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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
Do not give Disney your money, they will only use it to steal your culture
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!
Somebody already mashed this trailer up with Michael Jackson's "Beat It" - it works disturbingly well.
--Ryv
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.
TR2N: 3l3C7R1C B0064100
This guy's the limit!
Is nothing sacred? Lightcycles going around curves. How could you... *sob*
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.
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...
But, but, but... we are Generation X, long forgotten in between the baby boomers and their annoying offspring, the GenY'ers. Now that the old fogeys are retiring it is our turn in charge, and we are going to create nostalgia for our youth era gone by. No longer do we have to relive the 1960s and 1970s... nooooo, that is only for the baby boomers. Now instead we get to relive bad hair, metal, band-aid, the dawn of personal computing and video games. We get to recreate Atari 2600 games and make them into movies. We get to mandate any new pop stars create hits "remaking" the hits of our generation... hopefully we'll do better than Phil Collins did with that Supremes remake. This way we'll get to like the current popular music. And g'damn it you are going to sit through it and like it. Maybe in time you too will get sick of it and create your own grunge movement. Rap doesn't count.
To all those GenY'ers who might complain, I say you guys have nothing to bitch about for quite some time. We GenX'ers after all have sat through countless replays of Beatles and Mama's and Papa's songs on the radio, umpteen recollections of what a tragedy it was when losing John Lennon, television show after show on JFK Jr., and that god-awful mess that "the Cuba crisis" was about. About the time you have listened to Nirvana's Teen Spirit for the 10,000th time, and have your own stars go tits up (and I mean beyond that dude who played the Joker in Batman) like Kurt Cobain, well then you can complain.
Now get off my lawn.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
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.)