Slashdot Mirror
Twenty Five Years of Tron
the_quiet_angeleno writes "I have an article in today's Summer Film Preview issue of Los Angeles CityBeat on Disney's sci-fi classic Tron, which is celebrating it's 25th anniversary this year. The piece includes a discussion with Richard Taylor, one of Tron's visual effects supervisors on the film's groundbreaking effects, as well as director Steven Lisberger, on how the narrative incorporates the Jungian concept of individuation. Here's a sample: 'Visual Effects Society member Gene Kozicki, of the L.A.-based visual effects house Rhythm & Hues, believes Tron's legacy was in moving computer-generated visuals into the realm of storytelling. "Research into this type of imagery had been going on for over 15 years, but it was more scientific in nature," Kozicki says, "Once artists began to share their ideas and treat the computer as a tool, it moved away from strict research and towards an art form."
That move changed my life! Up until then I wanted to be a stormtrooper. After seeing Tron I wanted to be a light cycle driver. I ended up being a shift manager at a flour mill. Wee. NoonooNOO noonooNOOnooNOO-nooo...
Tron's legacy was in moving computer-generated visuals into the realm of storytelling.
Sadly, there was not a lot of compelling storytelling in that movie. The script was pretty bad, as was much of the acting (my opinion of course)
Tron opened against ET, and it bombed at the box office. Some people say that Tron's failure at the box office set back CG animation by 10 years. Most studios back then saw the technology as expensive and not worth the investment. Only after CG got it's feet wet in commercials and broadcast in the 80's did the movie studios embrace it again.
I first thought it said 25 years of pron
With some ARMAGETRON! http://armagetronad.net/ (linux pkgs and sourcecode incl)
For a long time, I carried around a logic probe in my tool kit. I didn't need one for my work...I just liked grabbing it and shouting in my best David Warner voice, "Bring in the logic probe!". ^_^
I also said "Greetings, programs!" way more often than I should have...
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Tron's special effects have influenced in more than just movies. Just take a look at case mods and riced out cars sporting neon to see just how much people liked Tron.
Bobo Mahoney
Obligatory tron guy repost.
http://www.tronguy.net/
beta of the Matrix..
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
We're getting tons of festivities, all together: towel day, Star Wars tuned 30, now tron. I say we declare may Nerd Pride Month.
Give Kashyyyk back to the Wookies
I remember seeing this at the /. firehose a while ago but it never made the front page.
Was it a joke or something?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Need some balance here. I'm sick & tired of the coverage that the overrated Star Wars franchise has been getting lately. It's like Al Gore, just give it a rest, we heard your story now move on. Same thing goes to you Lucas, you've had your five minutes of fame now ge the hell out. The original trilogy wasn't all that good and the natalie portman/jar-jar shitfest was an embarrassment to the silverscreen.
Great sci-fi, like Tron, is totally underappreciated in favor of mass-marketed starwars'ish puke.
We just had an article on 30 years of Star Wars, a movie saga that started with some of the most sophisticated computer generated effects ever seen in its time. And it didn't rely on them like a crutch like this.. other movie.
Now, a movie that came 5 years later is being touted as one that opened the doors to computer generated effects as art and a compelling storytelling platform. Someone's not blowing their own horn I hope?
And, seriously, a movie that sucked hard compared to A New Hope.
Mod me down, but the premise behind Tron was no more believable (less, to me) than a mysterious "force" that permeates the universe that can be bent to human will with enough effort and skill -- and definitely not as cool.
TLF
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
if crap script and crap acting (brought about mainly through the lack of a tangible set) put CG films back 10 years, how come it didnt take 10 years from the creation of Star Wars Ep1 (The Phantom Annoying Kid With Over Long Pod Race And Buildup That Only Is Included So Games Can Be Sold) didnt put SW back 10 years?
BTW, watch the Adult Swim preview "Fat Guy Stuck In Internet" - looks like a gay version of Tron.
The book of the film was damn good if i remember...
I can't believe that /. forgot about Star Wars Anniversary
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
The funny thing was it didn't win an Oscar for special effects that year because the Academy felt they had "cheated" by using computers. (Of course, the computers were so slow they had to plan every shot out in detail because 'rerendering' would have taken too much time. And they communicated the data over the phone... by reading the numbers out loud.) Interesting to see how attitudes have changed.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Is being the first movie to be ruined by relying on CGI special effects to carry a movie.
The script was dull, and acting was horrible. That was the first time I ever walked out of a movie theater wanting my money back.
Two of the greatest IT quotes to live by come from Tron:
"On the other side of the screen, it all looks so easy."
"I shouldn't have written all of those tank programs."
~insert tech sarcasm here~
As for which is the dumber movie about computers, I'd say it's a toss-up between Tron and The Matrix. At least Tron had attractive special effects and wasn't so goddamned pretentious.
I piss off bigots.
Seems like every other movie that comes out these days is a remake or spin off of an old idea, I'd think Tron would fall right in line. It would be very similar to the most recent "King Kong" remake, as the original was considered a revolution in special effects for its time much as Tron was in its time.
It would probably be complete slop if they did it, but I would go see it out of curiosity.
while [ 1 ]; do echo -n -e "\xe2\x95\xb$((($RANDOM&1)+1))"; done
it was called "The Matrix"!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Dad used to love that movie, it were our common motor to computing.
?
Sure, it had to compete with E.T, which destroyed it at the box office. However, "Tron" did not fail - it cost $17,000,000 to produce, and it made $33,000,000 domestically. Don't try to blame "Tron" on the reluctance of Hollywood to try new technology.
I am on the road crew. This is my stop sign.
Gibbs: User requests are what computers are for.
Dillinger: Doing our business is what computers are for!
"25 Years of Tron", as if 0.00001% of the Earths population has even thought of Tron in the last 24 years, 11 months.
The most memorable thing about it to me was the arcade game, and it wasn't even that good.
Let us not forget the TV "spinoff" of Tron ... Automan.
Where Glen A. Larson (what show didn't he make during the 70s/80s?) took the idea of Tron and ran with it for 12 episodes.
Where every episode involved a car chase in which Automan eluded the bad guys because he could make 90* turns and they couldn't.
Twenty-five years? I'm a dyed-in-the-wool science-fiction fan, have a substantial collection of sci-fi-books, have watched thousands of science fiction movies ... but twenty-five minutes of Tron was too much. Not that Tron even vaguely resembled science-fiction, any more than Star Wars did.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Or are you just glad to see me?
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Seriously, how hard is it to grasp that the contraction of IT IS is IT'S, and the possessive is ITS? All possessives are ALREADY possessive, so they don't need an apostrophe.
I looked at the headline and thought you meant 25 years of *this* TRON: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_Project But that project began only 23 years ago.
I was a classmate of Gary Demos at Caltech. Through him I met John Whitney Jr.,and John Whitney, Sr. I've got to point out that Demos and Whitney, Jr., played a key role in the history of CGI, including on TRON. John Whitney, Sr. is the father of computers in film animation, going back to analog computers in the 1950s; he also invented the credit crawl technique from the opening of Star Wars (30 years old today).
To excerpt from
http://accad.osu.edu/~waynec/history/timeline.html
While at CalTech, Gary Demos was made aware of the work of John Whitney, Sr. who was teaching classes there, experimenting with early CG images. Whitney's work, and that of the University of Utah, prompted Demos in 1972 to go to work for Evans and Sutherland. E&S used DEC PDP-11 computers along with custom E&S hardware, including the Picture System and a variation of the UofU frame buffer. At E&S, Demos began discussions about filmmaking with Ivan Sutherland, and together they started a company in LA called the Picture/Design Group. Demos met John Whitney Jr. at P/DG, and they started to work on some joint projects with Information International, Inc. Founded in 1962, III was in the business of creating digital scanners and other image processing equipment. Jim Blinn developed software (TRANEW) for III, which ran on a modified DEC 10, called the Foonly F1, which came out of the Stanford Research group and was originally used for OCR.
The III graphics effort was founded as Motion Pictures Product Group by Whitney and Demos (with Art Durinski, Tom McMahon, and Karol Brandt) in 1974. Early software was written by Blinn, Frank Crow, Craig Reynolds, and Larry Malone.They did some early film tests and broadcast graphics work for the European market. Motion picture work included TRON, Futureworld, Westworld, and Looker. They also produced Adam Powers, the Juggler as a demo of their capabilities. They marketed their services as "Digital Scene Simulation", and did several spots for Mercedes ABC and KCET. III hired Richard Taylor, an art director at Robert Abel, to handle the creative director efforts there. He brought a sense of film production to III, which in his words were lacking. He directed "Adam Powers" and was assigned as the effects supervisor for TRON (III produced the MCP, the Solar Sailor, and Sark's Carrier). Other projects included tests for Close Encounters, Star Wars, The Black Hole and the Empire Strikes Back, a stereo production called Magic Journeys, and many groundbreaking television promotion sequences.
Although they defined much of the early commercial perception of CGI, disputes regarding the computing power necessary to continue in the business prompted Whitney and Demos to leave to establish Digital Productions in 1982. They departed before TRON was completed, so much of the III contract was taken up by MAGI. Richard Taylor continued to handle the effects supervision, and was hired by MAGI when the film wrapped.
Gary Demos and John Whitney, Jr. went on to Digital Productions and then Whitney/Demos, and Demos more recently founded DemoGraFX (which was acquired by Dolby Laboratories in 2003), where he worked with digital TV, HDTV standards, digital compositing, and other high technology graphics related projects. Whitney founded USAnimation, which later became Virtual Magic Animation, in 1992. Demos and Whitney received the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Scientific and Engineering Award for the Photo Realistic Simulation Of Motion Picture Photography By Means of Computer Generated Images in 1984 for work on the movies "The Last Starfighter" and on "2010" using the Cray XMP. Demos also received an Academy Scientific and Engineering Award in 1995 for Pioneering Work In Digital Film Scanning", and an Academy Technical Achievement Award in 1996 for Pioneering Work In Digital Film Compositing Systems.
Equipment included PDP-10s, the famed Foonley F1 (a modified DEC 10), a propri
"Where every episode involved a car chase in which Automan eluded the bad guys because he could make 90* turns and they couldn't."
Nothing new. Streethawk could go fast and do ninety degree turns as well. Why he never ended up as a bug on a windshield was amazing too.
It's ironic that for all that it was a milestone in the development of CGI in movies, the way things are getting more and more screwed up in America, years from now no-one will be able to watch it anymore.
0 - the department of Homeland Security has classified Tron as "sensitive" because some locations were filmed at a nuclear research facility, and they're worried about 25 year old nuclear secrets being revealed. They're apparently currently trying to seize all of the footage from Disney and get all copies of the movie pulled from stores.
I read an article recently at http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2007/3/28/132751/38
It has a little CG in it; but a classic - it 'tis not.
There were other movies with tons of CG not long after, like The Last Starfighter. Most of them had poor scripts as well. TRON didn't set the CG industry back 10 years; it was 10 years ahead of its time.
And, it *was* expensive. Unless you were after the CG look of the time, there was no reason to use CG.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Speaking of Hollywood reluctance, I wonder what ever happened to the Tron sequel? A few years ago, Disney was in a buzz about how the new Tron movie was coming out soon. They even made the Tron 2.0 game to ride the promotion wave. Yet nothing ever appeared, and the very idea of a sequel seems to have vanished into the ether.
To be blunt: What happened?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Sadly, I contributed to E.T. doing so much better than Tron. My paper route income didn't leave me with enough funds after paying for my D&D/Traveler/RuneQuest habit to see both, and I hadn't really discovered computers yet, so I decided to see the movie by the guy who had done CE3K. I was very disappointed; there wasn't enough science or violence to hold my interest. I should have seen Tron, where at least there was violence. :-)
Tron is my favourite movie of all time. It is mistakingly labeled sci-fi, but really it's total fantasy. Sure the actors are stiff, the plot is by the numbers and downright silly, but the world created by Steven Lisburger and company really has not been equaled in 25 years. Tron is by far the most labor intensive special effects movie EVER made (pre-digital). Every frame in the computer world had to be processed at least five separate times, with all of the elements. Tron did not set back computer animation by several years as others have incorrectly stated. The truth of the matter was that computer animation was simply too costly, and the technology, including software, to make realistic computer animation simply did not exist till the late 80's. The pinnacle of realistic computer animation was used in the movie "The Last Starfighter," and it simply was cheaper, and more realistic to use models than computer animation. It was not until Terminator 2 that computer graphics were used in a movie realistically and that had nothing to do with the failure of Tron. To me, Tron is one of the "feel good" movies of the 80's and accomplished so many things on so many levels that I really can't criticize it.
"Jeremy, you need to get to an internet cafe and cut and paste some appropriate sentiments about me from the world wide
25 years "Of" Tron? No, "since" Tron.
It's not like Tron has been in your face, except for the odd past-pop-cultural reference over the decades.
OB Simpsons Ref:
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.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
So many here say so, but I cannot see their point, as well as how anyone can compare it with anything else at the time; what has Star Wars to do with it, at all?
As many, I was there and it was clearly groundbreaking. I distinctly remember that I had not been moved by imagery like that since I was little and saw my first Harryhausen or later 2001. Not from the script, which was Disney, but the imagery and immense scale, especially the light cycle race and the tank chase.
Sitting in a theater on opening weekend, huge screen and high quality audio, its few minutes of CGI and music, it was clearly a demonstration of things to come.
If you compare Tron's computer graphics with the computer graphics we have in movies today, they seem crude, yes, but surely if the designers back then had wanted to, they could have made all the shots as complex and slick as what you can do today.
The problem is that if they had tried that with the hardware they had then, the movie would still be rendering today and would probably not appear in cinemas until all of its actors were retired.
See, software HASN'T changed that much in the intervening time; you still make compromises to get the product out the door today, but on different criteria...
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
I was watching Caddy Shack in HDDVD, and found out that Cindy Morgan, the hot babe, was also the girl in TRON. And she's a regular geek!
/
:)
"I wanted to go to Illinois Institute of Technology and become an Engineer, but when I went to open house it was all guys. I kind of got scared. I was a little freaked out. I got over that obviously. I was a geek."
http://www.retrocrush.com/archive2005/cindymorgan
*sigh*
It's ironic that movies like that made use of wireframe images and the ubiquitous green grid perspective plane to look really hi tech, and now that we have enough computing power that we don't need to do those kind of things, natural looking objects look low tech!
'nuff said. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSGEbJLCRuQ
Just because you get modded "insightful" on Slashdot doesn't mean you actually are in real life.
Does it really count as "25 years of Tron" when you forget about Tron entirely for 5, 10 years at a time, then think of Tron for about 5-7 minutes, then forget for another 5, 10 years or so, until the next 90 seconds, and so on, over 25 years? Kinda like spending months rendering 30 seconds of CGI.
--
make install -not war
Tron was not a good movie. Not even close. But man was it groundbreaking. It's up there on my list of favorites with "Dark Star," John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon's collaboration that is a clear precursor to O'Bannon's "Alien."
I heartily recommend that all Slashdot nerds get copies of *both* (VCI released Dark Star on DVD, both original and theatrical versions). They're both like watching a long, slow inside shaggy dog joke.
What memories. "Computers are for USERS." Was that concept prophetic or what?
--
Toro
Arguably Tron was the first Cyberpunk movie, ever. Beat out Blade Runner if my memory serves me right. Also the short story in which the term "Cyberpunk" was coined was written in 1980 but published in '83.
Tron was the first movie to ponder the concept of life inside a computer or a computer network. Even though Tron's worldview was more the black-and-white traditional superhero/space opera good-vs.-evil worldview rather than the more nuanced, shaded, and shady world of what we now know as Cyberpunk, it postulated human interaction with a completely digital world, where "all things that are, are lights." Flynn would not have to be physically sucked into the world if Tron was entirely true to the genre, but then again arguably the genre didn't exist at that point. Networked computers were only seen commonly in business. Personal Computers were basically toys at that point. Networking? What's that? Modems? Expensive toys that spit 300 characters out per second. There was no popular concept of this yet.
Any Tron sequel would by necessity have to borrow tropes from Cyberpunk. There would be no more need for the human digitizer. Flynn would just have to "jack in" to interact with the world he interacted with as a physical figure in the original. And the playing field is bigger now...not just one machine, but billions. I would think that Flynn might also naturally morph into somewhat or maybe even entirely a villain, perhaps one with the global reach and Croesus-esque wealth of a Bill Gates and the charisma of a Steve Jobs. Maybe, while defending his proprietary empire, he has to face the Open Source movement. Maybe he might just revive the Master Control Program to help him in his quest. Hmmm...let's say I'm "open sourcing" this idea and if Disney/Pixar wants to do something with it, go right ahead.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Tron is the reason I have 100k a year job today with no college. I saw Tron when I was 11 years old. Tron and Wargames are what made me want learn about computers and to this very day I love working with them.
So was it a bad movie? Maybe, but I don't care. It influenced my life in a positive way so greatly that it will alway occupy a place of honor and respect with me.
"It's because they're stupid, that's why. That's why everybody does everything." -Homer Simpson
the last starfighter was.
I saw how the bikes were put together for Tron a long time ago -- apparently they lacked the ability to use boolean operations so all of the parts of the bikes were animated together and placed together very carefully out of real primitive shapes. I can't remember if they had basic parenting or not...
Oh, and the outfits were all hand painted in by some hardcore artists in Korea, they had to do the job twice over because they finished it so damn quickly the first time that each frame stuck together and was rendered useless. Pretty fascinating.
30 years of star wars, 25 years of tron, 10 years of waiting for duke nukem forever...
classic!
~insert tech sarcasm here~
Actually, if you play through Tron 2.0 you discover it IS the sequel.
Picked it up for $8 at work a month ago. As a whole it's one of the better single player storylines in an FPS I've played in a long while. Theres a few just outright cheezy parts, hey it's dizney, but whouldn't make a bad transition to movie in the end. They even had several actors from the original film VO the game.
http://imdb.com/title/tt0208650/
If I had mod points I'd use them all up for this.
Star Wars was simply the most over-hyped movie ever. I remember just how overwhelming the quantity of advertising and "news" stories about it were before it even opened. I saw it on a recommendation of my brother and was totally disappointed
It had improved special effects but it didn't have an interesting story, it didn't have any good science fiction element, and it didn't have anything interesting to say.
Tron at least had an attempt at an interesting theme, as flawed as it was, as well as ground-breaking special effects. I never saw it in its' theatrical release, and it's by far not my favorite movie, or even favorite science fiction movie, but it was better than the incessant and boring Star Wars franchise.
I don't know about anyone else here... well, I probably do... but I loved Tron when I was a kid. Hell, I was 9 when it came out in the US (I lived in the UK, so it was a year or so later that I saw it). I remember being blown away by the visuals, and really getting a kick out of the movie. I also remember going home and loading up a game on my ZX Spectrum and all of a sudden the concepts of programs "living" inside the computer as active entities really clicked with me. The religious overtones of the "user" (actually the programmer) as a "god figure" became extremely alluring to my probably sugar-addled 10 year old brain.
:D
Jump forward a few years, and as I got deeper into a computers and started REALLY creating programs on my Atari ST and Amiga I would be sitting there coding in 68K assembly and still I visualized each of these programs as "people" living inside my computer. It helped me visualize coding flow, interaction, even helped me visualize the "handing off" of data from one program to another in order to get a job done. Hell, the movie even helped me to visualize multi-tasking.
I've never forgotten Tron, and to this day even though I work as a Systems Engineer and not a programmer, every time I write something in PHP, ASP or some other language depending on requirements I still seem them in my minds eye as "people" in neon blue.
I also have to say that particularly as the world became networked the vision of Tron fits quite well with the world of computers that came much later. In a way, Tron was somewhat prophetic as at the time most computers were really single-tasking monsters. Tron to me really depicted a networked, multi-tasking advanced system that really wasn't commercially available for many years after that.
25 years. Now I feel old
There is also a recent comic book series about TRON. It continues the story from both the movie and the game.
Also, in the game Kingdom Hearts II there is a TRON world. As with the first Kingdom Hearts game it features many worlds, most based on a different Disney movie.
I used to use TRON and TROFF all the time on my old TRS-80. Ah, the memories... line numbers filling the screen like a field of wildflowers.
But it seems like the poor C64 users never had a chance to share my joy. Just the 128, and the rare C16 and Plus/4 had TRON and TROFF.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
Bring in the *ahem* logic probe!
Unfortunately the comic book was discontinued after just a few issues. You can still get them from Slave Labor Graphics, however. The artwork in the first two issues is absolutely terrible, but they changed artists in issue 3 and both the visuals and storyline had found their sweet spot when it was cancelled. *sigh*
As the grandparent stated, the TRON 2.0 video game is absolutely the genuine sequel to TRON. The plot is solid, the gameplay is great, and the environment is oh-so-compelling- far superior even to the original movie. It really would make a great movie, though I don't think that the translation to big screen would offer anything that the game doesn't already have. I place it firmly in my top 5 best games ever list.
And then there's multiplayer. The standard deathmatch mode is nice but nothing special. The arena combat is original and really puts you into the feel of what doing battle on the game grid would actually be like.
However, the game really shines in Lightcycles, both single player and multiplayer! It'd be worth the full price of the game just for that mode alone. I've played a lot of excellent light cycles games over the years, and TRON 2.0 wipes the floor with even the very best of them. Again it's superior even to the original move. It's gorgeous, authentic, and has surprising variety. It's also held up exceptionally well in the few years since it came out. I was at a LAN party just last weekend and we spent a good chunk of the day doing light cycle combat. I was in heaven.
Yeah, I'm gushing here, but it really is that good. I don't understand how it is that more people haven't discovered this game.
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
Armagetron and GLTron are both great fun, but honestly neither one holds a candle to the actual TRON 2.0 game. It's a completely different caliber. Granted, it's not open source and as far as I know it's only available for Windows and Mac OS X, but if you're really fanatical about light cycles the game is worth it just for that mode alone (to say nothing of the superb FPS and disc combat arena modes).
If you can find a copy it's absolutely worth picking up, even at full retail. However, any retailer that has it likely has it in the $5-$10 bin, which is a steal for one of the best games ever made.
Boundless Expansion, Self-Transformation, Dynamic Optimism, Intelligent Technology, Spontaneous Order- BEST DO IT SO!
I'll submit James Earl Jones as carrying the movie. The actor voicing MCP tried hard, and came up with a close second. Together they created the "Voice of Evil" sound.
However, Star Wars was also full of flashy exploding stuff... which all science fans know wouldn't actually make any of those sounds. Would it have carried so well if all those battles were silent? Also, I think the storyline of Tron, however clunkily rendered, was far more advanced for its time and the audience simply didn't have the tech background to understand.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
For me the most interesting part of the movie Tron is its link to Dr. Alan Kay, who is easily one of the most influential computer scientists to have ever lived.
The story is that the film was written by Bonnie MacBird, who based it in part on Dr. Kay's work. She met him as part of the research and they eventually got married.