vibe.
It was a visceral glimpse into cyberspace, 2 years before Neuromancer.
I don't think it looked cheesy and cheap so much as other worldly. Blade Runner probably did the noir vibe better than Tron did cyberspace, but who wants to do a sequel to that...not would most things pale in comparison to that, but no company will pay for product placement, given the curse of the first....
Yes the acting was bad...I cringe everytime I hear the delivery of "The best programmer Encom ever had, and he ends up playing Space Cowboy in some back room" but it wasn't about the plot or the acting so much as the world...
All those other films you mentioned...all of them were lacking one important thing...deadly looking lowslung sleek black battletanks.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
"Do we really want Al Gore for a vice predident?! Come on, his favorite movie is "TRON" for fucks sake!"
Disney is fscking dead. Look at all of the horrible part 2 movies they Disney has released over the last few years.. Beauty and the beast 2, 102 dalmations, return to neverland, lady and the tramp 2.. dead... now tron 2.. key-ryst! Stop it!
"It's not like your minds are as open as the source you love..." - Me to the majority of Slashdot.
um, i was born in 1965 but i am only 36. how come moby gets an extra 2 years?
I used to have a better sig than this, but I got tired of it
Because it's jammed with so much cool sh*t that the typical geek will cream his pants for a week enjoying it all.
Ewwww! Well if it's packed full of fecal matter and will cause me to spontaneously ejaculate in my pants multiple times maybe I'll just skip it.
GMD
watch this
Hrm. Those haven't been that great either, recently... never mind.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Who said Tron was good SF?
I like it because it's cheesy!
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
digital binary logic calls this the Hi-Z (high impedence) setting. It's not logic zero (voltage 0, voltage -5, etc.), its not logic one (voltage 5, etc.) it's hi-z.
It's a bitch but thats how the circuits are defined.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
I think The Wrath of Khan was the first movie with realistic cgi. Anywho.
I agree that Tron is a piece of crap. I guess you either love it or hate it.
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
Consider yourself lucky if you consider Black Hole Disney's worst movie... They did quite a bit of live action stuff back in the 60s and 70s...most of which makes Black Hole look like it had excellent acting and storywriting.
I still remember being surprised that Black Hole featured violence, death, and a story in which the good guys don't "win."
Dr. Who would certainly be a great show to redo - but only if you avoid the problems the Fox movie had... Though I'd be afraid of what American writers would do the poor Doctor... I have images of him turning into a sort of ethereal Indiana Jones - punching and shooting his enemies - something that his other 9 incarnations never did.
I'd also like to see Blake's 7 redone, but fear that the witty sarcasm would have to be dumbed down, and a laugh track added so the putzes at home would know when to laugh and feel smart.
Well, as long as there is as much spandex as in the first one, I'm game!
Duh-huh, what?? The Matrix is like the soggy paper towel of movies: The more you watch it, the more it decomposes into little lint balls. The AIs use humans for power?? So, they store and feed billions of people, plus expend untold megajoules on the whole distribution system, instead of tapping the nuclear fusion plants directly? Or sending up solar satellites above the atmospheric inteference?
There exists on the face of a mechanized Earth a city which is simultaneously (a) utterly secret and camouflage yet (b) densely populated and technologically extravagant?
The humans know enough to bend the rules and make 5-mile jumps but not to escape agents?
The Matrix was the worst kind of psuedo-mystic comic-book cookie-cutter claptrap to come down the pike in many a year. Fun to watch, soemwhat, but hardly a great movie.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
But wait. The Black Hole deserves a sequel first because (one must conclude) it's a better film than Tron. But it is also "Disney's worst film ever", meaning that any other Disney film is better than The Black Hole.
Yet Tron was a Disney film! So it must be better than The Black Hole, even though it has been posited to be worse than The Black Hole. You, my friend, have reasoned to a contradiction. Pffft! You disappear in a puff of mis-logic.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Bruce Boxleitner in spandex. What more do you need?
I've experiments to run, there is research to be done on the people who are still alive.
Tron was a box office bomb.
1. Make first CG movie
2. Lose Money
3. Make Sequel
4. ????
5. Profit!
Table-ized A.I.
The movie was rendered on a PDP-10 (well, a clone actually, but that doesn't matter) which had an instruction called TRON. I always thought the anti-christ-like character in the movie was so named because TRON's opcode expressed in octal, which was the convention for the PDP-10, is 666.
Anobody know if it was just a coincidence?
My main point about Tron was that many of the effects in Tron which today look like "obvious CG", weren't. All those nifty glow effects in scenes with live characters were hand animated.
I was surprised at the time that Burroughs didn't sue them for the use of the term "Master Control Program" in a derogatory way. The Burroughs MCP was a real, and quite good, operating system.
The Last Starfighter was the "Final Fantasy" of its day - good CG, miserable plot. But it was the movie that made it clear that minatures and matte paintings were on the way out. Tron was sort of "gee whiz, we can show the inside of a computer, but what else would we do this way?". The Last Starfighter was "this stuff is going to be a mainstream production tool."
A current graphics milestone: "Britney's Dance Beat" for PS2. The game sucks, but the character rendering is perhaps the best ever seen in a game.
n/t
Corollary to Moore's Law: The IQ of new computer owners is declining.
Wha'?? No mention of Wendy Carlos and the wonderful Tron soundtrack??
Alison
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." - Albert Einstein
It also starred Bruce Boxleitner, one of the worst actors of any generation...
It is quite obvious Bruce Boxleitner acts well enough to be in not only film, but also, two television series, one of which won many emmys. Granted, the emmys aren't necessarily the best way to judge a TV series, but if you actually watch Babylon 5, you wouldn't see him as such a terrible actor.
I am a meat popsicle.
Like many other useless sequels, this Can't Be Good(tm)
For me, the only thing that could salvage the effort would be Wendy Carlos doing the soundtrack again. Then at least we could listen to some kickass music
It'll probably be marketed at early/mid teenaged kids and have shite techno/dj 'gods' doing the music.
--- Do you believe in the day?
www.tron20.net/
It got me intereseted at least, even if it is full of Flash...
But your comment that Blade Runner is somehow superior to Tron concerns me. Granted, Blade Runner's story was crafted by one of the greatest sci-fi authors in the 20th century. And the film adaption barely captures most of the themes of Dick's book and certainly not some of the more visionary issues (the mood organ being a great metaphor for a current state of prozac popping society). But the film looks absolutely dated today. The dreary backdrop is obviously out of touch with today's green movement as is the ridiculous notion of space travel that infected all pre-Apollo sci-fi artists. Tron is much more relevant to today than Blade Runner ever has hope to be. Let alone Ridley Scott's penchant for smoke everywhere.
Trinary exists. It's even common, in the case of "high impedance."
What's this Submit thingy do?
(* The Last Starfighter was the "Final Fantasy" of its day - good CG, miserable plot. But it was the movie that made it clear that minatures and matte paintings were on the way out. *)
My reading suggests that CG was looked down on in Holywood after Tron until Terminator II made big bucks. This seems to be the turning point. Before that, it seemed to doom films WRT profits. If GC did not equal profits, then directors avoided it. James Cameron was happy with small-scale CG from Abyss, so was willing to use more for later films such as T2, and of course Titanic. He is known for his risk-taking in general. (Titanic was considered a huge gamble and he risked his own future returns on it.)
The Last Starfighter was pretty much a break-even film, wasn't it?
Table-ized A.I.
(* Read this history of the field. [siggraph.org] *)
I read this and have been poking around on Google.
It seems the first movie to use "3D" computer graphics was FutureWorld in 1976 where a human head was allegedly shown digitized into polygons. (It was the sequel to WestWorld, where android cowboys in a theme-park turn murderous. The original used some computer processing, but not 3D renderings.)
I have never seen FutureWorld, nor could find any screenshots of the CG in it. Has anybody here seen it and have comments?
Another oddity is about CG in the original Star Wars. Some accounts said they showed wire-frame "navigation" renderings of the Death Star tunnel on some of the ship equipment, but other accounts say that such was later added and that the original had zilch computer graphics whatsoever. IOW, the accounts seem to conflict.
Table-ized A.I.
2 should feature a cyber battle between a kid and the likes of Microsoft and DMCA who want to control his computer and content.
Table-ized A.I.
It's more art novella than comic book, and the story is a weird mix of sex, violence, and religious themes. Kinda like life. I thought it was deep.
From TRON to Babylon 5. .
I guess we will have to agree to disagree. I loved Babylon 5, but one of my few misgivings about the show was that they let Bruce Boxleitner anywhere near it.
I consider Ralph Fiennes, Dame Judi Dench, Pete Postlethwaite, Jeremy Irons, Cate Blanchett, and Dame Maggie Smith to be good actors.
I consider Tom Hanks, Jackie Chan, Harrison Ford, Clint Eastwood, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and (the late) John Wayne to be non-actors, but rather familiar, reassuring presences.
I consider Bruce Boxleitner, David Hasselhoff, Patrick Wayne, (the late) Doug McClure, Lindsay Wagner, Steven Seagal, Cheryl Ladd, Chuck Norris, and Jean-Claude Van Damme to be bad actors who have inexplicably (to me) ingratiated themselves with the film-going public.
I know, it might be unfair to include the action heroes in my list, who largely have no pretension of being actors, but I include them for one simple reason: too many people fail to distinguish between an actor and a star, and the difference is relevant to this discussion.
Note that I am not claiming that actors are never stars, or vice-versa, but that the two are not necessarily (or even often) connected.
Neopets - the best free game on the Int
Nope, looks like a cool coincidence. Didn't know that one before. Here's a link about the pdp-10 clone III (Information International, Inc.) used for Tron. Supposedly it was the fastest pdp-10 system in the world.
In the great CONS chain of life, you can either be the CAR or be in the CDR.