Tron

I’ve always known about Tron.  I remember seeing the ads for it when it was coming out & the ads for it being on television as a kid & the thing that always made me steer clear of it was the billing “Disney’s Tron” because Disney made crap for kids.  (With the exception of The Jungle Book, I’ve never had much affection for any of the classic Disney stuff & the only time I’ve been to Disney World was when I was three & the main memories I have are waiting in lines & being briefly separated from my family in a crowd (which was pretty frightening).)  My one brother had a pocket version of the light bike game & that was pretty awesome (in fact I have a flash version of it up on the Silber website) & I thought some of the action figures looked kinda cool (turns out the design for most of this movie was by Moebius & Syd Mead (Blade Runner), but I still avoided it.  Over the years I would see clips on a regular basis in documentaries about sci-fi movies or computer culture or whatever, but they never gave me an urge to watch it.

A few months ago I turned the Tron: Legacy movie on while assembling mini-comics & I thought it was kinda crap, but I did think some of the character design looked cool.  Then I saw the new Tron: Uprising cartoon & it was pretty awesome (right now you can watch it online here).  It reminds me of Aeon Flux in both themes & art style (end up one of the designers for it, Eric Canete, used to be a protege of Peter Chung (Aeon Flux)).

So I decided it was finally time to watch the original.  So the original, it’s a mess.  I guess it was supposed to be a movie so computer geeks (then maybe 10% of the population instead of today’s 30% of the population) could show their kids that they were cool.  The plot is a computer programmer gets digitized & sucked into the computer world & has an adventure trying to find his way out & all the people look like real world counterparts in what I assume is a Wizard of Oz reference. The villain has the typical villain flaw of toying with enemies & letting them kill him instead of just destroying them at the start.  The graphics, which didn’t look particularly good at the time, I enjoy as a weird aesthetic that goes against the modern computer special effects that I hate.  It brought up all these weird theological ideas with the programs that believed in mankind being an outdated religion, but did nothing with them.  Granted I was assembling comics while watching this, but there were parts where I felt like a scene was cut out or something because it didn’t follow clearly.  If you’ve managed to not see this so far, I’m pretty sure you’re fine without it & would be better off checking out Tron: Uprising.