Sci-Fi Classic Review: TRON (1982)
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- Опубліковано 29 сер 2020
- This incredibly ambitious hybrid of CGI, hand-drawn animation, backlighting techniques, and live action is a one-of-a-kind film that was way ahead of its time and full of surprising depth. It's the kind of movie that would have made Walt Disney proud, even though it under-performed to the studio's expectations.
If you're looking for a "review" in the traditional sense, then let me just say I love this movie. This video, however, is a "review" in the literal sense (using the Miriam-Webster definition "a retrospective view or survey"), in that I'm going over the history of the film and its place in sci-fi cinema history.
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"He fights for the Users." In a way, Tron is a firewall.
I love this movie, I re-watched it again just a few weeks ago. It has some flaws, but it's so visually unique and it has so much heart, the characters are so compelling, I am so drawn in by it, I still enjoy every minute of TRON.
I saw this in the theater and it blew my hair back. I asked my dad to take me back, and he did so I saw it the next weekend again. I loved this film and still do. It's difficult to say how thrilling a film like this was to an 8-year-old's mind and imagination in the world of 1982.
Thank you for sharing! Must have felt overwhelmingly awesome. My only candle to that would be seeing Jurrasic Park in theater and not understanding how they got Dinosaurs on screen.
I was 10 years old when I saw Tron in 82 and to this day its my all time fave Live Action Disney film behind The Black Hole.
@Atariboy with your name and avatar, I totally balieve you 😄👍
Xanadu in 1980 really got me excited about digital sfx, and the music stirred my emotions. I was only 9 at the time but too poor to go to the theater again and again.
Then TRON blew me away, just wow! When it came out on VHS I watched it as many times as I could get away with at any friends’ houses for years and years. I rode my friends’ 10-speed with those low-set handlebars as fast as possible, trying to imagine I was a light cycle -and got hurt or nearly killed because of the inevitable crashes.
Frisbees and any other round disk like object became near holy objects to me, and I tried to get my friends to have “frisbee wars” with me, but they just weren’t into it. I played Tron 2.0 to death, those primitives were so cool! Tron: Legacy had a weak story but was just as beautiful in costuming, casting and environment as the original film.
I’m a Tron fan for life. It’s too bad Disney is so focused on the big IPs like Star Wars and has lost interest in exploring new stories in their older properties like Tron.
Tron was definitely ahead of its time & opened the door for the SFX revolution of the 1980s & beyond. I saw this movie in the summer of 1982 upon its release & enjoyed it. Visually stunning & a interesting story, well acted.
It’s interesting that just as this movie broke new ground with high-end graphics in the 80s, Bruce Boxleitner - the actor who played Tron - would go on to play the commander of “Babylon 5”, a TV show that was a another pioneer in the use of CGI in the 90s!
Additionally, the program that Flynn plays against on the game grid is none other than Peter Jurasik, AKA Londo Mollari from "Babylon 5".
Dillinger didn’t create the MCP. The MCP started as a chess program created by Encom’s founder, who’s name I can’t remember, but that’s why he looks like Dumont at the end, they were made by the same guy
I didn't hate the sequel, but the visual design really let me down. What I love about the original TRON is how utterly unique its vision is. There's never been a movie that looks anything like it, and it's really believable as a computer world made real specifically because it's so alien. Meanwhile TRON Legacy just looks like a fancy Apple store. There's so much less imagination onscreen, it's disappointing.
First saw this movie at a LAN party in 02. Picked up the 2-disc DVD right afterwards
Aaah, got my mamory jogged again. I remember Animalympics, but only on video. I think it was one of the first video releases to have a stereo track, but could be mistaken. I had a second job at that time, selling stereo and video equipment. Believe it or not, I still have and use the speakers I bought back then, a brand new concept of subwoofer and two mid-treble satellites. Employee discount rules ☺️
And Tron? Simply glorious, even though the plot seemed a bit wonky even when nobody knew a thing about computers. I feel so blessed to have watched cinema evolve like this.
I think those animators had a point cuz now hand-drawn is dead thanks to computer animation
21:09 I would have never noticed but for the pointing out of the hidden images that at this point there's a Pac-Man on the graphic next to his face
This is one of those movies whose reach exceeded its grasp, but I always enjoy that kind of ambition--we need it, creatively.
The franchise has always been more successful in some of its tie-ins than in the movies themselves. The tie-in arcade video game for the original movie was a big hit, an early example of what we might now call a minigame compilation. And these days, the most successful manifestation of Tron is the light-cycle-themed roller coaster built for Shanghai Disneyland, with a duplicate now going up in Orlando. The story of the original was kind of hard to follow, but the aesthetic is something everybody remembers.
Technically it's a showpiece for two things--the CGI that got all the publicity and did end up eventually dominating the industry, and the handmade backlit animation that actually plays a much bigger part in the movie. That was all over the place in the early 1980s--now it's instant nostalgia to see it.
I was a little young to watch this in the theater, but I enjoyed watching it many times when it came out on vhs. I watched it again recently with my teenage son, who also enjoyed it. He echoed the thought I always had that Tron was ahead of its time. Thanks for the review.
Up here in Vancouver, Canada I would go to a theatre that continually played Tron and Heavy Metal as a double bill. Man the 80s were a fun ride!
My two favorite movies from that time were Tron and Blade Runner.
Ah Ram. What a great character and a good person. I hope they bring him back in future films.
The stylized title screens in your videos are pretty amazing, BTW. Thanks!
I saw this in 70 mm 6-track the year it was released...what an experience!
I was 9 when this was released but my parents were not into this type of picture (not technology savvy) and preferred ET which we went to see twice in 1982. ET dominated that summer, people have no idea. Back then, your parents dictated what you see or did not see. At home, Disney was always equated with animated movies which we would always catch at the cinema (The Rescuers, The Fox & the Hound etc.). I eventually managed to see this on VHS rental in 1984 (remember the white Disney Home Entertainment shells) but did find the movie boring and issue with pacing despite the special effects. Star Wars was the baseline. ROTJ, released in 1983, was the Sci-Fi movie everything was to be compared to. There were no range of toys either. In the UK, during the 80s, it was always on TV on lazy Saturday and Sunday afternoons.
Solid review! I was too young, and didn’t see Tron until a few years later on the Disney Movie of the Week. Instead of Don Knotts or Herbie, Tron came on. It blew my little mind!
just finding your channel, really well done. BUT, one error, TRON is short for TRACE ON not short for electron. It's a programming term. Opposite is TROFF for Trace off. It's old school programming how you started a program trace when testing a program.
According to Lisberger, it really is short for electron and has nothing to do with the programming term. This is a common misconception. Thanks for watching!
Tron was amazing to watch on big cinema screen when it first came out.
Ohhh my user!
Tron is a really weird movie that happens to be one of the biggest landmarks of filmmaking. The acting is kinda stiff and forced (but it was a requirement so that frames would be easier to composite) and the story and world building could be fleshed out a bit more, but it's still an incredible movie and one that conquered my heart when I discovered it in 2016.
@neb6 oh damn I get it
I think that the success of this film is it's ahead of it's time predictions about the relationship between major Corporations and the rise of dangerous advances in technology. (particularly in the field of computing)
Something unusual for a Disney offering being highly political this isnt Cinderella.
the corporativeness of "Tron" reminds me of the corrupt OCP in Robocop for its feel, and David Warner is something like Dick jones/Ronnie Cox i'd say, to look at - long & skinny with a lantern jaw and stern faced
I gotta the MCP won after all.🤣🤣🤣🤣
OK, lot to unpack here and I want to lead off with a big frickin' thank you-This movie isn't just a watershed for me, it's a glimpse through the portal of a penumbrae that underpin's reality. The idea that ideas are the framework of existence, whether construed by nature or by human imagination was a wake-up-and-smell-your-soul moment for me-and that was in 1983.....OK late 1983. The first time I saw Tron it was at the Route 3 MultiPlex in Lowell and I snuck out to watch E.T. for the fourth time (I think that deserves your attention because it has been forsaken, btw)....and then I snuck back in-well I was seeing it with my best Friend Mark and his dad-who was a programmer for one of the first PC CAD companies in existence I later learned-and boy were they unhappy with me (We made up and went to see Empire Strikes Back for my 7th and 8th theatrical viewings) and BTW, there's no way Tron came out in July of 1983, because I saw it in Lowell before I moved down to Florida and saw Return of the Jedi.
Nah-batha! When my brother and I went to see Tron in late 83', it was because I'd already read 2001 A Space Odyssey for the first time and was swum away with the idea of what Dave Bowman had become. There it was. He had integrated into some advanced program (as Clarke pretty much explained in 3001: Final Odysssey). He had become some inscrutible hyperintelligence's CLU-set forth on a purpose not wholly his own to discover himself. Back then, in the insurmountably optimistic 80's, history repeating itself meant that things naturally progressed and that the struggle for freedom would spring from a new enlightenment-that every scene has it's soul-it's ineffable transient being, who is more than the sum of their bits (see what I did there?).
It spoke to the future, not just of our technology, but our eventual psychological being-that everyone had ahead of them a discovery of themselves in an abstract sense. It inspired so much music and world building and yet, Tron is still the pure germ.
Life is in the current of a wafer (whether we are based on Carbon or Silicon-we are each entitled to appropriate respect-you'll recall Dr. Chandra saying in 2010) it's not just us represented differently, it's a parallel of of us and our greatest intellectual feat is to recognize it.
When I hear about modern Simulation Theory and how information is trapped in the apparent horizon of a black hole, I get goose-bumped at the ideas presented in Tron Legacy (The Big Flynnbowski)-that the DNA of sentience is transferable to other modes of existence for triptofantic reasons.
"Bio-digital Jazz, man!"
Tron makes me glad I did all that acid (even though several things make me sure I'll never do it again)-just to know that the frontiers go beyond your carbon atoms and are integrated into the structure of the universe at the bosun level. Ones and Zero's, Man! That's where all the information integrates.
Awesome work finding Lisberger's back sketches. I've got a hundred of my own drawn of vista's made of broken cubes resembling Dali's disintegration of the persistence of memory. That was a real ride back in time. I'm totally stoked.
Scanners and Quiet Earth!
The movie released in ‘82, but it spent the next two years floating in and out of theaters the way a lot of movies did back then. You were one of the young “creatives” I refer to near the end of the video, somebody inspired by the ideas of Tron who got into computers with an eye towards its artistic potential rather than its business applications. You are proof that Lisberger isn’t insane when he talks about what Tron is all about.
holy shit this movie blew my mind i feel you
Randle here in Texas! Jeff Bridges, Bruce Boxleitner, Cindy Morgan, and David Warner might not have been the names they are now, but in retrospect it's an extremely well rounded cast! It even has Peter Jurasik (RIP) thrown into the mix! If the movie's plot lets it down in the slightest, the performances by actors that had never worked with this type of film (who had at the time?) really do it justice in my opinion.
Side note. The owl still haunts my dreams too...
Right. Nowadays, it’s super common for actors to perform on big, barren sets (usually green), but back then, that was a pretty crazy way to do things. These actors were brave and talented enough to make it work.
IMDb says Peter J is still alive…did something happen to him
@@Maniac536 That's a good catch! I think you'll find that is a mistake as it was Andreas Katsulas from Babylon 5 that passed several years ago, not Peter Jurasik.
@@NoMarketMedia An alarming number of Babylon 5 actors have passed, to the extent that one starts wondering about a curse, but Bruce Boxleitner and Peter Jurasik survive.
Yup! Very much a mistake on this end of the keyboard getting them mixed up!
Sorry for any confusion.
I put a lot of quarters in that game.
TRON- One of my favorite movies.
The TRON pair are two of my favorites (it's great to be able to see the TRON cartoon on Disney+), and it's great to be able to hope for a third. I am also delighted that they are successful enough to warrant a ride at the parks, even as I look at the ride videos, from the overseas parks, and wonder if I will be able to work up the nerve to ride it.
I'm reading Reality+ by philosopher David Chalmers whose contention is that virtual reality is just as "real" as normal reality… so maybe Tron was even more prescient than we thought.
I think The Great Owl haunts a LOT of our memories. XD
Fantastic video!! Thank you so much.
The show was more than just pretty decent. If it had lasted till the end, I would say probably could have gone up there with clone wars
Good review as usual that examines both the flaws and triumphs of this science fiction classic.
One of my favorites!
Saw this at the cinema when it was released, age 14. Was horribly bullied at school. This film was something shunned by the bullies. I grabbed it with both hands and hung on. Credit it, with stopping me from me ending myself.
I'm sorry you had to go through that, but it is another reason to love TRON!
@16:06: That _TRON_ game for the Atari 2600 VCS on the left doesn't actually exist, does it. :|
You’re right! There were two Tron games made by Mattel for the Atari 2600, but that particular box shown is just a mock-up someone made later.
One of my all time favorite films...
Thanks. Another well researched vid. Never had a big place in my childhood. I was more an ET kid. Wasnt aware of Tron toys in the UK but I prob couldn't see past my Millennium Falcon. Cool concept tho and well executed for the early 80s. Definitely had no contemporary peers. I enjoyed Legacy. Looked amazing but felt the Rinzler character could have been developed more. In terms of electronic music, I don't think there is a greater soundtrack to what Daft Punk produced. Probably more successful than the film itself.
Loved this movie as a kid!
Love this movie. Caught that Zelda reference. Never gonna un-see it.
4:37 that really looks like a cylon
Hiiiiiiii I'm back
Not sci-fi but fantasy :- \
@20:50 cute
the 1st movie was a marvel of creation & imagination. Imho, too bad the 2nd movie was just a HD version of the 1st one, hardly inventing anything new.
Jeff bridges looks like a dork with dumb facial expressions in the real life sections of the movie