The Story of Tron

An anonymouse reader writes "Tom's Hardware has a feature up on the makings of Tron which may interest latent fans. Through interviews with the creators they explore the makings of Tron, from how it came to be picked up by Disney to how the effects were put together ('While the majority of the film takes place in the computer world, only 15 minutes worth of footage actually used CGI', because it would have taken years to make the film otherwise). They then explore why the film flopped at the box office. 'It was like we put LSD in the punch at the school prom and it was just way more than they can handle,' said Steven Lisberger."

Comments

Or...

[Anonymous Coward]

Special effects != Return Investment

May the wind be always at your back,
-Empyrealmortal

Where is our Pixar/Disney Sequal?

[cbuskirk]

The rumours few around a few years back but with this years aquissition of Pixar by Disney it could be a huge blockbuster.

Easy answer

[gowen]

They then explore why the film flopped at the box office.

Same reason many special-effect movies flop at the box office.

They started with a lousy script, and an implausibly silly plot that its very hard to look past. The market for movies that look pretty but don't engage on a human level is very, very small.

"The Master Control Program has chosen you to serve your system on the Game Grid. Those of you who continue to profess a belief in the Users will receive the standard substandard training, which will result in your eventual elimination."

See? That's dialogue bad enough to have come from one of the Matrix sequels.

Re:Easy answer

[solarbob]

Pretty film that flopped. Final Fantasy:- The Spirits Within. Looked nice but just was so very very boring. You can get something that looks nice (Toy Story) and still have a decent plot (Toy Story) and does well (Toy Story)

Re:Easy answer

[zakezuke]

"The Master Control Program has chosen you to serve your system on the Game Grid. Those of you who continue to profess a belief in the Users will receive the standard substandard training, which will result in your eventual elimination."

See? That's dialogue bad enough to have come from one of the Matrix sequels

It's a laugh isn't it? Take this for example

The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't. --Douglas Adams

In order to take Tron seriously, you have to not take it so seriously. This was what 1981 or 1982 or so... video arcades were newish and computers were fancy mystical machines no one understood, esp this whole concept of easily editable word processed documents I.E. how someone with no real skills can delete someone else's name and take credit for their work, or worse yet create a program which will do this automaticly. Take into the account the 1980s mindset of computers which for the most part would be arcade style video games, using them and some spiffy new computer animation and you have the perfect vehicel for satire. And yes, the dialog is the likes of which that you would find in a Matrix sequal... and *that* is what makes it so funny.

Re:Easy answer

[jamshid]

Tron had a really interesting message about openness that is very appropriate today. I remember seeing it again last year and thinking alot of the things it said about the freedom of programs to interact directly with their users could be applied to the Internet and the importance of everyone on the Internet being able to be a server and everyone on the Internet being able to talk directly to each other, not go through an MCP.

Re:Easy answer

[zakezuke]

There was nothing intrinsically wrong with the plot : Man gets zapped into machine and has to battle his way back out.

The plot was a little deeper than that. A man (Flynn?), an ecentric genius, was obsessed over video games... designs a few blockbusters but a not to bright but sneaky person takes the credit for his work and as a result gets promoted to a position of control (VP?) and uses his position and access to lock out Flynn preventing him from vindicating his name and creates a master control program who's purpose is to steal other people's work and prevent others from accessing it. This tale is told by two other employies who are attempting to figure out what is going on with the system. They express shocked disbelief but one statement has enough of the way of truth to it for them to investiate. The MVP retaliates in the only way it knows how and zaps Flynn into it's world... which as you said "man gets zapped into machine and has to battle his way back out".

While your statement was ment with sarcasm, there is nothing wrong with the plot, nor the sub plot of romance between not only the real life characters but between their programs. It's your run of the mill heroic tale that has been told many times before. Those who want to be critical on the store should be on that point as heroic epics have been a staple of western culture even before to Roman empire was born. It was clearly made with a cookie cutter script generator that would work just as easily with an evil prince and dragons or gunmen and the wild wild west. It's redeming qualitys are the satire on bureaucracy and insight on religion, which are two things you would not expect in a film who's main purpose seems to be a vehicle for hi-tech CGI graphics.

Re:Easy answer

[gowen]

Last I checked, that's practically a formula for a successful movie.

The producers of Stealth, I Robot, The Island, Fantastic Four, and Pearl Harbor would like to disagree. Hell, even Kong did disappointing box office compared to how much it cost to make. Almost ever succesful recent blockbusters has had strong characters (or at least franchise characters with whom have a pre-existing relationship: Chronicles of Narnia, Batman Begins, Harry Potter, R-o-t-Sith etc. And, I've spent some of the morning reading the UK press savaging "V for Vendetta", so we may be able to add another to that disastrous list soon.

The Matrix is the exception, but the plot in the Matrix was irrelevant compared to the effect of those incredibly novel visuals. The sequels blew because the novelty wore off enough that we could see the plot creak.

Meanwhile, the producers of Sideways, Napoleon Dynamite, Crash, Walk The Line, Constant Gardener and Brokeback Mountain are smiling to themselves and rolling in the cash generated by their low budget successes moderate gross.

Re:Easy answer

[Guppy06]

What sysadmin wants to believe in the users?

Re:Easy answer

[AlterTick]

The Matrix is the exception, but the plot in the Matrix was irrelevant compared to the effect of those incredibly novel visuals. The sequels blew because the novelty wore off enough that we could see the plot creak.

Well, I wouldn't say the plot creaked too badly in the first movie. It was a pretty much stock retelling of story number 259-A from the Film Writer's Plot Catalog*, "Rise of a Messiah from Obscurity to Ascendent Triumph", with a shitload of novel eyecandy to make it interesting. The trouble they had in the sequels was partly, just as you say, the non-novelty of the effects; but additionally they ran into the "Superman problem"-- i.e. how do you create a compelling adversary for the unstoppable, super-being? Well, you either do something interesting, like create super-equals (Superman II), or you do something utterly idiotic, like throw in magic extra dimensional creatures (Myxlplik), cast Richard Pryor as a super-genius computer nerd who builds an unstoppable computer (Superman III), or you just throw special effects at the hero till he gets (or we get) too bored or tired to let the fight go on (Reloaded, and the other Matrix one).

* no such catalog exists, to my knowledge, but it sure seems like it should.

Reading anything on tomshardware....

[TrueKonrads]

Slightly OT, but i'd like to read TFA, but I ran out of patience clicking "next" and "next" and then watching as some overlay pops every time i accidentally move my mouse over underlined words. Sheesh. No wonder nobody reads TFA

The Matrix

[Monte]

...was a really great sequel to TRON.

Or at least that's what I think.

Don't forget the TRON soundtrack!

[farrellj]

Check out the website of Wendy Carlos, who composed and performed the soundtrack...her website is: http://wendycarlos.com/

ttyl
          Farrell

Simple reason for the "bomb": It was too early

[Opportunist]

1982 it was not "cool" to be a geek. It was not cool to "live" inside the computer. 1982 was a time when computers (and even more consoles) were considered toys, not an essential part of our life.

Especially, the audience for such a movie was too small. And the studio was the wrong one. First of all, it's Disney. Back then, what did you get from Disney? Cute li'l films about cute fuzzy animals having some cute adventures. So people did not expect a "serious" science fiction movie.

Second, it was the wrong kind of science fiction for this time. Science fiction back then was either in a galaxy far, far away or equally far away in the future. But most certainly not NOW. How can you make science fiction in the NOW? Now is the real world. The movie was simply not credible for the audience of then.

Before someone quotes E.T.: E.T. was credible for the simple reason that it was a "real" drama movie with an alien element. Not a "real" science fiction movie. There were no laser beams and no robots.

Tron was also not the stereotypical science fiction movie, it didn't carter to the SciFi crowd of those times. No aliens, no space battles, no epic hero. Instead a very dramatic personal battle for Flynn and Tron, with a lot of abstraction that only someone who has at least a clue about computers can comprehend and appreciate.

In total, it is a movie for computer and game geeks. And those were rather scarce back then.

Re:Simple reason for the "bomb": It was too early

[acroyear]

Disney did the Black Hole 2 years earlier, and in the 70s did a number of sci-fi films (some funny, some not - Escape/Return to Witch Mountain, Cat from Outer Space) so they'd already established that they could do serious, if teen-oriented, scifi. Hell, Disney was on the cutting edge of the "epic" film back in the 60s with 20,000 Leagues and a few others.

I agree the timing was just a little early. We needed Wargames *first*. Show us what happens outside the computer world when a modern computer "thinks", then the audience might be ready for what might happen inside that world.

Personally, I love Tron, always did, its a reason I'm in software now. But among this crowd, I know i'm an apologist so I'm not going to bother to try to justify it.

And box-office flop or not, its more than in the black with HBO and home-video sales, like every disney "flop". People FAR too often complain about Disney making box office flops (about half of their animated feature canon didn't make a profit in the box office, including Fantasia, Pinnochio, Bambi, Alice in Wonderland, and the well-known flops of the 90s-00s), but over time, the films have serious legs in the home video market and continue to be watched today, which is not something you can say for many at-the-time blockbusters.

Jim Henson's works are the same way (Dark Crystal, Labyrinth). As is Princess Bride, and other classics in hindsight like Wizard of Oz.

Its like comparing Salieri to Mozart. Salieri was the more popular AT THE TIME, especially his operas (AFAIK, he never had a flop, Mozart had 2). But its Mozart we listen to today.

Only Hollywood judges quality by its at the moment popularity. The real judgement happens far later, when you realize that 25 years on people ARE STILL WATCHING IT (crappy script and all), which can't be said for MOST films from 1981-1982.

Re:Grossing Twice the Cost is a Flop?

[skribe]

Tron cost 17 million to make and pulled in 33 million. How is this considered a flop?

A good rule of thumb is that you need to earn 4x the budget to break even.

Tron vs Titanic

[Anonymous Coward]

The wonderful thing about creative endeavours - films, books, music, software, whatever - is that they are inherently unpredictable. I've lost track a number things I've seen that claim to be able to guarantee you a hit single or novel say. Tron probably deserved to be a hit but it wasn't. Another big special effects movie with equally laughable acting and awful dialog - Titanic, did alright.

Movie critics....

[Savage-Rabbit]

In order to take Tron seriously, you have to not take it so seriously.

It is amazing how many people fail to understand that simple truth. Take for example 'The Mummy' and it's sequel 'The Mummy returns' It's always funny to read reviews of those movies talking about overacting, a bad plot, bad script, over reliance on special effects etc... It's fun to read those reviews because the snobby film critics who write them have completely missed the point which is: "For god's sake man it's a MUMMY MOVIE! The fact that it's full of cheesy clichés is exactly what makes it such fun to watch!". No matter how many times I watch hat scene in 'The Mummy Returns' where the Pygmy mummys run over the log with the one in the lead carrying a stick of dynamite like an Olympic torch it always makes me laugh. It's actually worth while to go down some 'worst movie ever' list and watch those sorry pieces of cinematic catastrophe just for laughs. Just make sure 'Plan 9 from Outer Space' is on the list. It's a well known classic and watching it at least once is mandatory.

Re:SQL?

[dodobh]

you would have a guy that goes around doing the same thing every day. You know what that is?

Work?

Tron and Blade Runner were worth the trips

[ianscot]

[Tron] was 22nd in the top grossing films of 1982. Blade Runner was 27th that year.

Man, I hadn't remembered that those came out the same year. I biked maybe five miles to see Tron at the local theater that was showing it, at least a few times. I remember locking the chain around the bike rack and walking from the summer heat into that run down theater with its thinning carpet and whiff of warmed popcorn. That movie made frisbee extra fun that year. Later on the Intellivision games, with the Recognizer "bosses"...

"Blade Runner" we were too young for, it being an R, so my older brother took us to that for my birthday. That means it was late June. What the heck was anyone doing releasing that movie as a summer blockbuster? The theater was basically empty except for us.

Neither one of them got the box office that its studio was expecting. As investments, though? I'm not that keen on either one as a work of high art, but the ripple effect they had was really something, culturally.

You were an uptight kid

[Sinistar2k]

When I was a kid, especially in '82 (age 9), I didn't really focus on the directing, writing, and point of a film.

Re:Nice way to justify it...

[Anonymous Coward]

I was going to make an argument against your claims, but since all you really said was that you didn't understand it I can't argue with that. However just because you couldn't enjoy it doesn't mean that no one can enjoy it. I for one enjoyed Tron and like the abstract viewpoint it provided. As Humans we often do not think of perspectives other than our own.

Tron provided a realistic main plot (theft of someones work), an interesting subplot (programs having a life of there own), a drama (the strugle for freedom), and a love story. The movie was more complex that you give it credit for. A story about computers doesn't have to be accurate to how computers are at the time of the story to be a good story. It's not fact after all it's fiction.

Reboot?

[NeuroManson]

Just thought it was odd that they failed to mention Tron's "unofficial" sequel, which covered a lot of similar premises (almost every all of them). Since the series came out just barely 12 years after Tron, it's about as good as an homage as any.