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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.
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
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.
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.
Craptastic. Honestly, Automan was just barely better than Manimal.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Ah... Manimal and Automan... brings back memories of my terribly misspent youth.
I think that was around the same time as "Otherworld" and "V: The Series".
it was called "The Matrix"!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Gibbs: User requests are what computers are for.
Dillinger: Doing our business is what computers are for!
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.
Hey, until Phantom Menace, it wasn't even one word.
Unfortunately, Star Wars didn't use any computer generated effects. The original version was done the old fashioned way, with models and latex. A few years later, Lucas decided that CGI was the way of the future, so he took a hunk of his profits and started a little company to design and manufacture CGI hardware. They did a lot of the effects for Wrath of Khan, among other things, but they never did as well as Lucas had hoped so he sold them to a recently fired billionaire looking for a new business to run. You may have heard of them; their name is Pixar.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
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.
I really don't know how to say this without being flamebait, but Tron is a classic and burn in hell. :)
"Jeremy, you need to get to an internet cafe and cut and paste some appropriate sentiments about me from the world wide
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
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.
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*
Look very carefully at the name of the FBI agent in that piece....
Tron was layered about 20 times per shot; it wasn't so much digital as the ultimate analog movie.
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
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!