Comments | krblack: TRON (1982)

krblack

TRON (1982)

Jul 09, 2008 22:32

On our recent vacation, we got a chance to see TRON (1982) in 70mm at the Castro in San Francisco. TRON was a very important movie, featuring some of the first computer graphics on film. It was a commercial failure, the only profit coming from the associated video game. I think it's visionary--but if you weren't around in 1982, there's a good ( Read more... )

tron, jeff bridges, bruce boxleitner

Comments 6

catherinew July 10 2008, 15:07:51 UTC

OMG, my husband luuuuuuurves TRON. I have watched it with him a few times. It was very influential in who he turned out to be.

But I think you're right -- if you didn't encounter it as a kid and have a mystical moment with it, it's probably too late now.

Then again, the "bit" is cute. We imitate that to each other all the time. "Yes." "No." "Yes." "No." "No no no no no." :-)

krblack July 10 2008, 18:02:47 UTC

The bit was awesome! ISTR it kind of showed up, had one good scene, and got dropped. It reminded me of Cursor from Automan, which now that I think about it was a total Tron rip-off.

krblack July 10 2008, 18:18:25 UTC

Thinking more about a Tron remake--I dig the look of the movie, but it's just not how the inside of a computer looks to us anymore. Then it was all about straight lines, antiseptic circuit board type environments, and a limited RGB color palette. Plus the lightcycles were coolest computer game we'd ever seen. Now being inside computers looks like the holodeck on TNG or the virtual world of The Matrix. All limitations have been removed, and with the limitations goes the romance.

They could do something like American Gladiators meets Tron, where warriors in retro neon outfits spend the movie battling each other in new creative videogame environments. That could be cool. But Tron was more about the anxiety of coming to grips with a new computer dominated society and trying to understand the digital frontier... that will surely be lost.

catherinew July 10 2008, 18:22:59 UTC

Yeah, computers have evolved to such a point that being stuck inside one would be totally different today.

Now, if they were stuck inside a calculator... especially one of those graphing ones...

Thread 5

Improv mkttimer July 11 2008, 12:02:03 UTC

One of our classes had a guest speaker in April who was doing a presentation on Web 2.0 and Improv. He went through his life story and made it interactive by giving us the authority to move him to the next slide whenever a few people indicated he wanted to move on. Things didn't get interesting until he put up a poster for TRON, when 1/3 of the class started buzzing with excitement but 1/3 of the class gave mystified stares (my class leans young and international ( ... )