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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."
honestly think about tron without the image of the tron guy coming to mind?
the box office flop is all the proof that I need that people really are idiots, I mean, did they even see the lightcycles?!
ptsch.
Special effects != Return Investment
May the wind be always at your back,
-Empyrealmortal
The rumours few around a few years back but with this years aquissition of Pixar by Disney it could be a huge blockbuster.
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.See? That's dialogue bad enough to have come from one of the Matrix sequels.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
I can handled some better grammar and/or editing
The movie is absolutely great. I saw it in the cinema twice. The DVD version I have contains a great making-of and I enjoyed the movie again since I bought it a couple of times. Actually I always wondered why this is a Disney film...
In Korea, all your base are Only For Old People
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
Lone Gunmen crew.
Who would have thought it was a bomb? I remember seeing it and loving it as a kid - and loving my toy lightcycle and some of the video game - and the movie seems to be so well known. If you ever mention it to someone, they know what you're talking about. It amazes me it was a flop.
I saw Tron, opening night, and its one of the things that made me really, really want to figure out how those nifty looking typewriters with screens could do so much. I didn't know what memory was, I didn't know what a processor did, I barely understood how a calculator worked and if you said Binary I'd say "Sure, I have a Huffy!".
:)
:)
We're always looking at value as something monetary. Tron made me go get my first trash-80 (Err Tandy TRS-80 heheh) and later my first Commie. I wanted to know how those things worked.
You all may remember the short lived series "Whiz Kids" , with the talking computer that looked like it was assembled from stereo components. That was another one way ahead of its time.
The value of the film wasn't how much it grossed , if you want to calculate that, then calculate the life time earnings of those who got into computers partly because of seeing it and you may be surprised
However only 15 minutes of CGI? I somehow (not sure why, because I know what was available then) thought most of it was CGI.. but yes, that would have been very very difficult at the time. My bubble sort of broke reading that article, never really thought about the making other than being fascinated as a child with the results.
Much like the show Whiz Kids, it was just a little too abstract for most people. Entertainment isn't entertainment to most if it requires too much thought.
Tron got to be the pavement others were able to ride in on. So wallet aside, I don't think the film was a flop. I was too young to remember any hoop-la coming from Disney about the film.. I wonder how it would have done if it had been underplayed before release.
Cool article, if you can wade through the advertisements
It was 22nd in the top grossing films of 1982. Blade Runner was 27th that year.
Maybe it wasn't the smash hit they were hoping for, but it looks like it did very well.
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/
For Tron's special effects — The Super Foonly F-1. I bet it had a phat exhaust, blue downlighting, a killer sound system with a 16 inch subwoofer, and a stylish fibreglass skirt fitted to the front of the reel-to-reel cabinet.
...was a really great sequel to TRON.
Or at least that's what I think.
Is it just me, or does Tronguy look quite a lot like Ned Flanders at a fancy dress? "Yes indeed-e, tron-a-roony."
What were they going to call it? Troff?
Check out the website of Wendy Carlos, who composed and performed the soundtrack...her website is: http://wendycarlos.com/
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
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.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Cron of course.
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.
"Has anyone here seen Tron?"
"No"
"No"
"No"
"Yes - I mean no."
Some then young budding PHB or IP Lawyer to be, realizing, hey- this guy used company resources to make video games on the side, with the intent to spin-off a VERY PROFITABLE COMPANY...
We should make job contracts that say "all your base belong to us" iffen you make them at all whilst you are working for us...
Thanks TRON!
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
GLtron
Both free, for Windows/MacOSX/Linux.
Circumcision is child abuse.
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.
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.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
I suppose that people who never saw Tron missed the reference.
Interesting to whom?
"Growing old is inevitable; growing up is optional."
Family Guy riffed on Tron too - they had Peter driving one of those light cycles. I guess this just proves that plenty of Geeks go into animation!
The article says Disney experimented with using comupters for animation in the seventies. I think the first thing they tried doing was to do in-betweening of hand-plotted vector graphics, animating the series of lines on a vector scope, then drawing the lines to cells using an XY plotter. This was done using an IBM Whirlwind vector terminal in 1959 or 1960.
One thing the article failed to mention was how ardous it was to make those "mere 15 minutes of cgi." Back then, no animation tools existed nor were there any GUI based rendering tools either. All of the CGI was hard coded by hand using a text system very similar to Pov-ray. There was no animation programming either. To animate something they had to calculate how far they wanted each object to move, then calculate and enter the cordinates by hand frame-by-frame.
Furthermore, the computers of the time didn't have enough memory to store entire movies, let alone any sort of device to output it to video tape or film like we have now. Instead, they had to render each individual frame, display the frame on a high-resolution monitor and then photograph the monitor onto regular 35mm film. Each frame would take several hours to render further complicating the process trying to keep the lighting uniform on each exposure.
Now, fifteen minutes * 60 seconds in a minute * 24 frames per second = roughly 21,600 frames. Just an insane amount of manual labor.
Obviously all the trails and glowing auras were meant for us trippies!
Mind | Body | Spirit | Cash
Something the article doesn't mention is that Tron also had a futuristic soundtrack by Wendy Carlos, the same woman who composed (at least, she composed the song Timesteps) and performed the soundtrack for A Clockwork Orange.
I believe he has my stapler.
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There's a reason why Scorcese's "Raging Bull" doesn't center on the world frisbee champion, you know.
Obviously, because people wouldn't be able to stand the sheer thrill and excitement if it did.
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He's talking about the game they did a couple years back. Should be cheap, I just saw it for $6 at the local Big Lots. Amusing, and it really does look very much like the movie - sobering to think we can do those kinds of graphics in real-time now.
Music available here.
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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.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
calculate the life time earnings of those who got into computers partly because of seeing it and you may be surprised :)
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I resemble that remark. (Even ended up working with a III system later in '82, though not doing anything nearly as interesting with it...)
Yeah, the dialogue is awful (though not as bad as The Black Hole), but the look and soundtrack are still inspiring. As another poster said, this film was ahead of its time - by at least a good twenty minutes...
<grrr
I was working (learning) in the biggest graphics lab in the world at the time _Tron_ was made, Summer 1982. The New York Institute of Technology had a DEC VAX/VMS datacenter, with DEC GIGI graphics terminals and other rendering HW. We were busy scanning 1970s progressive rock album covers and inserting our own adventures into the cover art. Then Disney opened their Tron lab, and we weren't the biggest anymore - just another little college computer room.
It was like our bong hits wore off, just as someone else at the school prom dosed us all with LSD, then they started flying around the dance hall.
--
make install -not war
From the article: "One of the things I'm most proud about in Tron is there are no guns in the movie -- it's a killer Frisbee!" he said. "I mean, try to make an action adventure movie without a gun. I dare you."
So, those aren't gun turrets on the tanks? I guess those are love turrets, and they fire love and happiness.
As implausible as the plot devices were, Tron actually captured something about how it felt working with computers in that era. You had a great deal of control, but programs had reached a point of complexity where different pieces of software almost had a mind of their own. And since the suits only had a vague idea of what you did, they tried to avoid you as much as possible, which meant on a day to day basis you really interacted with bits of software more than you did people. There were no ex-geek managers for the simple reason there were no ex-geeks.
Add to that, very few of us had computers in their home; the home computers that existed were for practical purposes not much more than toys.
The upshot was, when you sat down in front of that terminal at the start of the work day, it really felt like preparing to dive into an alternate universe, with its own population.
And furthermore, there was no Internet. Internet means you're handling emails, IM, blogging and interacting with real, flesh and blood people; or at least what those people are pretending to be. Having the Internet means that software flows in and out of your computer like electricity. In those days your computer was isolated, like one of the Galapagos Islands, and sparsely populated with humans. The real people were, in the cast of characters a distinct minority. When you chatted at the watercooler about one program or another idiosyncracies, it was gossipping.
Tron, while it may not be Citizen Kane, captured the feeling of an unique moment in computer history.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
When I was a kid, especially in '82 (age 9), I didn't really focus on the directing, writing, and point of a film.
The ethic of programs of little fighters within a sometimes incomprehensible system was very appealing. The idea of old crusty programs bearing the likeness of their users was cool. The idea of independently minded security programs running around like white blood cells was also pretty fabulous. In terms of what actual programs could do at the time, Tron was inspirational to real programmers. I mean every program in Tron could communicate to every other program. Strong programs could defeat weak programs by learning new games at the instruction of stronger still programs, all without user intervention. A super program that could heal other programs that had crashed...
There were realistic in-jokes, like the Bit, the PacMan graphic in Stark's domain, the endless infinty of cubicles, and the fantasy that (arcade) gamers could pull chicks by getting high scores.
Tron was true the spirit of the then-emerging hacker ethic in many ways that other movies haven't really ever captured. In fact, I can't think of any other that captures more truly on an emotional scale how programmers think about their programs. In fact there is probably only one movie that has ever been cooler to hackers and that is Swordfish.
fault-tolerant
Flynn, who initially started out as an innovative programmer of videogames, presides over Encom as it becomes the main provider of operating systems for personal computers. Flynn grows more and more out of touch the more money he makes, and his lust for more and more domination of the field becomes more and more intense.
It is now 1995. Two things have emerged that he cannot control:
1.) Arpanet becomes the Internet, and is opened to the Great Unwashed. It begins to take shape as its own cybernetic landscape, much like the interior of the Mainframe but infinitely more vast.
2.) A Flynn-like programmer in Europe, Karl Svenson, has created an operating system which, while still rough around the edges, has the potential of blowing Encom's "Portals" system out of the water. And he's giving it away. The thought galls Flynn.
So Flynn goes back to a wheel of paper punch tape and resurrects the MCP. The MCP's new mission: to conquer the Internet and to eliminate Svenson. The MCP gets out of Flynn's control, and Flynn and Svenson are eventually forced to work together to prevent the MCP from putting them both out of business.
If you work at Pixar, go right ahead and take this. You're welcome.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
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.
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