The Story of Tron 367
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... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Can anyone... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Can anyone... (Score:2, Funny)
Separated at birth? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Separated at birth? (Score:2, Offtopic)
Re:Can anyone... (Score:5, Funny)
I could, just before clicking the link. Thanks for nothing.
Re:Can anyone... (Score:2, Funny)
Now I have to go brillo my brain.
Thanks. Thanks a lot.
Re:Can anyone... (Score:2)
Excuse me... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Can anyone... (Score:4, Funny)
Time to "crack out" Goatse again, eh? ;)
Noooooo! (Score:2)
Please don't! The Cowboy Neal is still in therapy after the last time you did that.
Well, (Score:2, Interesting)
ptsch.
Or... (Score:4, Insightful)
May the wind be always at your back,
-Empyrealmortal
Where is our Pixar/Disney Sequal? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Where is our Pixar/Disney Sequal? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Where is our Pixar/Disney Sequal? (Score:3, Funny)
Sequel? (Score:5, Funny)
SQL? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:SQL? (Score:2)
isnt it jobs that run stuff over at disney now?
Re:SQL? (Score:5, Funny)
Or Pr0n, the X-rated version.
Re:SQL? (Score:3, Insightful)
Work?
Re:Sequel? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Where is our Pixar/Disney Sequal? (Score:5, Funny)
Easy answer (Score:3, Insightful)
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. See? That's dialogue bad enough to have come from one of the Matrix sequels.
Re:Easy answer (Score:5, Funny)
hey! but thats what i tell all my new sysadmins!?!
Re:Easy answer (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Easy answer (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Easy answer (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Easy answer (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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.
Re:Easy answer (Score:3, Interesting)
I just wish the movie was better. I recently grabbed it on DVD, thinking it couldn't be so bad... the plot changes weren't so bad, but I really hated the parts where they kept the plot, and left out the punchline. I honestly don't know what happened. Either
a) Adams didn't want to repeat himself and threw the baby out with the bathwater
b) They never let him put the good parts in
c) They ripped out the good parts after his death
d)
Movie critics.... (Score:3, Insightful)
It is amazing how many people fail to understand that simple truth. Take for example 'The Mummy' and it's sequel 'The Mummy returns' It's always funny to read reviews of those movies talking about overacting, a bad plot, bad script, over reliance on special effects etc... It's fun to read those reviews because the snobby film critics who write them have completely missed the point which is: "For god's sake man it's a MUMMY MOVIE! The fact
It was a brave new world (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Tron, while it may not be Citizen Kane, captured the feeling of an unique moment in computer history.
Re:Easy answer (Score:2, Funny)
See? That's dialogue bad enough to have come from one of the Matrix sequels.
Speak fo
Re:Easy answer (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Easy answer (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
thus we blame TRON for (Score:3, Interesting)
We should make job contracts that say "all your base belong to us" iffen you make them at all whilst you are working for us...
Thanks TRON!
Idea for a real Tron 2 movie: (Score:3, Interesting)
It is now 1995. Two things have emerged that he cannot control:
1.) Arpanet becomes the Internet, and is opened to the Great Unwashed. It begins to take shape as its own cybernetic landscape,
Re:Easy answer (Score:2)
No more or less stupid than gladiator combat, boxing, or martial arts except in this case it's satire. It's a look at how a computer generated culture views the macro-universe. Yes... it's stupid... that's the point... life is a series of conflict and resolutions no better than tossing around DayGlo Frisbees.
Raging Frisbee Bull (Score:5, Funny)
Obviously, because people wouldn't be able to stand the sheer thrill and excitement if it did.
Re:Easy answer (Score:2)
Yeah, I mean... um... er, OK, I've got a Zardoz quote in my sig. I'll shut up now.
Re:Easy answer (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Easy answer (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:2)
Um, so they couldn't print, right?!
or perhaps... (Score:2)
Having experience with a great many non-native english speakers, from eastern europe and islamic countries, some asian, I know that the best of them still use funny sentence construction at times...
Re:Easy answer (Score:2)
--- SER
Re:Easy answer (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Easy answer (Score:3, Interesting)
Lacking any info, virtually every one of us who saw the first film imagined what the sequel plot would be, what would be revealed, what the hell it all meant anyway, and so on.
Once the second film came out, it was clear that nearly all of that imaginary storyline stuff turned out to be a WHOLE lot more ambitious than what they actually filmed.
In fact, the sequels -while profitable- were more or less a hu
Re:Easy answer (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, I wouldn't say the plot creaked too badly in the first movie. It was a pretty much stock retelling of story number 259-A from the Film Writer's Plot Catalog*, "Rise of a Messiah from Obscurity to Ascendent Triumph", with a shitload of novel eyecandy to make it interesting. The trouble the
Re:Easy answer (Score:3, Informative)
Mxyzptlk.
Sorry, sorry, sorry ... [runs away and hides]
welcome to slashdot (Score:4, Funny)
Re:welcome to slashdot (Score:2)
Re:welcome to slashdot (Score:2)
Re:welcome to slashdot (Score:3, Funny)
Obviously the Slashdot Spell Checker program met its fate early on on the Game Grid.
I really like the movie (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:I really like the movie (Score:2)
Regarding the Disney bit, they apparently weren't actively involved in the design of the movie. Sometimes even the major Hollywood studios don't mess with the filming too much.
Re:I really like the movie (Score:2)
Special Edition Addiction.
Reading anything on tomshardware.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Reading anything on tomshardware.... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Reading anything on tomshardware.... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Reading anything on tomshardware.... (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, that's just about the stupidest page layout ever. But the underlining is easy to fix if you block intellitxt.com.
I never would have suspected (Score:4, Interesting)
I thought the lines were a little short to get in (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:I thought the lines were a little short to get (Score:3, Interesting)
I resemble that remark. (Even ended up working with a III system later in '82, though not doing anything nearly as interesting with it...)
Yeah, the dialogue is awful (though not as bad as The Black Hole), but the look [development01.com] and soundtrack are still inspiring. As another poster said, this film was ahead of its time - by at least a good twenty minutes [maxheadroom.com]...
<grrr
The movie flopped (Score:2)
Re: The movie flopped (Score:2)
I thought it was a yawner too, though I'm surprised to see several people posting to that effect. For some reason it seems to have a reputation of being a cool movie. I couldn't understand that even back then; how anyone could rave about it now is beyond mystery.
Grossing Twice the Cost is a Flop? (Score:5, Informative)
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? (Score:2, Interesting)
I think the reason that many consider TRONStar Wars and that movie changed the standards for what is a hit. But TRON making back double what it original cost to make would make it a success to me.
I think the problem with TRON was that it came out at the wrong time, a time before most people were very familiar with computers. Due to this some of the humor in the movie did not instinctively carry to the average viewer.
But some elements of the movie still hold up to this day. The light cycle sequence has b
Re:Grossing Twice the Cost is a Flop? (Score:2)
http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/1982/0TRON.html [the-numbers.com]
Re:Grossing Twice the Cost is a Flop? (Score:4, Informative)
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? (Score:4, Insightful)
A good rule of thumb is that you need to earn 4x the budget to break even.
Re:Grossing Twice the Cost is a Flop? (Score:3, Funny)
Well, they expected it to make $400 million, so it was a disappointment.
And if it made $400 million, it's still a disappointment because they expected it to make $2 billion.
Tron and Blade Runner were worth the trips (Score:4, Insightful)
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! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:And they pimped up a PDP-10! (Score:2)
I would never have considered a PDP-10 to be a fast rendering machine. This sounds like a way around paying for time on a cray.
The Matrix (Score:3, Insightful)
Or at least that's what I think.
Don't forget the TRON soundtrack! (Score:4, Insightful)
ttyl
Farrell
Re:Don't forget the TRON soundtrack! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Don't forget the TRON soundtrack! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Tron 2.0? (Score:3, Informative)
He's talking about the game [go.com] they did a couple years back. Should be cheap, I just saw it for $6 at the local Big Lots. Amusing, and it really does look very much like the movie - sobering to think we can do those kinds of graphics in real-time now.
Music available here [tron-sector.com].
Simple reason for the "bomb": It was too early (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Simple reason for the "bomb": It was too early (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree the timing was just a little early. We needed Wargames *first*. Show us what happens outside the computer world when a modern computer "thinks"
Maybe it's the "art" thing (Score:2)
More movies like Tron should be made (Score:2)
I am not sure if it would have ever been made today, but I think this exactly the kind of movie that needs to be made - sheer fantasy to escape from the realities of this world.
Tron was not a failure... (Score:2)
Very misleading summary. Tron was, and still is, a nice piece of movie history. The arcade game was also great, I could almost guarantee there is a Tron machine within 50 miles of wherever you're reading this from.
I'd love
Obligatory Simpsons Quote... (Score:5, Funny)
"No"
"No"
"No"
"Yes - I mean no."
Even better: South Park (Score:3, Interesting)
I suppose that people who never saw Tron missed the reference.
Re:Even better: South Park (Score:3, Informative)
great stuff (Score:2)
Obligatory lightcycle games (Score:4, Informative)
GLtron [gltron.org]
Both free, for Windows/MacOSX/Linux.
"first" video game ever created. (Score:2)
ehhh, not quite. Space War [wikipedia.org] preceded Pong, and the table tennis [osti.gov] game at Brookhaven preceded even Space War.
However, Pong was the first widely popular video game and the first home game.
Tron vs Titanic (Score:2, Insightful)
Earlier computer graphics (Score:3, Interesting)
Interesting fact they glossed over. (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
So, those aren't gun turrets on the tanks? I guess those are love turrets, and they fire love and happiness.
First Geek Movie (Score:5, Informative)
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? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:They ignored the Bonnie MacBird/Alan Kay bit! (Score:2, Funny)
You were an uptight kid (Score:5, Insightful)