The Story of Tron

An anonymouse reader writes "Tom's Hardware has a feature up on the makings of Tron which may interest latent fans. Through interviews with the creators they explore the makings of Tron, from how it came to be picked up by Disney to how the effects were put together ('While the majority of the film takes place in the computer world, only 15 minutes worth of footage actually used CGI', because it would have taken years to make the film otherwise). They then explore why the film flopped at the box office. 'It was like we put LSD in the punch at the school prom and it was just way more than they can handle,' said Steven Lisberger."

Can anyone...

honestly think about tron without the image of the tron guy [tronguy.net] coming to mind?

Re:Can anyone...

http://www.tronguy.net/TRONguard/ has just managed to put me off my breakfast which is nice

Time to "crack out" Goatse again, eh? ;)

Separated at birth?

Is it just me, or does Tronguy look quite a lot like Ned Flanders at a fancy dress? "Yes indeed-e, tron-a-roony."

Re:Can anyone...

honestly think about tron without the image of the tron guy coming to mind?

I could, just before clicking the link. Thanks for nothing.

Excuse me...

I believe he has my stapler.

Or...

Special effects != Return Investment

May the wind be always at your back,
-Empyrealmortal

Where is our Pixar/Disney Sequal?

The rumours few around a few years back but with this years aquissition of Pixar by Disney it could be a huge blockbuster.

Re:Where is our Pixar/Disney Sequal?

Prehaps the plot should be about the redux of the MCP trying to taking over the internet and enforce its own standards which everyone else has to confirm to ... Oh sorry that was Verisign wasn't it. OK What about a multi-national company that tries to get into every corner of your home to control the environment that has an evil overlord at the top... no sorry thats microsoft Right ok definitly good idea this time My Little Pony attack the Care Bares .... (goes off into a strange, caffine induced rant)

Sequel?

What were they going to call it? Troff?

SQL?

Cron of course.

Re:SQL?

Or Pr0n, the X-rated version.

Re:Where is our Pixar/Disney Sequal?

How about a prequel where they have it all taking place inside a calculator and everything is slow motion and LCD black on grey?

Easy answer

They then explore why the film flopped at the box office.

Same reason many special-effect movies flop at the box office.

They started with a lousy script, and an implausibly silly plot that its very hard to look past. The market for movies that look pretty but don't engage on a human level is very, very small.

"The Master Control Program has chosen you to serve your system on the Game Grid. Those of you who continue to profess a belief in the Users will receive the standard substandard training, which will result in your eventual elimination."

See? That's dialogue bad enough to have come from one of the Matrix sequels.

Re:Easy answer

""The Master Control Program has chosen you to serve your system on the Game Grid. Those of you who continue to profess a belief in the Users will receive the standard substandard training, which will result in your eventual elimination.""

hey! but thats what i tell all my new sysadmins!?!

Re:Easy answer

"The Master Control Program has chosen you to serve your system on the Game Grid. Those of you who continue to profess a belief in the Users will receive the standard substandard training, which will result in your eventual elimination."

See? That's dialogue bad enough to have come from one of the Matrix sequels

It's a laugh isn't it? Take this for example

The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't. --Douglas Adams

In order to take Tron seriously, you have to not take it so seriously. This was what 1981 or 1982 or so... video arcades were newish and computers were fancy mystical machines no one understood, esp this whole concept of easily editable word processed documents I.E. how someone with no real skills can delete someone else's name and take credit for their work, or worse yet create a program which will do this automaticly. Take into the account the 1980s mindset of computers which for the most part would be arcade style video games, using them and some spiffy new computer animation and you have the perfect vehicel for satire. And yes, the dialog is the likes of which that you would find in a Matrix sequal... and *that* is what makes it so funny.

It was a brave new world

The geeks I knew back in the day loved Tron, not as satire, but possibly something more like burlesque. But even though it was brain-dead fun, there was something more to the movie that made us accept it. That wasn't easy; we weren't an easier audience to please than modern geeks, who roll their eyes at the cliche "tap-tap-tap we're in" hacking scene. Nobody feels affection for a movie if they don't sense some level of truth in it.

As implausible as the plot devices were, Tron actually captured something about how it felt working with computers in that era. You had a great deal of control, but programs had reached a point of complexity where different pieces of software almost had a mind of their own. And since the suits only had a vague idea of what you did, they tried to avoid you as much as possible, which meant on a day to day basis you really interacted with bits of software more than you did people. There were no ex-geek managers for the simple reason there were no ex-geeks.

Add to that, very few of us had computers in their home; the home computers that existed were for practical purposes not much more than toys.

The upshot was, when you sat down in front of that terminal at the start of the work day, it really felt like preparing to dive into an alternate universe, with its own population.

And furthermore, there was no Internet. Internet means you're handling emails, IM, blogging and interacting with real, flesh and blood people; or at least what those people are pretending to be. Having the Internet means that software flows in and out of your computer like electricity. In those days your computer was isolated, like one of the Galapagos Islands, and sparsely populated with humans. The real people were, in the cast of characters a distinct minority. When you chatted at the watercooler about one program or another idiosyncracies, it was gossipping.

        "O wonder!
        How many goodly creatures are there here!
        How beautious mankind is!
        O brave new world,
        That has such people in't!"

Tron, while it may not be Citizen Kane, captured the feeling of an unique moment in computer history.

Re:Easy answer

There was nothing intrinsically wrong with the plot : Man gets zapped into machine and has to battle his way back out.

The plot was a little deeper than that. A man (Flynn?), an ecentric genius, was obsessed over video games... designs a few blockbusters but a not to bright but sneaky person takes the credit for his work and as a result gets promoted to a position of control (VP?) and uses his position and access to lock out Flynn preventing him from vindicating his name and creates a master control program who's purpose is to steal other people's work and prevent others from accessing it. This tale is told by two other employies who are attempting to figure out what is going on with the system. They express shocked disbelief but one statement has enough of the way of truth to it for them to investiate. The MVP retaliates in the only way it knows how and zaps Flynn into it's world... which as you said "man gets zapped into machine and has to battle his way back out".

While your statement was ment with sarcasm, there is nothing wrong with the plot, nor the sub plot of romance between not only the real life characters but between their programs. It's your run of the mill heroic tale that has been told many times before. Those who want to be critical on the store should be on that point as heroic epics have been a staple of western culture even before to Roman empire was born. It was clearly made with a cookie cutter script generator that would work just as easily with an evil prince and dragons or gunmen and the wild wild west. It's redeming qualitys are the satire on bureaucracy and insight on religion, which are two things you would not expect in a film who's main purpose seems to be a vehicle for hi-tech CGI graphics.

Raging Frisbee Bull

There's a reason why Scorcese's "Raging Bull" doesn't center on the world frisbee champion, you know.
Obviously, because people wouldn't be able to stand the sheer thrill and excitement if it did.

Re:Easy answer

Sure, you can take any line out of context and make it seem soulless. The point of that particular line was that it was dripping with cynicism. The MCP wasn't giving those programs a place of honor to "serve their systems" at all. Programs were sent to the Game Grid to die. In fact, Sark probably would rather have been doing something else. The only enjoyment he got from his little speech was the opportunity to kick the prisoners in their religious nadgers, which made a nice counterpoint to his later conversation with the MCP:

Sark: I don't know, I mean, users wrote us. A user even wrote you!
MCP: No one user wrote me. I'm worth millions of their man-years.

It actually has interesting parallels with Cold War indoctrination and Stalinist gulags, with a hint of medieval religious indoctrination as well.

Another interesting concept brought up by the line you quoted was the staggering difference in time scale between the real world and the computer world. The religious pogrom in the computer world had the flavor of something that had been going on for decades. But actually, users were able to work with their programs right up until the point where the MCP shut down Group 7 access ("just to be safe"). The efforts of the MCP and Sark to eliminate belief in the users must have started after that point, and it was a matter of mere hours from then to the time at which Flynn found himself trapped on the Game Grid.

Re:Easy answer

Last I checked, that's practically a formula for a successful movie.

The producers of Stealth, I Robot, The Island, Fantastic Four, and Pearl Harbor would like to disagree. Hell, even Kong did disappointing box office compared to how much it cost to make. Almost ever succesful recent blockbusters has had strong characters (or at least franchise characters with whom have a pre-existing relationship: Chronicles of Narnia, Batman Begins, Harry Potter, R-o-t-Sith etc. And, I've spent some of the morning reading the UK press savaging "V for Vendetta", so we may be able to add another to that disastrous list soon.

The Matrix is the exception, but the plot in the Matrix was irrelevant compared to the effect of those incredibly novel visuals. The sequels blew because the novelty wore off enough that we could see the plot creak.

Meanwhile, the producers of Sideways, Napoleon Dynamite, Crash, Walk The Line, Constant Gardener and Brokeback Mountain are smiling to themselves and rolling in the cash generated by their low budget successes moderate gross.

welcome to slashdot

I can handled some better grammar and/or editing

Reading anything on tomshardware....

Slightly OT, but i'd like to read TFA, but I ran out of patience clicking "next" and "next" and then watching as some overlay pops every time i accidentally move my mouse over underlined words. Sheesh. No wonder nobody reads TFA

I never would have suspected

Who would have thought it was a bomb? I remember seeing it and loving it as a kid - and loving my toy lightcycle and some of the video game - and the movie seems to be so well known. If you ever mention it to someone, they know what you're talking about. It amazes me it was a flop.

I thought the lines were a little short to get in

I saw Tron, opening night, and its one of the things that made me really, really want to figure out how those nifty looking typewriters with screens could do so much. I didn't know what memory was, I didn't know what a processor did, I barely understood how a calculator worked and if you said Binary I'd say "Sure, I have a Huffy!".

We're always looking at value as something monetary. Tron made me go get my first trash-80 (Err Tandy TRS-80 heheh) and later my first Commie. I wanted to know how those things worked.

You all may remember the short lived series "Whiz Kids" , with the talking computer that looked like it was assembled from stereo components. That was another one way ahead of its time.

The value of the film wasn't how much it grossed , if you want to calculate that, then calculate the life time earnings of those who got into computers partly because of seeing it and you may be surprised :)

However only 15 minutes of CGI? I somehow (not sure why, because I know what was available then) thought most of it was CGI.. but yes, that would have been very very difficult at the time. My bubble sort of broke reading that article, never really thought about the making other than being fascinated as a child with the results.

Much like the show Whiz Kids, it was just a little too abstract for most people. Entertainment isn't entertainment to most if it requires too much thought.

Tron got to be the pavement others were able to ride in on. So wallet aside, I don't think the film was a flop. I was too young to remember any hoop-la coming from Disney about the film.. I wonder how it would have done if it had been underplayed before release.

Cool article, if you can wade through the advertisements :)

Grossing Twice the Cost is a Flop?

Tron cost 17 million to make and pulled in 33 million. How is this considered a flop?

It was 22nd in the top grossing films of 1982. Blade Runner was 27th that year.

Maybe it wasn't the smash hit they were hoping for, but it looks like it did very well.

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/ [boxofficemojo.com]

Re:Grossing Twice the Cost is a Flop?

"Tron cost 17 million to make and pulled in 33 million. How is this considered a flop?"

Because you generally need to make several times the cost of the movie at the box office to break even. Theaters take a cut, distributors take a cut, then there's the advertising costs to pay on top... which can be massive: in the extreme case of low-budget movies, they can be many times the cost of the movie itself.

$33,000,000 gross for a $17,000,000 movie probably just about paid for the advertising and the coke and hookers budget.

"Blade Runner was 27th that year."

If I remember correctly, 'Blade Runner' was considered a disaster when it was released: hence the voiceover and happy ending tacked on to try to raise revenue with Joe Sixpack.

Re:Grossing Twice the Cost is a Flop?

Tron cost 17 million to make and pulled in 33 million. How is this considered a flop?

A good rule of thumb is that you need to earn 4x the budget to break even.

Tron and Blade Runner were worth the trips

[Tron] was 22nd in the top grossing films of 1982. Blade Runner was 27th that year.

Man, I hadn't remembered that those came out the same year. I biked maybe five miles to see Tron at the local theater that was showing it, at least a few times. I remember locking the chain around the bike rack and walking from the summer heat into that run down theater with its thinning carpet and whiff of warmed popcorn. That movie made frisbee extra fun that year. Later on the Intellivision games, with the Recognizer "bosses"...

"Blade Runner" we were too young for, it being an R, so my older brother took us to that for my birthday. That means it was late June. What the heck was anyone doing releasing that movie as a summer blockbuster? The theater was basically empty except for us.

Neither one of them got the box office that its studio was expecting. As investments, though? I'm not that keen on either one as a work of high art, but the ripple effect they had was really something, culturally.

And they pimped up a PDP-10!

For Tron's special effects — The Super Foonly F-1. I bet it had a phat exhaust, blue downlighting, a killer sound system with a 16 inch subwoofer, and a stylish fibreglass skirt fitted to the front of the reel-to-reel cabinet.

The Matrix

...was a really great sequel to TRON.

Or at least that's what I think.

Don't forget the TRON soundtrack!

Check out the website of Wendy Carlos, who composed and performed the soundtrack...her website is: http://wendycarlos.com/ [wendycarlos.com]

ttyl
          Farrell

Re:Don't forget the TRON soundtrack!

I have a couple of her other albums, which are also good. One is Switched-On Bach 2000, in which she revisited the material she covered in the original Switched-On Bach album, with modern synthesizer gear and period-correct Bach tunings. She added one "bonus track" as well, a rendition of the famous Tocatta and Fugue in D Minor--perfect for Halloween music. The second is her collaboration with "Weird Al" Yankovic on a rendition of Prokofiev's Peter And The Wolf, as well as a new piece, Carnival of the Animals, Part Two (parody of Camille Saint-Saëns' Carnival of the Animals). She proved she could be as much of a parody artist as Al, throwing a bunch of references to other pieces into her compositions to counterpoint Al's bizarre sense of humor.

Simple reason for the "bomb": It was too early

1982 it was not "cool" to be a geek. It was not cool to "live" inside the computer. 1982 was a time when computers (and even more consoles) were considered toys, not an essential part of our life.

Especially, the audience for such a movie was too small. And the studio was the wrong one. First of all, it's Disney. Back then, what did you get from Disney? Cute li'l films about cute fuzzy animals having some cute adventures. So people did not expect a "serious" science fiction movie.

Second, it was the wrong kind of science fiction for this time. Science fiction back then was either in a galaxy far, far away or equally far away in the future. But most certainly not NOW. How can you make science fiction in the NOW? Now is the real world. The movie was simply not credible for the audience of then.

Before someone quotes E.T.: E.T. was credible for the simple reason that it was a "real" drama movie with an alien element. Not a "real" science fiction movie. There were no laser beams and no robots.

Tron was also not the stereotypical science fiction movie, it didn't carter to the SciFi crowd of those times. No aliens, no space battles, no epic hero. Instead a very dramatic personal battle for Flynn and Tron, with a lot of abstraction that only someone who has at least a clue about computers can comprehend and appreciate.

In total, it is a movie for computer and game geeks. And those were rather scarce back then.

Obligatory Simpsons Quote...

"Has anyone here seen Tron?"
"No"
"No"
"No"
"Yes - I mean no."

Obligatory lightcycle games

Armagetron Advanced [armagetronad.net]
GLtron [gltron.org]

Both free, for Windows/MacOSX/Linux.

Earlier computer graphics

The article says Disney experimented with using comupters for animation in the seventies. I think the first thing they tried doing was to do in-betweening of hand-plotted vector graphics, animating the series of lines on a vector scope, then drawing the lines to cells using an XY plotter. This was done using an IBM Whirlwind vector terminal in 1959 or 1960.

Interesting fact they glossed over.

One thing the article failed to mention was how ardous it was to make those "mere 15 minutes of cgi." Back then, no animation tools existed nor were there any GUI based rendering tools either. All of the CGI was hard coded by hand using a text system very similar to Pov-ray. There was no animation programming either. To animate something they had to calculate how far they wanted each object to move, then calculate and enter the cordinates by hand frame-by-frame.

Furthermore, the computers of the time didn't have enough memory to store entire movies, let alone any sort of device to output it to video tape or film like we have now. Instead, they had to render each individual frame, display the frame on a high-resolution monitor and then photograph the monitor onto regular 35mm film. Each frame would take several hours to render further complicating the process trying to keep the lighting uniform on each exposure.

Now, fifteen minutes * 60 seconds in a minute * 24 frames per second = roughly 21,600 frames. Just an insane amount of manual labor.

Wendy Carlos soundtrack

Something the article doesn't mention is that Tron also had a futuristic soundtrack [wendycarlos.com] by Wendy Carlos, the same woman who composed (at least, she composed the song Timesteps) and performed the soundtrack for A Clockwork Orange.

Imagineering

I was working (learning) in the biggest graphics lab in the world at the time _Tron_ was made, Summer 1982. The New York Institute of Technology had a DEC VAX/VMS datacenter, with DEC GIGI graphics terminals and other rendering HW. We were busy scanning 1970s progressive rock album covers and inserting our own adventures into the cover art. Then Disney opened their Tron lab, and we weren't the biggest anymore - just another little college computer room.

It was like our bong hits wore off, just as someone else at the school prom dosed us all with LSD, then they started flying around the dance hall.

The Delusional Director

From the article: "One of the things I'm most proud about in Tron is there are no guns in the movie -- it's a killer Frisbee!" he said. "I mean, try to make an action adventure movie without a gun. I dare you."

So, those aren't gun turrets on the tanks? I guess those are love turrets, and they fire love and happiness.

First Geek Movie

It's rather astounding that there are so many young geeks who think Tron was lame. Of course it's lame by today's standards. But I was an actual programmer on the job in those days when it was considered incredible to get 300KB for your own program's memory. Tron was the first movie about programmers that made our style comprehensible. We were considered truly weird, and somebody as cool as Bruce Boxleitner to star as a programmer was considered a coup. That says a huge amount about the social acceptance of OGs (original geeks).

The ethic of programs of little fighters within a sometimes incomprehensible system was very appealing. The idea of old crusty programs bearing the likeness of their users was cool. The idea of independently minded security programs running around like white blood cells was also pretty fabulous. In terms of what actual programs could do at the time, Tron was inspirational to real programmers. I mean every program in Tron could communicate to every other program. Strong programs could defeat weak programs by learning new games at the instruction of stronger still programs, all without user intervention. A super program that could heal other programs that had crashed...

There were realistic in-jokes, like the Bit, the PacMan graphic in Stark's domain, the endless infinty of cubicles, and the fantasy that (arcade) gamers could pull chicks by getting high scores.

Tron was true the spirit of the then-emerging hacker ethic in many ways that other movies haven't really ever captured. In fact, I can't think of any other that captures more truly on an emotional scale how programmers think about their programs. In fact there is probably only one movie that has ever been cooler to hackers and that is Swordfish.

Reboot?

Just thought it was odd that they failed to mention Tron's "unofficial" sequel, which covered a lot of similar premises (almost every all of them). Since the series came out just barely 12 years after Tron, it's about as good as an homage as any.

You were an uptight kid

When I was a kid, especially in '82 (age 9), I didn't really focus on the directing, writing, and point of a film.