'Tron: Legacy' Director Explains the Tron World

An anonymous reader writes "We only had to wait 28 years for the second installment of 'Tron' — the sequel, 'Tron: Legacy,' comes out on Friday. It is expected to have less awesomely bad '80s graphics and more awesomely awesome millennial CGI. In advance of the opening, Discover has an interview with director Joe Kosinski in which he talks about reinventing the light cycle, and explains that the Tron world resembles the Galapagos Islands, where everything evolved in isolation."

Comments

Re:"awesomely bad 80s graphics"

[jdgeorge]

Perhaps the submitter does not understand that Tron's graphics were cutting edge at the time. If he doesn't get off my lawn, I'll have to run him over in my awesomely bad 80s monster truck.

Re:"awesomely bad 80s graphics"

[6031769]

That will teach me to his submit before rereading my post

Want to bet?

Re:"awesomely bad 80s graphics"

[mcgrew]

Jees, these kids... I was about 30 when Tron came out. Tron's graphics were awesome for the time, better than any of the coin operated video games that were out then that the movie was portraying.

As to the plot, aside from the necessary suspension of disbelief of a) a laser disassembling a human and storing him in a computer and b) true machine intelligence, it was as good or better than the average action flick, let alone one of the old westerns from the '40s.

I was working at Disney when it came out, and got to see a pre-release screening with 72 mm film close to a large screen. The DVD (my copy of which has been stolen, sadly) really paled in comparison to seeing it in 72 mm in the theater.

No, I had no part in making the movie; the pre-release was one of the many perks Disney employees got.

The original Star Trek, on the other hand, DID often have cheesy effects, bad acting, and bad plots, even though a lot of the episodes were and still are awesome.

I fear the new Tron will suck, but hope it doesn't.

Re:"awesomely bad 80s graphics"

[vuke69]

The DVD (my copy of which has been stolen, sadly)

Wow, Disney is more serious about suppressing the old version than I had initially suspected.

Re:"awesomely bad 80s graphics"

[mcgrew]

TRON (yes the name is kinda hokey

TRON is a debugging command in the BASIC programming language. It is an abbreviation of TRace ON. It is used primarily for debugging line-numbered BASIC GOTO and GOSUB statements. In text-mode environments such as the TRS-80 or MS-DOS/IBM PC-DOS, it would print the current line number which was being executed, on-screen. In a windowed environment, when the TRON command had been executed, a window would indicate the line number being executed at that instant. This command's opposite is TROFF, or TRace OFF, used to turn off command tracing.[1]

Re:"awesomely bad 80s graphics"

[TheRaven64]

MCP (which did stand for Master Control Program) was the operating system on Burroughs Large Systems machines, from the B5000 onwards. It was released in 1961, so predated TRON by some time. It was the first OS to support multiple CPUs, the first OS to be written in a high-level language, and the first commercial OS to support virtual memory.

Re:"awesomely bad 80s graphics"

[Nadaka]

Wargames. I re watched it recently. It actually has some of the most realistic representations of hacking and hackers in any movie ever.

Re:"awesomely bad 80s graphics"

[simcop2387]

I believe that War Games vs Sneakers would be a far more interesting match up.