Tron Part 1: The Tronomenon

Ever fall in love with a movie’s world while side-eyeing its logic? That’s the neon paradox of Tron. We dive straight into how Steven Lisberger’s Pong epiphany became a Disney gamble that pushed live action, backlit animation, and early CGI into a single, striking language—and why that language still speaks to us. From Moebius-inspired suits to hand-processed frames and vendor tag-teams like MAGI and Triple-I, we unpack the painstaking craft that birthed a timeless visual grammar of grids, glow, and velocity.

We also confront the chewy stuff: a digitization beam that turns users into avatars, identity discs that are both passports and plot holes, and an MCP that behaves like a walled-garden overlord long before big tech made the term feel familiar. The story inverts expectations—Flynn as creator without control, Tron as titular champion without the spotlight—and lands somewhere between rebellion myth and systems metaphor. It’s messy, yes, but the ideas are weirdly prescient: corporate capture of technology, AI consolidation of power, and the uneasy line between play, surveillance, and ownership.

Along the way, we trace Disney’s state of flux after The Black Hole, the greenlight born of a killer sizzle reel, and the great irony that the Tron arcade cabinet out-earned the film. The Academy may have snubbed the VFX, but the look rewired pop culture’s sense of the digital future. We close by asking the big question: why do we keep wanting more Tron? Maybe it’s the unspent potential, maybe it’s the vibes, maybe it’s both. Hit play to join a candid, curious tour through the franchise’s origin story, its technical miracles, and the blueprint for a version that finally matches the glow.

Enjoyed the ride? Follow, share with a friend who loves neon worlds, and leave a review to help more curious listeners find us.

Episode Transcript

SPEAKER_01 (00:00):
It's plain rice checks.
That's it.
It becomes grape nuts.
Grape nuts.
What are other grapes nor nuts?

SPEAKER_02 (00:08):
Disgust.
It's a jumping off point.
There's your pod right there.
It's called cereal, but spelledwith a C.
Oh shit.
The most popular podcast of alltime.
Yeah, by accident.
We're gonna be the asylumstudios of podcasting.

SPEAKER_01 (00:22):
Gentlemen, let's broaden our minds.

SPEAKER_00 (00:26):
Are they the proper approach button for today?
Negative.

unknown (00:43):
Charge the lightning field.

SPEAKER_02 (00:50):
Welcome back to Dispatch Ajax, the podcast that
is the reason that Jeff Bridgeskeeps a spare data disc in his
crunk.
Yes.
Today we're oh I'm sorry, I'mskipped.
Yes.
Yes.
You have to do an and if you'regonna yes and.
That's an integral part of theprocess.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Well, anyway, he's Jake.

(01:13):
Yes.
You just ran out.
Alright.

SPEAKER_01 (01:16):
Well, it's like I love the bits in the original.
I wish those had sustainedthroughout the rest of the
series.

SPEAKER_02 (01:22):
Well, and the reason we bring these kinds of things
up is because today we're gonnabe talking about Tron.
Raw.
All hail Tron, destroyer ofworlds.
Penis is bad.
Tron is good.
The penis is evil.
The user is good.
Since Tron Ares just came out,we decided we were going to

(01:44):
tackle not just the history ofthe franchise of Tron, and not
just the review of Tron Ares,but also bandy about the ideas,
concepts, legacy, no punintended, and weirdness of Tron
and why it's somehow stillrelevant to some people, I
guess.
If it is.

(02:04):
If that is the case.
And the box office numbers onTron Ares would say otherwise.
However, it's hard to know whatthat means anymore because
everything is alsosimultaneously streaming, so who
the f who the fuck knows?

SPEAKER_01 (02:14):
That's true.
But if we go by history, Tron,Tron Legacy, Tron Ares.
None of them did well at the boxoffice.
That is true.

SPEAKER_02 (02:25):
Well, they all did okay.
None of them did well, but noneof them bombed technically.
So the original Tron wasdisappointing because it was
supposed to save the company's,you know, new endeavors into
live action, but it also didn'tlose that much money.
It actually did okay.
It actually made some money,just not what they thought it
was gonna do.
Same thing with Legacy.

(02:46):
And just like with the firstTron, Tron Legacy, I think more
people have seen it in hindsightthan did at the time.
I think it it's gained morepopularity and put more eyes on
screens as time has gone on.

SPEAKER_01 (02:59):
Well, but I think you could say that for most
films because it's let merephrase that.
Okay.

SPEAKER_02 (03:07):
It's more popular now, I think.
I think m people were look backon both of them a little more
fondly than they did at theirrelease or right after their
release.

SPEAKER_01 (03:17):
Okay.

SPEAKER_02 (03:18):
There are people that went back and have like
they have a love for TronLegacy, which I didn't love at
the time.
Now I kind of appreciate it in adifferent way, but uh, you know,
it still got the Tron problem.

SPEAKER_01 (03:29):
I went back and watched all of the Tron films
along with the new Tron Ares.
I have found that I like themless than I did.
Yes.
I find them to be far worseproducts as feature films than I
recalled, but we can get intothe specifics.

SPEAKER_02 (03:48):
And we will, and that's gonna be part of our
premise, I think, as we go alonghere.
To start off, we'll just kind ofcatch everybody up on.
Let's get let's get digitized,Jake.
No.
He might have a spare data deskto plug in here.
So this is a 1982 film fromDisney, and it was directed by
Steven Liseber.
It was actually his creativevision.
Reportedly, he just wanted tosee a video game character on

(04:11):
screen.
Apparently, he was enamored whenPong came out.
This is how fast this technologyhas come along.
We were mesmerized by Pong.

SPEAKER_01 (04:22):
It was a different time.
People nowadays, you gotta thinkabout how far we've come.
In a short period of time.
Yeah.
I always think of this theoldest person governing you in
Congress, they were still aroundwhen people were plugging in
switchboards to connect you overthe telephone lines.
They had prank operated recordplayers.

(04:46):
They were of a time the TVdidn't exist.
And they were just listening tothings on the on the radio.

SPEAKER_02 (04:52):
Well, I guess there are a few left like that.
I mean, it was like, I mean,it's not like Strom Thurman
isn't around anymore.

SPEAKER_01 (04:58):
Yeah.
We have gone so fast and so far,and that at least for Congress,
and the my biggest problem withthe older people governing us
and no term limits and whatnot.
They are so disconnected fromtheir lived experience to ours,
not just by time, wealth, by howfast culture and technology has

(05:21):
progressed.
I mean, think about trying totell your grandparents how to
use remote control or or usetheir phone.
But imagine those people tryingto decide on how AI should be
policed.

SPEAKER_02 (05:34):
Think about this.
Bill Clinton, who at the timewas like the second youngest
president ever elected, was thefirst president born after World
War II, which makes you go, wow,he was really young.
That was a new generation.
Now think about it in thisperspective.
He was a boomer.
A fucking boomer.
Not even Gen X.
Uh how old is Bill Clinton now?

(05:54):
He's like 80 something now.

SPEAKER_01 (05:56):
He's 79.
79, okay.
Our last two presidents wereolder.
We're currently older in office.
Decades after Bill Clinton wasgone.

SPEAKER_02 (06:07):
Trump had no office.
He had an office in the skyrisesomewhere that he, I'm sure, was
in defaulting mortgage paymentpayments on.
But you know, you know what I'msaying, like they were in power.
All this stuff it's come alongso quickly.
Guys like Lisber were soenamored with something like
Pong that he wanted to tap intothis emerging technology and

(06:27):
this emerging new culture.
And so he decided that was thefuture, and it was the future of
movie storytelling as well.
And so he was going to dowhatever he could to bring
American cinema into the future.
And to be fair, he kinda did.
I know it's a cliche, butliterally ahead of its time.
This was barely even a cultureat this point.

(06:49):
Arcades still were yet to becultural tent poles, and then
suddenly Flynn has like thehippest arcade in the world in
like Los Angeles.
And I think his overall visionfor this is a fascinating
snapshot of the actual futurethat transpired after that.
And I think that's one of thereasons people didn't connect
with it, but it's also one ofthe reasons that people always

(07:12):
look back fondly, at least atthe ideas of it.
We'll get into some of the morephilosophical and existential
stuff in a bit.
But Liseber went to the schoolof the Museum of Fine Arts in
Boston, really awkward name fora school.
He started his career inanimation in 1973 with a film
that he directed and animatedwith a colleague named Eric Ladd

(07:33):
called Cosmic Cartoon.
It's a psychedelic thing wherethey do a lot of experimental
visual stuff.
He then started his ownanimation studio.
Unfortunately, the center ofanimation as an industry was not
on the East Coast.
So everybody was going to LosAngeles and even for upstarts.
So he and his business partner,Donald Kushner, decided to move

(07:56):
the studios in 1977 toCalifornia, and it did see a big
pickup.
Now, that's when he firstdiscovered video games.
Quote, I realized that therewere these techniques that would
be very suitable for bringingvideo games and computer visuals
to the screen.
And that was the moment that thewhole concept flashed across my
mind.

(08:16):
He didn't like the sort of earlyon tech bro culture, which is
obviously different than it isnow, and the niche
inaccessibility of video gameculture.
He thought if he made a filmthat brought that to the masses,
that it would open the world upto computing, to gaming, and to
tech in general, what we wouldthink of as modern tech.

(08:37):
In some ways I think he didthat, and in some ways I think
he completely did not do that.
We'll have to get into that.
Now, Kushner would end up goingon to be a producer in
Hollywood, with maybe thestrangest filmography I have
ever seen for one person.
These are the movies that he'sknown, and these might be the
only ones he's produced, andthis these are the movies he's
known for producing.

(08:58):
Tron, Monster, the uh EileenWarnos one?
Yep.

unknown (09:03):
Okay.

SPEAKER_02 (09:04):
The Brave Little Toaster.
I mean a classic.
And Blitz, a Jason Stathamrevenge movie.

SPEAKER_01 (09:12):
What?
Uh you know what?
I applaud him for not beingpitch and holed.
Kind of galaxy braining this andlike just, you know, spraying it
all over the field.

SPEAKER_02 (09:21):
Diversifying his portfolio, as it were.
So even just broadcast theirbrand to the world, the
Liceburger Studios logo featureda character created completely
out of light using backlitanimation.
So essentially you're creatingnegative spaces so that when you
shine light through the back ofit, that is what lights up what
you would normally consider theoutlines of the character.

(09:43):
That would go on to sort of setthe tone for his aesthetic in
Tron.
You had something to say abouthow he named Tron, didn't you?
If people are stupid, it comesfrom the word electronic, but
there is more of a story tothat.

SPEAKER_01 (09:55):
It does.
So uh at least from what I hadread from Lisberger himself, is
that in the in the late 70sthey're working with the
Olympics, his studio was, andthey were gonna do something
called Animal Olympics, which Iguess are animals doing
gladiatorial games or whatnot.
Oh, good.
Then he said he saw Pong, and touse a bad pun, you want to
connect the dots.

(10:15):
And so they're working on Neonlogos for Animal Olympics, and
he thought that they shouldcreate the character in Neon,
and that character they justcalled Tron.
And then again, he said a lot ofpeople thought it came from
Tron, which is a debuggingcommand in basic programming
language, meaning trace on.
However, Lisbberger stated ininterviews that he took the name

(10:37):
from the word electronic, and hedidn't know anything about basic
commands until much later.

SPEAKER_02 (10:42):
Which is so funny because that would actually make
way more sense.
That right there is maybe amicrocosm of the Tron Gestalt in
general.
Maybe we're assigning too muchmeaning to something that is
really just flash and nosubstance.

SPEAKER_01 (10:56):
Yeah, they were just trying to make something cool
and fun, and then they're likethey didn't think hard about
what all this stuff was andmeant and where it could come
from.

SPEAKER_02 (11:05):
Yeah, and that's gonna become very apparent as we
go along and extremelyconfusing.
He first and foremost justwanted to make a movie.
And it was originally conceivedas an animated film, with the
live action stuff being in thereal world as bookends.
The middle animation stuff wouldbe a combination of what we now
call CGI, and also that backlitanimation we were talking about

(11:28):
before.
Now he was going to do thisindependently because who the
fuck is going to understand thisconcept in a at a movie studio?
And so he approached severalcomputer manufacturers, but they
wouldn't bite on it either,mostly because this is long
before venture capitalists andprivate equity.
There was one company though,Information International
Incorporated, II, that's weird.

(11:51):
They were interested.
Called Try-Eye.
Try I, that's good.
And they started talking abouthow they would integrate live
action, photography, and backloganimation in a way that would be
integrated with the graphicsthat try-eye would help to
facilitate.
I made that up.
I don't know if that's why Iknow, but it's better than I'd
saying III all the time.
And at this point, he actuallyhad a good thing going because

(12:13):
he had his entire script writtenand storyboarded.
Actually, he had done some testcomputer animation as a sizzle
reel.
So he had the complete package.
The problem was he was pitchingit to computer companies.
It's not gonna get you very farin this era.
Today, Apple would throw so muchmoney at you.
He spent three hundred thousanddollars in early eighties money

(12:34):
developing the concept for Tron.
That is a lot, but at the sametime, based on that effort, had
secured between four and fivemillion dollars of private
banking in early 80s money,which is like bigger than most
budgets of films back then.
Unfortunately, he then just sortof hit a wall.
And so I think all of that kindof went away.

(12:55):
I think it went back to itsinvestors.
In a last ditch attempt at doingthis, he drug his idea like a
hobo carrying his bindle up tothe front doors of Disney, which
sounds like to people like uskind of crazy because Disney is
the behemoth that it is.
To modern audiences, youngeraudiences, perhaps, not that

(13:18):
weird because they do a lot ofstuff now and own a lot of
stuff.
But back then, Disney, which hadbeen the powerhouse of
animation, was really on theskids.
Walt Disney was dead, they wereabout to lose Don Blut, and
Disney had a long history oflive action stuff.
They used to do nature films,they used to have a show hosted
by a Nazi.

(13:38):
Now I'm not talking about WaltDisney, an actual Nazi.
They had uh TV shows, they hadSwiss Family Robinson, which
then eventually became Lost inSpace.
They had they had theWaterfalls.

SPEAKER_01 (13:48):
They're Herbie the Love Bug, you had all kinds of
stuff.
They had a lot of child actors,and that's kind of where like
they transitioned those childactors, Kurt Russell, which
famous last words of Walt Disneyon his deathbed.
That is so weird.
They would then transition thatinto like, you know, later into
like the Mickey Mouse Club, um,the Mousketeers, you know, you

(14:10):
you have a lot of famous peoplecome from that.
That progresses on to Disneythen takes those live action
elements, makes TV programs forkids that go on decades and
decades after that.
But at the time, right beforeTron, they had been trying to
focus a little more effortbecause they weren't doing super
well with their animatedfeatures.
So they're trying to do somelive action stuff.

(14:31):
That's where they did Escape toWitch Mountain in 1975, The
Black Hole in 1979, and TheWatch in the Woods in 1980,
trying to expand their genresand what else they could do, but
none of them were commercialsuccesses.
So they were bombs.
Yeah, Disney was trying to findsomething that was going to
really hit.

SPEAKER_02 (14:52):
The crazy thing is that they tried Black Hole and
then tried Tron.
It feels like they would havebeen like, no, we're not doing
this shit again.
Because Black Hole came out, andyou you can see why they did
Black Hole, because Star Warshad just come out in 77, 77.
Um never heard of it.
Never heard of it, never who?
Go see a Star War.

(15:13):
Then Battlestar Galactic had hadbeen developed as a film, but
then transitioned into TV inlike 78, and then Star Trek the
Motion Picture Kit comes out in79, revitalizing that franchise.
So to compete, because you know,it's uh the NFL is a copycat
league, Disney comes out withthe black hole to compete with
the success of Star Wars.

(15:33):
It is a complete disaster, theblack hole.
And so you would think they, youknow, their first real foray
into the sci-fi genre, or atleast sci-fi adjacent genre,
would have like turned them awayfrom another big swing like
Tron, because that was a bigswing.
But they needed to do somethingto up the game, so they hired a
guy named Tom Wilhite, anascending, you know, executive

(15:57):
within the Disney hierarchy.
And he was the one that wasenamored with the concept based
on the reels that they had shownhim, based on the sizzle reel
and the storyboards andeverything, how professionally
done the whole pitch was.
It was one of those ones where alot of times when you pitch
something to a studio, you havean elevator pitch, and you might
have even a test screen, but youdon't normally have an entire

(16:20):
script already completed andstoryboards done and a sizzle
reel.
You have one of those thingsmaybe, but he had all three, and
so we'll hike bid on it.
It took some convincing because,like we were talking before the
show, the studio loved the idea,loved the script, loved the
ambition, but only about half ofthe company was excited about

(16:41):
it.
You were talking about thatearlier.

SPEAKER_01 (16:43):
Yeah.
So there were some that werevery opposed to the project at
Disney because they didn'tbelieve that artists should get
involved with computers at thetime, but there was a faction
within the Disney higher-upexecutives that thought we need
to look towards the future andreally try to like push the
limits what we can do with thisfeature film.

(17:05):
Now, at the time, they didn'thave uh the tech to make it a
real reality.
Bill Croyer, who was the co-leadanimator of the feature, he
described it as jumping off acliff and building your wings on
the way down, which is how theymade the film.
They ended up drafting four maincompanies: Digital FX, Robert

(17:26):
Abel, and Associates,Mathematics Applications Group
Incorporated, or Magi, and alittle group called Triple I
that you might have heard of.
Oh, Tri-Eye.

SPEAKER_02 (17:37):
ICubed.

SPEAKER_01 (17:39):
They got together in what they called symbiotic
creativity.
Kroyer and Jerry Reese would dothe storyboards for the whole
movie and ended up doing all theanimation.
But they they asked the guys atat Magi and Triple I, and they
said, What exactly can you do?
What will it look like?
What can be made?
And you see what they were ableto come up with.

SPEAKER_02 (18:00):
I think Triple I is triple H the next generation.
You know what I mean?
He's the next iteration ofTriple H.
Alphabetically at least.

SPEAKER_01 (18:11):
Oh, oh, that's that's how we're going to that.
I guess that makes sense.
It wouldn't be Quad H.

SPEAKER_02 (18:15):
That's too existential for right now.
Let's move on with that.
There's a quote from Leisberger.
The whole idea of Flynn as atech shaman, I mean, he's really
archetypal.
He journeys to the otherdimension where he solves the
problem because he has powersthat most of the characters in
that world don't have.
I like that idea, and that'skind of something they would
steal for the Matrix later, orDark City, or various other

(18:37):
things, but he doesn't really dothat in this movie.
The sequel.

SPEAKER_01 (18:40):
No, in the first movie, that's not I feel like
that's something that inretrospect, that's an idea that
maybe they're applying, but notwhat was actually delivered for
the film.

SPEAKER_02 (18:53):
What he's implying is that he intended him for him
to be Neo, post-woke Neo, buthe's not in either of those
films.

SPEAKER_01 (19:02):
In the second one, I mean in the second one, he's
kind of like a god figure.
I mean, he has created all ofthe people, all of the city.
You know, he can essentiallylike walk on water.

SPEAKER_02 (19:11):
Yeah, I mean he can do some things, but he's been
like in hiding as a basicallylike a shunned monk.
Yeah, he has access to thesource code, but he doesn't
really utilize it all that much.
He does it to help out his kidand like to help some of the
underground rebellious stuff,but I mean he could just turn on
the lights at any point, and hedoesn't.
Exiled shaman instead of a god.

(19:32):
But then they try and make himlike a god when the plot
requests it.
Then it just doesn't really makea lot of sense, like, why he did
what it what he did the wholetime.

SPEAKER_01 (19:40):
I'll be honest, when you start trying to like break
down what makes sense within theTron films.
Oh boy, I know.
You start treading on dangerousground.

SPEAKER_02 (19:48):
Yeah, on deadly ground.
Which is dangerous becausethere's some fire down below.
Um That'll mark you for death.
You're gonna watch it.
We've got to remain above thewall.
The serious practical andlogical issues with this entire
concept, I think, is going to bethe bulk of what we're gonna be
talking about pretty soon, butwe're just laying down the
groundwork.
So before we do that, let's see.
Leiseburger was talking aboutthe casting of Jeff Bridges.

(20:11):
He started reaching out to seewho would be interested, and a
lot of them, because you knowit's it's old Hollywood, sort of
the death of old Hollywood, whenthey heard that it was about
video games, they were like,fuck you, and then hung up on
him.
Because either they didn't thinkthe video games were serious,
they didn't think they were thefuture, they felt that it was
childish.
It's like a lot, a lot of actorsfelt, you know, when Donner

(20:32):
Superman came out, even thoughthey managed to somehow nail
down a bunch of really famousactors.
So when they actually startedproduction, they managed to snag
Jeff Bridges.
He was a young guy, just kind offresh on the scene.
He was very much into the ideaof this being the future of
things, and he was enthusiastic.
And so when they were trying toget people into the concept on

(20:52):
set, when they were building thesoundstage, they lined it with
video games, with actual arcadecabinet.
I guess an immersive thing, evenif symbolic.
But Jeff Bridges took to it likea fish to water and wouldn't
stop playing them, to the extentwhere they would have to drag
him away from Battle Zone toactually show up to perform in

(21:12):
scenes.
And he liked Battle Zone becauseit was essentially the template
for the visuals of Tron.
According to him, quote, all thethose lines and the grid and all
that, and man, they'd have totear me off this game.
I'd say, I'm preparing for thescene.
That's pretty good, actually.
As he takes a hit off bong andbumps some more quarters in.

(21:32):
Yeah.
Got those headphones onlistening to bowling.
And then so then Disney hadagreed to finance a test reel
outside of the sizzle reel thatalready been created, because
the flying disc thing was a bigaction element in the film.
And so they financed a what theresearch I found was a flying
disc champion, which I think alot of college bros call

(21:55):
themselves, but I don't knowthat that's really a
distinction.
I'm not exactly sure what thatinvolves, uh, because I don't
think they're talking aboutdiscus.
I think they're talking aboutfrisbees.
So they created this test reelto have a live-action, I guess,
frisbee expert, throw around acouple of prototypes of the prop
disc, which then get redesignedin Legacy.

(22:15):
It was impressive enough thatyou know what it was?
He was essentially like thesizzle reel that Sam Raimi
presented to Sony when hepitched Spider-Man.
Have you ever seen that one?
Yeah.
Because they were like, TobyMaguire, he looks like a wiener,
and he's like, well, he'ssupposed to be a high school kid
and he's supposed to be awiener.
So Sam Raimi had Toby Maguire,who at that point was ripped
because he'd been working outfor the role, do a scene where

(22:37):
he fights off a bunch of muggersin an alley, but shirtless, so
that Sony would understand whathe was pitching.
But Disney liked it so much theywere like, you're right, I love
it.
Rewrite it and re-storyboard it.
It was going to be under thepurview of Disney itself.
Now, I think you could probablyfind the original script online.
I haven't looked for it yet.

(22:57):
You can find most unmade scriptsonline, but I am curious the
difference.
It's been greenlit, Disney likesit, they're filming the thing.
It has cast pretty interestingnumber of players.
You have obviously Jeff Bridgesas Flynn, the main character.
You have the evil corporateoverlord in David Warner, a
great character actor who hadjust come off of things like, I

(23:20):
think this was before, Time andTime Again, where he plays Jack
the Ripper, who travels throughtime, chased by H.G.
Wells, played by MalcolmMcDowell.
Talk about a cult classic.
And would become one of the mostrenowned villainous actors of
all time.
And then you have young upstartBruce Boxleitner, who had just
come off of, or I think maybewas currently on no, actually

(23:43):
hadn't done it yet.
He would go on to star in TheScarecrow and Mrs.
King in the 80s, and then laterbecome the second commanding
officer at Babylon 5 in the 90s,mostly built on his his sort of
gestalt that this moviegenerated, and he plays, you
know, the sort of thein-between, the go-between
between Flynn and David Warner'scharacter.
The what really is interestingabout the narrative of the film

(24:06):
is that it does seem to predicta lot of stuff that would come
later.
Surprisingly so.
It deals with corporateespionage, it deals with
cutthroat tech bros, it dealswith capitalism and its negative
co-opting of technology, afuture technology, and also
plays into a lot of the fearsabout AGI, about AI in general.

(24:28):
And I think that it's and Ithink that's one of the things
that leads into its eventualappeal upon retrospect.
And we'll get into that here ina bit.

SPEAKER_01 (24:37):
I would say with it's probably that and the look
of the film.
True.
Which was not necessarilygroundbreaking, but it
definitely pushed a lot ofthings forward.
And it's one of the best partsof the film today because it it
still holds up.
Now, Tron wasn't the firstfeature to use either green
screen or blue screen.
Chroma Keith, as they call it,that was invented all the way

(25:00):
back like in the 1930s.
There's even double exposure andoptical printing and traveling
mats.
That was all back in the early1900s.
But you had The Thief of Baghdadin 1940, which was the first use
of a proper blue screen processto create a traveling mat.
That won the Academy Award forBest Special Effects back in
1940.
You further had other films thatuse it like in the 1958 Old Man

(25:23):
in the Sea with Spencer Tracy,further developing blue screen
techniques.
But one of the things that theydid for this film is that they
shot everything in black andwhite.
And then because this is longbefore software, you don't have
after effects or anything, sothey would send these frames off
to Korea and then they would allget colored in.

(25:46):
The look of Tron, you have thegood guys, you know, quote
unquote, are in these blacksuits with like blue stripes
that glow, and the bad guys arein similar outfits but with red
stripes.
Originally they were supposed tobe yellow and blue.
So the yellow would be the goodguys and blue would be the bad
guys.

(26:07):
And so you can still see alittle bit of the hint of the
yellow in some frames, but theychanged that so that the I think
it would pop more with the redand the blue, but they had to go
in and color all of those handpainted.

SPEAKER_02 (26:19):
Two anecdotes about that.
Interestingly enough, they wereactually white suits.
They weren't black until TronLegacy.
Yes, that's what I meant, butcontinue.
And also it's kind of a andwe've talked about this before,
but it's kind of a Star Trekeffect because they are supposed
to be red and blue, but theyeffectively on screen come off
as orange.
And so by the time you get toTron Legacy, it's just orange,

(26:40):
not red.
Which is odd, but I mean aproduct of technique, not uh an
intentional choice.

SPEAKER_01 (26:47):
Along with the interesting look of the suits,
it was they had actualcomputer-generated elements, you
know, something that theanimators had pushed very hard
against.
They thought that it might bethe depth of the industry.
Boy, were they prophetic inthat.
Right.
Now again, CGI had been used infilms previously to different
degrees.

(27:07):
You know, you had uh Looker, isthat one of them?
I thought it was Q Q the WingedSerpent?
No, no.
There was some previous stuff.
There was some in AndromedaStrain and Westworld um using
CGI wireframe displays in thebackground, and then further
push with Star Wars, but thebiggest leap was in 1981 with

(27:28):
Michael Crichton's Looker with aCGI Susan Day.
That's what I thought.
Yeah.
Now the actual first functionalcharacter, maybe the CGI, came
after this.
I think it was in that SherlockHolmes film that had uh are you
talking about young SherlockHolmes with the stained glass
medieval stained glass night,yeah.

(27:49):
That was from 85.
So still like three years fromthis.
I think 20 minutes worth of CGIfootage used for Tron, which is
not a lot.
No, but I mean at the time itwas a lot.
The state-of-the-art computerused for the film's key special
effects had only two megabytesof memory and 330 megabytes of

(28:11):
storage, but we're still able toproduce honestly pretty cool
graphics, especially for thetime.

SPEAKER_02 (28:18):
If I had a memory card that had those stats, I'd
throw it away.

SPEAKER_01 (28:23):
If you believe the stories, astronauts flew, you
know, to the moon with lesscomputer power.
Yeah.
You know how good Tron looksbecause of its computer
elements, it was shunned byelements of the Hollywood
elites.
So it wasn't even nominated forbest special effects at the time

(28:43):
that ended up going to E.T., Ibelieve.

SPEAKER_02 (28:46):
I mean, that's also pretty good special effects, but
I mean this was so much morepioneering.
Think about it.
When they filmed those black andwhite segments, right?
They shot 75,000 frames offootage, and each of those had
to be hand painted.
The special effects work thatwent into this is so monumental
that the fact that it wasn'teven nominated is fucking crazy.

SPEAKER_01 (29:07):
Yeah, I think that same year, if I remember right,
the thing wasn't nominated forspecial effects either.

SPEAKER_02 (29:13):
But ET is?
Are you kidding me?
What the fuck?

SPEAKER_01 (29:16):
I'm trying to remember off the dome.
I think that Blade Runner, E.T.
Which is fair, and what was theother thing?
Was it Wrath of Khan?

SPEAKER_02 (29:25):
It might have been Wrath of Khan, actually.
Yeah, I think it was actually,which I mean did also use some
on-screen CGI.
Impressive stuff too.
Actually, the the whole like uhGenesis project uh pitch thing's
pretty good.
These lot of vector graphicsstuff.
But I mean, come on, it's Tron.
That doesn't really make a lotof sense.
And you know, God love BladeRunner, but 90% of that movie is

(29:47):
just painted mats.
Like there's not a lot of stuffin there.

SPEAKER_01 (29:51):
Oh no, I was wrong.
So things that weren't nominatedthat year The Thing, Conan of
the Barbarian, Star Trek 2,Breath of Khan, Tron.
Tron, none of those werenominated.
The three that were nominatedwere E.T., Blade Runner, and
Poltergeist, with E.T.
taking home the Oscar.

SPEAKER_02 (30:09):
Okay, well, Poltergeist I'll give you.
That definitely is up, should beup there.

SPEAKER_01 (30:12):
Yeah.
People had to work around theclock on Tron to handle a
reported 76,320 frames, each ofwhich had multiple elements that
required anywhere from 12 to 50passes to generate a final shot.

SPEAKER_02 (30:26):
That's insanity.

SPEAKER_01 (30:27):
Which is one of the reasons it's it still looks the
way it does, you know.
The hard work and the attentionto detail, it pays off in the
final shot.
And I think that's one reasonthat that look, along with the
things it was propheticallyspeaking about, kind of stuck in
the memory of viewers then uhfor years to come.

SPEAKER_02 (30:47):
The reason this is just differs from, I don't know,
like Connecticut Yankee and KingArthur's court or something in
that vein is that Flynn startsout as a big wig computer
programmer engineer for NCOM,which is this big, you know,
international tech company.
And he's gone from the company,opens up his own arcade because
he thinks that's moreinteresting, and then tries to
become an ethical hacker, triesto hack into NCOM's mainframe or

(31:13):
whatever with a program calledCLU or Clue.
But the Master Control program,which is the AI running NCOM
behind the scenes, also playedby David Warner, figures this
out, and then he and the actualphysical corporate evil villain
played by David Warner colludeto not only stop Flynn's hacking

(31:33):
abilities, but also to just getrid of him.
And to do so, they see that thevideo game that Flynn has
created can be used, and this iswhere it starts to get real fast
and loose with logic, as sort oflike a place to silo off
unwanted programs, and theydecide actual living physical
people.
And so they start up the laser,they quote digitize him, which

(31:55):
really seems, if you reallythink about it, kind of crazy
because they take him apart atomby atom, like a transporter.
He's no longer physical, likeand then he shows up as a
digital version within strangelya sort of human-oriented
physical user interfaceenvironment?

SPEAKER_01 (32:13):
Like the metaverse, kind of it's always that

question (32:16):
is this the way his brain can interpret the digital
world and landscape, or is thishow things actually are in this
again, metaversal digitallandscape?
Right.
How literal is this?
It's hard to tell.
I mean, it technically itdoesn't really matter because
you're off to have weirdadventure in tech land.

SPEAKER_02 (32:37):
Yeah, I think some of the appeal of it is we want
to figure that out.
Because they so don't go out oftheir way to explain anything
logically at all.

SPEAKER_01 (32:45):
No, it matters more after the fact as you pour over
it and then as you build uponthat world.
But upon first viewing, you takeit at face value, you just go
along the ride.

SPEAKER_02 (32:56):
I know.
If you think about it in thatsense, it makes total sense that
Disney would do that becausethink about all the animated
stuff they do.
The anthropomorphization ofnon-human characters.
It was kind of, you know,Disney's bread and butter
throughout its animated era,right?
Anthropomorphization of now theyjust apply it to a new concept.
Now they don't understand whatthe concept is.

(33:17):
Computer programs, but that'swhat they've done.
They've personified a new techbuzzword and given them agency.

SPEAKER_01 (33:24):
Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 (33:24):
Put them in an environment that we can
understand as if it's the realworld in which we interact.

SPEAKER_01 (33:29):
Right.
Because there are only twoentities that do not have a
fully human physical reality onthe grid, right?
There's the bite, which is likea cube that only speaks in, you
know, binary.
So kind of yes and no, one andzero.
And then Master Control, whichis a big hologram, but in a like

(33:51):
a laser tube.
He looks like the living laser.
He does look or like when theEmperor would talk to Darth
Vader holographically, you putthat on top of a laser beam.
That's it.
But they're the only two thatare different.
All the other programs appear tobe human-like.
Continue.

SPEAKER_02 (34:10):
Basically, what happens is it becomes this
gladiatorial dystopianenvironment inside the game he's
created, which does beg thequestion, is this just the way
he's perceiving reality?
Because he invented Tron, thegame.
If it comes from hisimagination, so is this how
whatever is happening to him isbeing manifested?
It's really hard to say.
Does that mean that the programsthat he encounters, do their

(34:32):
fates actually correspond withwhat's happening to them, or is
that him creating a narrative?
I I don't really know.
I don't think, well, none of usknow, because they never tell
you in any way, shape, or form.

SPEAKER_01 (34:43):
Although maybe in the sequel we get a further
idea, but we'll get to that.

SPEAKER_02 (34:48):
That statement right there is kind of the problem.
Maybe someday.
So Dillinger, who is the DavidWarner evil corporate character,
he at some point finds out thatMCP has been, as an AI, doing a
bunch of illegal corporateespionage, and basically what
tech companies do today, it'sactually relatively prescient.

(35:08):
He's been appropriatingdifferent programs, he's been
basically stealing software,hacking into software from
normal people, businesses, andthe government.
And he's doing so to the waythey frame it is that by
gathering these programstogether, whether it's privacy
software or accounting softwareor whatever, by gathering these

(35:30):
things together, he's basicallycreating a big portfolio that
increases his ability to controlthe internet.
He's essentially Google.
Oh, no internet.

SPEAKER_01 (35:39):
Well, they're on DARPANET.
Well, no, that that one's isimportant.
I think we need to like put apin in that.
There is no internet.
There is a lack ofinterconnectivity.

SPEAKER_02 (35:49):
Though that's right, they are siloed off.
Right.
Yes.
That is a problem because theydon't even talk about that until
later.

SPEAKER_01 (35:54):
That raises big questions that I have for
everything down the line, but wecan get to that.

SPEAKER_02 (36:00):
DARPANET did exist.
I mean, they had something verysimilar to this back in the 60s.
There is a possibility ofconnectivity, but I mean it's
not the instant connectivity orthe reliable connectivity that
we have now.

SPEAKER_01 (36:12):
When you say the internet or even like connected
networks, we don't see that.
There is no like interactionbetween this system and other
systems.
It all seems self-contained.

SPEAKER_02 (36:25):
Well, that begs the question then, how does he
acquire or access, how does MCPaccess these other file systems?

SPEAKER_01 (36:31):
Well, I mean at the time, you know, you you were
they were plugging in floppydisks to store the information
and utilize.
I mean, perhaps they werephysically maneuvered out.
I think there's a lot ofquestions like how do we create
these programs in the firstplace and what therein creates
their identity and personalitiesand XYZ kind of go down the

(36:56):
line.
But it is unknown how thoseother programs are attained, but
we do not see them traveloutside.
There doesn't seem to be furthergrid interconnectedness within
Tron, any version of Tron,really.

SPEAKER_02 (37:10):
Makes me wonder if NCOM, Google, you know, because
they buy up startups and theyintegrate them into their
ecosystem or what.
And I feel like that's what MCPis doing.
Like he doesn't have to beconnected to them to steal them,
he just takes them over, likeGoogle does with they did with
YouTube, or they did with, youknow, any number of companies
they've integrated into theirinto their corporate hierarchy.

(37:34):
Yeah, but that's the most senseI can make out of it.

SPEAKER_01 (37:37):
I know, but that's that's like the actual
interconnectedness of theinternet.
That's a game changer.
I try to utilize that metaphorwithin this rationalization of
the story and what's happening.

SPEAKER_02 (37:50):
It but in war games, he was able to do that.
He was able to connect to theDARPANET, the Defense Department
original prototype for theinternet.
So why couldn't MCP do that?
It was around the same time asjust a couple years after this.
That technology existed.
I'm not saying that it didn't.
I'm saying that we don't seethat.
True, and I don't think mostpeople even understood it.

SPEAKER_01 (38:11):
No, and and what is this what is displayed in this
version and in the other twoversions of this world in the
subsequent sequels, there isn'ta wide-ranging, far-flung,
interconnected world.
It is siloed, it is by itself,there isn't like a connection to
further systems, which is whatleads me to believe

(38:34):
retrospectively that this is itsown internal network system.

SPEAKER_02 (38:39):
There is yet to be a series of tubes, is what you're
saying.

SPEAKER_01 (38:42):
Tubes do not seem to be present.
Uh there is water, but no tubes.
You mean data streams?
I mean data streams that don'tserve like data streams in the
following sequels.
No, not at all.

SPEAKER_02 (38:56):
Oh, they're actually energy taps.
If we get into how things work.

SPEAKER_01 (39:02):
Do you remember in this does Flynn get hurt?
Does he have blood?

SPEAKER_02 (39:08):
He lose I don't rem Yeah, and that's how they find
out he's our user, right?

SPEAKER_01 (39:13):
Well, that's how they do it in the other two
films.

SPEAKER_02 (39:16):
Oh, you're right.
I know he's weak, and that's howthey introduce him to the to the
power tap or whatever, thestream they drink out of.
It's a lot of trying to explaintechnology through metaphor that
audiences would understandwithout context, that doesn't at
all explain the stuff thatthey're talking about.
Doesn't make any sense.

SPEAKER_01 (39:36):
But it has its own internal logic in this first
film.

SPEAKER_02 (39:39):
Yeah, it does.

SPEAKER_01 (39:40):
He was digitized into a program version of a
user, of a human beinginteracting with these
human-like programs.
In the subsequent sequels, thatis not what happens.

SPEAKER_02 (39:51):
And they do give a little bit of a reason, but
we'll get to there.
So essentially what MCP isdoing, it is, like we said, it's
consolidating its power base bycollecting these quote unquote
programs from other systemsaround the world in other
sectors of society, and then tocull the weaker of them
basically pits them intogladiatorial combat in Flynn's

(40:15):
interpretation of this reality,where they have to literally
fight each other with datadiscs.
Which were actual frisbees.
Whose are frisbees that glow?
And the frisbee is basically, asa program, your entire identity.
It's kind of like your papers,you know, your passport or um
Yes, because you can functionwithout it.

SPEAKER_01 (40:36):
But you have to have it to do anything.
Well, not necessarily.
I mean, they leave in multipleversions of this film, people
leave their discs and otherpeople take them and are able to
attain knowledge from them, andthey can still function without
their discs.
See, they're all important, andthen they're like not important.

SPEAKER_02 (40:54):
Not important.
Right.
It's the problem of trying to,once again, square a metaphor of
this being a physical objectthat's a tool that you use that
you can lose or not have, butalso try to explain how data
works and how like a programuses not only a physical disc at
this point to function, but alsohow all of the information that
makes up the thing is on thatdisc.

(41:16):
And they're really trying tosquare that circle, and it
doesn't really work, but it getsso close that you're like, you
think it should.
And I think that's one of thebiggest appeals about this
entire franchise.
But we haven't even gottenthrough the first movie yet.

SPEAKER_01 (41:30):
Yeah, no, next, you've got to explain the end in
two minutes.
Do it.

SPEAKER_02 (41:33):
Yeah, so gladiatorial combat, they
introduce a lot of elements toit that you know, there are the
the flying like MCP arch they'relike flying tanks.
Well, there are actual tankstoo.
That's true.
The actual gameplay of the gameof Tron in the real world is
essentially like snake, exceptthere are two light cycles and
they create these trails oftheir color that are permanent,

(41:54):
they don't go away, and they aresolid physical objects.
And so the strategy is to figureout how to out-rase this other
character and or to trap it inits own or your digital wake so
that it's destroyed and you win.
That's the basic gameplay ofthat.
And so that becomes a big plotdevice in the movie, where in

(42:14):
another sort of Ben Hurgladiatorial combat, they take
these light cycles and they raceagainst each other.
And so they do that, there'ssome intrigue, it basically just
becomes sort of a Spartacusgladiator type thing, where
there's an undergroundresistance, of course, to the
Master Control program amongthese programs, because this
virtual reality world, thismetaverse that he's perceiving

(42:35):
is a dystopian autocracy.
So he enlists two friends, Ramand Tron, other programs, and
Tron is like the best at all thegladiatorial games.
And does Ram die?
Yes.
Yeah, Ramp dies.
Funny enough, there's more thanone Babylon 5 actor in this

(42:56):
film.
We don't want to detail everybeat of this plot because it is
not only a really cliche plot,but we really don't have the
time to do so.
But it's a classic undergroundresistance type situation.
Think about it like there's theFrench resistance or whatever.
It includes a wise elderly.
Also that, yeah.
It's a new hope.
You're right, the beats arethere.
I didn't even think about that.

(43:16):
So that's actually basicallywhat they're trying to do is
overthrow the Master Controlprogram.
And in parallel, BruceBroxleiger's character and
Flint's girlfriend are trying tofigure out what happened.
In the real world.
In the real world, and DavidWarner's evil corporate villain,
they realize that he's on thetake, even though he's a slave
to an AI, which is reallyinteresting.
So there's sort of a parallellike revolt going on on the

(43:40):
outside.
Except the difference is thatMCP is the real controlling
villain in both.
Flynn realizes that Tron's thekey.
The really interesting thingabout it is in most films you
would think that Flynn wouldjust become the character of
Tron, right?
Because Tron's the main is thecharacter you play when you're
playing Tron the game.
But Flynn isn't Tron.

(44:01):
Flynn's just Flynn, and he findsTron.
That's odd.
Tron is not the main character,he's the titular character, he's
not the protagonist, he's almostthe MacGuffin.

SPEAKER_01 (44:13):
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I mean, if it's I mean,the way I kind of think of it is
like if if you were liketransported into a fantasy world
and you found the strongestknight, you fight alongside the
knight, but the knight is thestrongest and the best, and you
need that knight and utilizethat knight to win the day, even
though you're the maincharacter, you know what I mean?

SPEAKER_02 (44:34):
I do.
I and I I understand, and thereare narratives just like that,
countless.
But the fact that you're tryingto adapt a video game in which
you play as the main character,and then when you actually go
into the video game, you're notplaying as the main character.

SPEAKER_01 (44:47):
Well, he's also beyond it.
He's I mean, he's a user.

SPEAKER_02 (44:51):
Right.
He's outside the system.
But Tron is barely in the movie.
I mean, he does the big herothings when he needs to, but
Flynn is your hero.
So why have both?

SPEAKER_01 (45:01):
I don't think it necessarily contradicts itself.
I think it maybe even gives it alittle more flavor than a
standard just Mary Sue like winsthe day.

SPEAKER_02 (45:12):
It's just not what you would think of from the
premise that they're giving youoff the bat.

SPEAKER_01 (45:17):
Well, in a way, it's kind of like if Jack Burton just
gets dropped into Tron, and thenlike That's a good analogy.
It's it's Tron's story.
Tron's the one who's the key todefeating Master Control, but
Jack Burton's helping.
Yeah, that's true.
But also, Jack Burton is not aprototypical, it's a it's a
unique story where they are theyare a side character that's the

(45:39):
main character, you know.

SPEAKER_02 (45:41):
You're right.
I mean, structurally, that'sessentially the same thing.
Out of place, dropped into themiddle of a of a of an actual
narrative, a battle going on ofgood and evil, and he's just
like, what?
But the weird thing is hecreated this universe.
That's the difference.
If Jack Burton was egg shed, itwould be different.
Or whatever.

SPEAKER_01 (45:59):
Right, but again, he's out he's outside it and
he's been dropped into it.

SPEAKER_02 (46:03):
But by but by creating it, you would think he
would have more agency andcontrol over the universe.
You know what?
If this was the lastStarfighter, it'd be different.
If you didn't create the game,but you got sucked into it, it
would make more sense, eventhough in last Starfighter you
are the main character.
But if you kind of combinedthose two ideas, him being the
creator of the game and yethaving no control over the game

(46:24):
and having to rely on thecharacter, but not controlling
him, letting him use his ownskills to play out the
narrative, that doesn't happenvery often as a narrative.

SPEAKER_01 (46:33):
Uh yeah, but I mean, I don't think it's that
different from like an authorgetting dropped into their
story, and then they're like,they're out of their depth
because, well, they're anauthor.
They're not a horse writer or acaptain at arms or whatever the
what's happening in the story,you know.

SPEAKER_02 (46:48):
I mean, yeah, I guess if you in that scenario,
you're helpless to the narrativeyou created.
But because they set up that hecreated it, you'd feel and he's
a hacker and he's a programmer,you would think that he would be
able to I don't know.
It always just felt to be alittle odd that it was called
Tron, and Tron's just kind ofthere and does his thing, but
nobody remembers Tron.
No, nobody if you if if you askthe person on the street who'd

(47:12):
seen Tron as a kid and go, Whois Tron?
They would go, Oh, it's JeffBridges.

SPEAKER_01 (47:16):
It's right, right.
Both on the inside the game andoutside.
I mean, Bruce Box Leitner's theguy who's creating this
technology, and he's the onewho's fighting in the real world
against NCOM's nefariousdealings, and he's also the one
on the inside the game that'sfighting against master control.
In a lot of ways, Jeff Bridgesis outside, he's doing his own

(47:36):
thing, he kind of stumbles in,decides to dick around, gets
sucked into the game, then he'skind of helping out the
storyline playing inside.
So, in a lot of ways, he's justthe observer who passes through.
So I don't know if you shouldnecessarily have more volition
than he does.
But we should get to the end ofthe movie.

SPEAKER_02 (47:54):
Yeah, okay.
So essentially all that happensis that uh they end up
physically go into the memorycore of the Tron universe, which
is the MCP.
However, it's tapping into thegame.
Do they go is that the giantlike light pole thing?
Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 (48:09):
Okay.

SPEAKER_02 (48:09):
Which makes me feel like it's like a it's like a
secret embedded Trojan horse,but also secretly the thing that
powers the whole game?

SPEAKER_01 (48:19):
It's hard to know.
Oh, it's become a trope now, butit's the magic glowing laser
light into the sky of whateverneeds to be done.

SPEAKER_02 (48:30):
That's after they destroy the MCP.
That becomes their conduit outof the game.
Hmm.
Okay, yeah.
Or or, well, they don't get outof the game until later.
Exactly.
But not.
What happens is MCP, I guess youcould say, is sort of like a
virus or a Trojan horse that hasquietly taken control and then
become the dystopian dictator ofthe Tron world, and then MCP is

(48:52):
destroyed, this giant column oflight, the source code of the
entire universe or whatever.

SPEAKER_01 (48:58):
Tron He needed to put his disc into the light
stream to win the day?

SPEAKER_02 (49:04):
Just a tip.
Tron allows Flynn tore-materialize in the real
world.
He's able to send Flynn backthrough this column of like.
Yeah, and so then Flynn showsback up in the real world.
Tron doing so has released allof the programs that MCP had had
pirated.

(49:24):
Then we find out that Dillingerhad basically stolen and
plagiarized all of Flynn'sprogramming, and that's why he
left Encom in general.
When Dillinger the villain showsback up the next day after all
this goes down, it has beenreleased publicly that he did
all of this, and then he isvanquished, and then Flynn
becomes CEO of Encom.

(49:44):
The end.
That's that.
That's Trond.
That's Tron.

SPEAKER_01 (49:47):
Tron the movie, folks.

SPEAKER_02 (49:49):
Tron the movie.

SPEAKER_01 (49:50):
You got Trond.
Bitch, you got Trond.
Which didn't happen to a ton ofpeople in 1982.
Again, Tron did okay, but notgreat.
In fact, it did poorly enoughthat it kind of scuppered a lot
of live action programming foryears to come from Disney.

SPEAKER_02 (50:09):
A lot of articles are like, well, that ended all
of that for Disney.
I'm like, I saw Flight of theNavigator.
What the fuck are you talkingabout?
What are you talking about?
They still did shit allthroughout the 80s.

SPEAKER_01 (50:17):
That's not true.
I think they were still doingthings, but I think the focus
got pulled back even further.
Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 (50:24):
They focused more on animation.

SPEAKER_01 (50:26):
Yeah.
They were swinging for somethings and they were striking
out.

SPEAKER_02 (50:29):
Yeah.
That's why Little Mermaidhappened.

SPEAKER_01 (50:32):
Aladdin happened.
I mean, a lot of that, I mean,that's there's a lot of
confluence of elements ofcertain animators, certain
voices within the Disney works,being there at the right time,
the right place, making thosethings work and those really
jumping off.

SPEAKER_02 (50:47):
Don Bluth was putting out actual really cool
stuff back then, so Disney waskind of like behind.
And so they felt like they hadto go back to the animation in
the first place, especiallysince the live action stuff they
did bombed, which totally makessense.
And now ironically, they'remaking their animation live
action, which is this hilarioustime is a flat circle scenario.

SPEAKER_01 (51:05):
Well, if you want to talk about master control
capturing uh programs andutilizing them in perpetuity for
their own money-making goals,then that that is Disney
currently.

SPEAKER_02 (51:16):
Really, really interesting tidbit about the
look and design of Tron.
Mobius was the productiondesigner, the inspirational
production designer for Tron.
You can totally see that.
For those of you who don't know,Mobius is a famous French comic
book illustrator, completegenius, and was also the
production designer onYodoraski's ill-fated Dune.

SPEAKER_01 (51:39):
Yeah.
A visionary sci-fi design guy.
But like I said, Tron didn't dosuper well, but the video game
did.
Tron itself, the movie, earned33 million, but industry
analysis estimate the arcadegame made between 100 and 200
million dollars in revenueduring its peak.
People played the shit out ofthat video game.

SPEAKER_02 (52:00):
That was just Tron, the original Tron video game,
right?

SPEAKER_01 (52:03):
Yes, just the original Tron video game.
You're looking about 20 yearsafter the movie and video game
came out, that they put out thesequel where you're like, why?
Who was asking for that?
Who needed that?
Not too long after, in 2010,they put out Tron Legacy.

SPEAKER_02 (52:19):
Which was greenlit in 2008 based on, once again, a
sizzle reel at Comic Con, whichis really funny.
Uh, we missed that one.
I know I was there, I justmissed that.

SPEAKER_01 (52:28):
There's definitely a lot to get into about well, what
does all this mean?
And definitely like, why arethey making these?

SPEAKER_02 (52:36):
Right, and what's the appeal, and why do we all
still kind of go, cool, a newTron?
We're gonna end this one here,because we laid the groundwork.
But next time we're gonna pickup where we left off, where you
don't need as much backstory.
Now we get to talk about thecultural impact, the the sort of
zeitgeist, and the reasons whyTron keeps happening, why they

(52:58):
keep trying to make Tron happen,and why we're all okay with
that.
Or are we?

SPEAKER_01 (53:03):
I am! I want a good Tron movie! Like the Final
Destination franchise.
First one was an interestingidea, and they kept making
sequels that were all bad tobatter.

SPEAKER_02 (53:14):
Reddit's gonna kill you on this one, man.

SPEAKER_01 (53:17):
Until the last one, which is the best film of all of
them.
It would have made a greatX-Viles episode.
I think it has more legs thanjust an X-Viles episode.
I think there is some fun thingsthat they do and like the but
overall, there isn't much meaton the bone.
Now I understand a bit withthat.
There is Sequelitis that goesthrough horror franchises.

(53:38):
They're easy and cheap to make,and you can just kind of pump
them out, give new kills, givenew chills.
It's great.
Kids eat it up.
But when the last one came out,you're like, we did need one of
these, but maybe we did.
Maybe all we were waiting forwas something great to come
along.

(53:59):
There are things that are reallygood that deteriorate over time.
A Star Wars.
Star Wars is fantastic.
Subsequent prequels and sequelshave been various levels of
disappointing.

SPEAKER_02 (54:12):
Those are for complicated reasons.

SPEAKER_01 (54:14):
In grand scheme of things, for a lot of people, it
kind of whittled away theirdesire to see more Star Wars.
True.
To where they got to a point, Iliked my old stuff, but I didn't
really like the new stuff.
I would check it out, but Iwasn't invested.
I didn't care.
But then Mandalorian and Andorcame out, and I'm like, okay,
it's not Star Wars itself that Ihave a problem with.

(54:36):
It's poor scripts, it's pooracting, it's poor stories, it's
bad Star Wars that was turningme off.
Star Wars can still be good, butthe thing about Tron is Tron was
never good.
So why is it that we why do wekeep wanting more Tron?
And do we want more Tron?

SPEAKER_02 (54:55):
It was really just vibe.
It's we we want the vibes ofTron to be good.
That's what we're feeding offof.
The ideas.
It's a combination of nostalgiaand potential, unrealized
potential, and often wastedopportunities for really cool
stuff, but we still want thatone good one to happen.
It's like how everybodyeverybody thought one day

(55:17):
Coldplay was gonna finally putout that good album.

SPEAKER_01 (55:20):
Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_02 (55:21):
And it never happened.

SPEAKER_01 (55:23):
Yeah, I can see that.
But we'll get into more of thatand go over the specifics.
What is it about the phenomenonof Tron?
We're not haters of Tron.

SPEAKER_02 (55:33):
If a cool Tron movie came out, we'd be like, fuck
yes, let's do this.
But it hasn't yet.

SPEAKER_01 (55:39):
I like Tron.
You know, I don't love Tron.
I think I overestimated it uponits release way back when and
when I was a kid.
The first times I saw it.
When I saw Legacy, I went backand looked at what I had thought
of it.
It's like, oh man, I liked it alot more then than I do now.
I enjoyed my rewatch of it.
We can get into the details.
I actually like Legacy more nowthan I did when it came out.

(56:01):
That's really funny.
We should put a pin in this.
Again, we're not hating Tron.
We wouldn't be doing an entiretwo-part series on Tron if we
weren't at least interested andliked it somewhat.
Yeah.
Things don't have to be greatfor us to be into it.
And we could be hopeful aboutbad things turning good.
Yeah, we're optimistic and we'reinquisitive about the nature of

(56:22):
Tron, the world of Tron, and thephenomenon of Tron and its
sequels, its legacy, punintended.
The Trinomenon.
The Tronomon.

SPEAKER_02 (56:32):
Yeah, the Trinomenon.

SPEAKER_01 (56:34):
That's that's what we're all saying.
That's what all the kids aretalking about.
TM TM TM TM.
They've got a case of tronomongoing on in their undercarriage
as we speak.
Trinomenitis.
But until until this podcastgets its legacy sequel, we'd
like to thank you for travelingto this digital pathways, uh,

(56:55):
drinking from our deep datastream, uh, and listening to the
podcast uh as we put it on foryou.
If you wouldn't mind likesharing, subscribing, that would
be great.
That's it gets all the bits andbites out there for others.
Beeps and boops, possibly uhhear us and thus see us and and
rise up the ranks.
If you wouldn't mind giving usfive master controls on the

(57:16):
favorite podcast app of yourchoice, ideally Apple Podcasts.
That's the best way for us toget our trhenomenon out there
for the masses.
And again, thanks.
Thanks for uh checking us out.
We hope you come back for parttwo, where we kind of dig in
deep into the trhenomenon, as wekeep saying, TMTM.
But skip.

(57:37):
Until the particle laser sucksthem into digital pathways and
they become not a user, but aprogram.
What shall they do?

SPEAKER_02 (57:45):
Make sure they have charged their compilers, their
recognizers, their light cycles,and make sure they have agree,
make sure they have supportedtheir local comic shops and
retailers.
That having been said, we wouldlike to say, Godspeed, fair
wizards.
Yes.