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Tron Legacy Exposed
KingofGnG writes "Disney has chosen the San Diego Comic-Con International to present its new sci-fi project: the sequel to Tron. The classic movie from 1982 dealt with video games, virtual reality and 3D graphics when none of those things were widely popular. The new movie has got an official title and synopsis now, and they've released the very first trailer from the movie (this time without silly censorship) together with some concept art and the teaser poster." No matter how silly the movie is, they'll at least get my money for sheer nostalgia.
Videogames weren't popular in 1982? Let me guess: in 1982, you were still a
Hershey bar in your dad's back pocket.
One word: Pacman
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I'll miss trying to pronounce the working title. Trihtoon, Tratoowon, The movie concept formerly known as Tron 2.
Do not give Disney your money, they will only use it to steal your culture
Had lots of Atari games in 1982 - like Asteroids.
Wow, those were the days.
Before that, like in the late 70's we had Pong, which I could play for hours - depleting my entire savings of quarters.
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
But, though pacman was popular, were 3D graphics even in existance? Wasn't Wolfenstein, released in 1992 the first game with 3D graphics?
The early arcade first-person shooter Battlezone was released in 1980, and it might not even be the first.
Do not give Disney your money, they will only use it to steal your culture
Before you mod Plunky's post all the way to -1, consider that The Walt Disney Company was one of the two biggest advocates of the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 (the other being the Gershwin estate).
No matter how silly the movie is, they'll at least get my money for sheer nostalgia.
Oops, you just defined the source to 90% of Disney's revenue.
I am the lawn!
that the game that came out a few years ago was Tron 2. Am I missing something?
Somebody already mashed this trailer up with Michael Jackson's "Beat It" - it works disturbingly well.
--Ryv
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Along with "War Games" TRON gave an unrealistic expectation of what computers could do which continues to perplex Ludites to this day.
On an offtopic note, this reminds me of one time when I went to a school auction. A couple of idiots felt that they got a really good deal, because they got the largest piece of computing equipment (A DEC computer of some sort) for less than what the Commodore PET computers were going for. I couldn't help but smile when I heard one say to the other "This part's the brains."
I really enjoyed the PC game Tron 2.0, put out by Monolith a few years back. It's actually quite clever (some good jokes, and of course the Musak version of the Tron theme plays in "the real world"), and the graphical style makes it almost timeless: it doesn't require high poly count video cards, it's all about that Tron look. The negatives, of course, were that most of the weapons past the disc were superfluous, and the multiplayer lightcycle races grew tiresome after a few rounds. It also had Bruce Boxleitner and Cindy Morgan providing voice talent.
I'm excited about a new film, but I'm also torn about what this might do to the story. Still, it's nice to see an interesting IP still has some life in it.
No matter how silly the movie is, they'll at least get my money for sheer nostalgia.
Oops, you just defined the source to 90% of Disney's revenue.
But how is the remaining 10 percent split among Super Jonas Bros., Miley Virus, Desperate Housewives and the rest of the ABC network, much is Kill Bill and other Miramax productions, and ESPN?
I'll miss trying to pronounce the working title. Trihtoon, Tratoowon, The movie concept formerly known as Tron 2.
TR2N - TRZN - TREZON - Treason
You can't take the sky from me...
http://www.complex.com/blogs/2009/07/27/wake-n-watch-tron-legacy-teaser-trailer/
One simple rule for its versus it's
I see the other 10% of their revenue coming from the new game "LightCycles 3D"
Which I sadly will probably buy a copy of.
A video game published by Disney probably won't run on Linux, unlike Armagetron Advanced.
http://www.flynnlives.com/media/video/0xendgame.aspx
I'll get downed for the fanboys, but whatever:
I couldn't possibly care less about a Tron sequel. The original was enjoyable when you were a kid, but watching it as an adult, you just realize what boring and uninteresting crap it is. It isn't even watchable in stretches longer than about fifteen minutes. So anyone who has finally realized what crap it is won't care about a sequel and kids today who are the age that we were when we liked the first one won't care because they weren't around for the first one.
I could almost understand a remake and doing it right this time. But a sequel suggests that they thought the original was actually good. The only people who will care about this are those who are suffering a heavy bout of nostalgia and haven't watched it recently so still mistakenly believe it's AWESOME.
It's like Knight Rider. I'm sure a lot of us remember how cool Knight Rider was when we were kids. Then watched a couple episodes as adults and realized how stupid and terrible and uninteresting it is.
Instead of this shameless money-grab, they should... you know... do something new.
I saw the headline and I was really hoping to see that guy who always posts how linux is used to host tron fantasies. For once, that post would have been marginally relevant.
Yeesh. Did not want to associate those two ideas in my head... not that tronguy left much to the imagination to begin with.
How much will I have to drink to erase that thought?
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
Is nothing sacred? Lightcycles going around curves. How could you... *sob*
I hope it has Bruce making a reappearance as a grizzled TRON veteran willing to take down a despotic, orwellian virtual government.
Bruce is just like Captain John Sheridan in real life...right?
Those poor bastards, they have us surrounded. Now we can fire at them in all directions!
If I remember correctly the premise of the sequel is that Enzo and Andraia get lost on the web for a while and grow up to be badasses - and then return to Mainframe for the final battle with Megabyte?
Bow-ties are cool.
New characters/themes to bring Tron into the 21st century:
1) Qubit - flies around saying, "Yes", "no", and "maybe"
2) Tron-troll - Any scene involving communication between more than two characters is constantly interrupted by the local Tron-troll
3) Anonymous - suddenly hordes of identical looking drones appear to aid the main character in his/her quest then dissipate feeling good about themselves
4) Users - rather than only having sparse information about the users, characters in Tron know everything about the users and are constantly interrupted by the user's incessant communications about what they are currently doing or their asking Tron characters to fill out quizzes which have nothing to do with the plot of the movie
5) DRM - weapons, vehicles, and entire structures suddenly stop working at the whim of the MCP
Faith is a willingness to accept something w/o complete proof and to act on it. Reason allows you to correct that faith.
By coincidence, last weekend I saw TRON in its entirety on YouTube. I must confess that it's a great movie. Obviously, technically, nobody knew what the hell they were talking about and it shows. Still, it was a great, prophetic movie. Well worth catching in 10 parts, each 10 minutes long...
If the title of this movie will be "Troff"?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
They'll have an unrealistic expectation of any expression of technology, by definition. All the while War Games and Tron were inspiring a whole generation (myself included) to learn what it's all about. We knew very well the expectations in both movies were unrealistic, but that was never the point. I had no hope of making my Sinclair ZX81 do anything remotely close to what Tron showed me but I got to fell like Flynn when I hacked a reset button for it (pin 13 to ground on the Z80). (Good) sci-fi is about inspiration, not reality. If it were realistic it would be a documentary and in 1982 a very boring one...
no matter how good people pretend the movie is, I won't be giving them a fucking dime.
Thanks though, for your subsidy. Somebody has to give their money away for total bullshit, might as well be you with all the extra cash and nothing better to spend it on.
when they start pushing the smurfs, live action, I wish I could punch you people in the mouth, one by one.
While you all bask in your nostaliga over here, I'll be over there both watching Olivia Wilde talk about the movie and watching the non-slashdotted trailer.
In the style of "turn every movie into a game before it even comes out" we should get a shiny new Tron game (joysticks anyone? :-D) by this Christmas!
Sarcasm aside, a new Tron game would be wicked. *goes to play the old Tron again*
I think you need to go to sleep and reboot your brain.
Warning, incoming game...
Where is that now..?
In 1976, I went around upstate New York pitching for a tiny outfit that produced commercials. One of films I showed the prospective clients was for a production house which used Defense Department-type 3D computer graphics (done on mainframes) to make type rotating through 360 degrees and even a clear bubble! It was awesome. That being said, I think the most important lesson of Tron was the concept that computer programs and functions could be quantified as symbols (and people).... and manipulated. The Xerox (then Apple) GUI was understandable if you had seen Tron. We had been psychologically primed for all of this by reading about the symbolic ceremonies, parade and dances etc. in Herman Hesse's 'Magister Ludi', a very popular work of the 60's and 70's. When we saw Tron and the modern computer GUI, they were recognized instantly as a relative The Glass Bead Game.
Not catacomb 3d :)
Wasn't E.T. on Atari three dimensional? Seemed like it to me, at age 4...
Light Cycles was just a take-off of the old Intellivision game "SNAFU".
Premise: The MCP is sold to a young kid at an electronics fair. Playing a game of chess the MCP (fitting on an old tape reel) the MCP says he can improve the game if the young boy, Inserts a disk from another program. After a few minutes the graphics improve in the game.
A short interlude of the boy progressively adding new disks and features as the MCP grows more complex. Then he finally plugs it in to the Internet...
10 years later.
The young boy, now a leader in industry running a CPU manufacture seals the deal on a government mandated contract for a microprocessor that will provide comprehensive inventory control and management. It's a hit, every company signs on to use it with one exception. Encom...
Meanwhile a well funded group of terrorists are emerging across the world tightening their grip on key infrastructure. Encom employees are also apparently targets...
The boy enters the office. The MCP speaks... You are no longer of use to me... Dillinger shoots the kid in the back...
Suddenly the MCP using a backdoor in the CPU design effectively shuts the world down... The terrorists, the MCP... The same organization...
"When someone in the real world pushes me, I push back..."
Encom, the only company not to use the chip (through some creative legal manuvering) digs out the prohibited AI code that Flynn had shuttered years earlier...
Now a dual race begins, the real world must stop the MCP's living forces while Encom's team races against time deploying dozens of AI units outside the firewall with the trailer closing with the following command lines:
PROMPT: Compile Tron 2.0
===> (bunch of autoconfig output)
===> Time to completion: 8:00 hours...
PROMPT: LOAD PROG: Laser Array 3
===>
===> Laser at full power.
===> Target Locked...
===> Flynn? Is that you?
Darkness....
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
No matter how silly the movie is, they'll at least get my money for sheer nostalgia.
MOVIE EXEC 1: (snorting coke from breast of hooker) See, Larry? Your whole idea about making good movies is pointless. Add some zombies to Tron Legacy and we're golden.
MOVIE EXEC 2: (snorting coke from other breast) Yeah, you're right, Bob. I'll get those other nostalgia movie projects greenlit.
MOVIE EXEC 1: Have them add more sparkles to the Twilight sequel. I totaled my Enzo last week and need another.
Zaxxon, released in 1982 was an isometric-view 3d game.
There, I fixed that for ya ;-)
To the haters: You can't win. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
Back when video games were a fairly new thing and CGI was amazing they made Tron. The visual style was impressive, especially given the use of hand tinting and other post processing effects. These days it's all too easy using CGI and other computer gadgetry.
There simply isn't any way that this sequel can stand out compared to all the other CGI fx laden films around. Unless of course they go for rotoscoping or similar as used in A Scanner Darkly.
What was it about Wolfenstien that gave me such a sick headache? Poor frame rate?
That was quite a long post from someone who "Could not care less."
If you are so apathetic, why did you even click the post, let alone reply to it?
Here's a bit of odd trivia. The original Tron movie was created (in part) on a clone of the Digital PDP-10 computer. The PDP-10 includes an instruction called TRON (Test Right-halfword Ones and skip if Not masked). The opcode in octal (which is the convention on the PDP-10) is 666.
I doubt Disney will actively publicize this.
(I still fondly remember working for years with this odd but elegant 36-bit machine.)
No, the grue, of course, was from Infocom which came out later. (I highly enjoyed those games, but they were not 3D graphics.) In this maze game you fell into a pit and broke your neck. Although there were climbable pits that took you to the next level, they were easily mapped and there was usually only one or two per level. However, it seemed that once your torch ran out, pits started showing up all over the place. With each step you took in the dark there was an increased chance of falling into a pit. Sometimes (although rarely) you could fall into a pit on the first step after the light went out. Other times you could walk as far as 10 steps safely. One person claimed to have gone 14 steps, but no one else saw him and no one could replicate that.
Great civilizations have lived and died on false theories. Don't mess up mine with a few facts.
I had 3d construction kit for the spectrum. It was a development environment that dreams were made of.
Damn blue! Where's the bright orange? And where's the grid? Damn curves!
At the time Tron was laden with current computer jargon/memes, such as the 'Input Output tower' and the character/program 'RAM' ...mind boggling stuff.
Now we know that Tron Legacy is a nostalgia laden rehash (doesn't deserve to be called Tron 2.0 if it's more of a service pack than a major release) but if it were to be the current day equivlent groundbreaking film, it would be something like Avatar with added 21st century memes: lolwut?, FAIL, In soviet russia.. babby, pwn3d, CHEEZBURGER? Throw in candy moutain unicorns and charlie bit my finger and some 1337 speak and make the credits like a warez keygen demoscene and you have a true-to-the-times movie that would be the most torrented piece of crap of all time.
yeah... so I see why they have done it a different way.. don't complain!
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Just watched the trailer ....
I think I had a geekgasm .....
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
The video game KNOT in 3D was a 3D version of the lightcycle game from Tron. It was released in 1983 and ran on the ZX Spectrum.
I wonder if they'll hire her again.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
No matter how silly the movie is, they'll at least get my money for sheer nostalgia.
This is why Hollywood does so many re-makes, sequels, and CGI inserts/remasters. Please stop it. Thank-you.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I'm excited as hell for this movie, but I wish they brought back David Warner as Sark. You might say he's too old, but I've seen him in something recently and he still looks good. He's truly an underrated actor and makes a great villain.
A little pointless trivia, he was also the voice of the MCP.
I thought the sequel was already done... Three times over, in fact...
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
This time it's blacker and deeper than ever!
First Disney movie with that tagline!
Edith Keeler Must Die
Wasn't there already a preview for a sequel of Tron last year?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Seven years after Tron, Slipstream premiered in 1989 starring Mark Hamill, Bill Paxton and (pre Sir) Ben Kingsly. Here's hoping Steven Lisberger can salvage his directorial good name.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloak_&_Dagger
Disney cracks me up. Who purchased the 20th ann. edition of Tron in the double-wide DVD case when it came out, only to see it recently in a standard DVD case? I remember going to Disneyland in the mid 80's and the only reference to the Tron film at the park was an overhead projection while I was going through a darkly-lit tunnel on the monorail. I don't think Disney ever fully understood what they had on their hands. Even now, in an age of sequels and reimaginings, Tron has had to make due with a Monolith videogame and decades of nostalgia-fed fans. I think Disney always thought of this property as being an outsider in their midst.
I'd think with a big game release and online flash game promotion Disney might make threats to tons of tron like games and knock offs that are too much like the film.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
sound like a mix of borg and skynet.
This isn't a trailer. It's an FX test. The finished product won't look like this and is still underwork.
John Lasseter (Finding Nemo, Toy story, Wall-e etc) from Pixar, saw the original when he was a kid and it set his dreams on fire - Woooooooooow - I'm going to do that. And he has in a way, and finally the chance presented itself for him to return to the early dreams - and is now overseeing Tron Legacy.
And all the kids who know noooooooooothing, are shaking in their pants when they download the HD version of the trailer.
Oh... and in case you didn't know... Flynn Lives!
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
From Slashdot, way back.... http://slashdot.org/articles/04/04/18/1515201.shtml He's actually a really smart guy, a maintainer (or was) of the Hercules Emulator, a brilliant piece of software that lets you run IBM's MVS on your PC. Play with COBOL. PL/I, JCL, even Assembler your heart's delight.
awesome Laurie Anderson reference...!
Ask Me About... The 80's!
Less esoteric was the SEX (sign extend X) opcode of the 6809, which we tried to use at every opportunity.
Maybe it was just me, but there was something about the crowd reaction whem the blue guy busted out the lightcycle that gave that video a little something extra.
It has nothing to do with Virtual Realty, other than the fact that the movie was depicted as a microcosm of a computer system. There were no fancy power-gloves, there was no VR Helmet....dude just got zapped and digitized into the system by the Master Control Program.....I'm sure the whole movie is foreign to the author, as it brings us back to the days of mainframe computing and job batch controls... ....there's going to come a day where computer history is going to be a requirement, just so some people don't sound stupid.
There are 2 groups of people you can make fun of on the Internet without fear of attack. The illiterate, and the Amish.
I must have dropped thousands of dollars in quarters into Zaxxon, centipede, spyhunter, robotron, Bezerk, and other games.
Spyhunter rocked!
We had an Atari 2600 at home and traded cartridges with our friends. Yars Revenge, Combat, Asteroids, Space Invaders where the main games. In 1991, I pulled the 2600 out and built a huge library of games - perhaps 100 from donations. Then gave it away to an orphanage.
Video games were hugely popular, but a kid didn't have enough money to buy one. We did get a few dollars in allowance weekly so going to the arcade at the mall was possible on a Friday night to drop $5.
Tron was a good movie, but the graphics were annoying. They did fit into the video game graphics expectation for the time.
I remember going to stay at my Grandmothers for a week with little to do other than go to the cinema in the shopping mall, I saw Tron every day for that whole week, by the end I as obsessed dreaming of what really happened on the other side of the video screen.I pestered the parents to get my my first computer TI-99/4a and never looked back. Even now, as a grizzled 38 year old I got a knot of childlike glee in my stomach watching the trailer. Sadly the last time I felt like that was the trailer for the Phantom Menace *shakes fist at George Lucas* I still watch Tron from time to time and it just never gets old for me even if the dialog is a bit cheesy now, I let it off cos I just love it.
I've got some photographs, I'd like to show them to you. Though you don't know the girls You'll recognise the view..
I saw the original Tron film the day it opened in theaters, on mushrooms. The impact was enormous, like a reindeer flotilla.
Say hello to my little sig.
What "silly censorship" is the author talking about?
I think Robotech is being made into a movie too.
Anything "Robotech" should just die already...
I kinda liked that cartoon... except that playing J-pop to aliens confuses them (wait, maybe that makes sense)
Well, when you consider the aliens in Macross are basically humans, shuffled into a life of military service where anything of a sexual nature is forbidden and repressed to the point they don't even remember what it is they're missing out on - then the idea of them freezing up when exposed to images of a cute teenage girl is a bit easier to understand...
Bow-ties are cool.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maze_War