... And yet this movie did NOT get the Oscar for Special Effects that year. Went to 'E T' instead. It may be that the Academy later got a clue, because it gave 'Tron' a 'Special' Oscar very recently.
@7thsealord888 Yeah, at the time they said they felt using computers like that was "cheating". Yet another example of the Academy having their collective head firmly lodged in their collective sphincter.
@@revbladeStar Wars used no computers, outside of computer controlled camera rigs and some very rudimentary wireframe graphics. So, yeah. It was absolutely cutting edge. The lightcycle scene had to be designed entirely mathematically, with no 3D user interface to see what the final outcome would be. A single frame could take six hours to render. One of the computers used had around 2 MB of memory and about 300 MB of storage. This was all very new stuff that Star Wars wouldn't get into until the 90s.
Pixar exists specifically because of TRON. Its founders were so blown away by it that they pivoted from traditional animation to creating their own computer animation studio.
Lots of people went to design school because of Tron. That’s how groundbreaking this was. It was literally THE first major movie to use CGI and explore visual effects and push their capabilities. 🤓👍
CGI animation was used in Star Wars to create the death star exhaust port diagrams, and before that in 1973 the view from the gunfighter's point of view had CGI elements. These were only a few seconds of animation compared to the "several" seconds of animation in Tron.
No matter how dated and silly this movie is, there's no denying that it was a hugely important part of the story and history of CGI. This was three years before Young Sherlock Holmes and seven years before The Abyss. And those movies had CGI shots measured in seconds, Tron's are literally measured in hours. Love or hate the movie, you still have to respect what it accomplished. I'm biased though, I'm old enough to have seen this in the theater, and it was a big deal to that 14-year-old.
@@timmooney7528 I think I understand what you're trying to say Tim, but you've got it backwards: The animation in T2 was an "extension" of the animation used in The Abyss.
@@timmooney7528 I've seen several effects teams try to recreate the liquid metal effects from T2 using all the modern tech and several more decades worth of available knowledge about digital effects. And while they were able to achieve a result that was somewhat similar, it took them absolute ages to get there and it was still noticeably inferior to the T2 effects in significant ways.
This was the 80s Jurassic Park, in the sense that no one had ever seen CGI incorporated into film like this. Star Wars was all models, which is impressive on its own scale, but TRON did something completely new.
Most, actually. Every frame "inside" the computer had to be reproduced, on film, four or five times. Then artists touched up and added effects to each frame. Not just to add the glowing effects, but to tone down the actor's eyes and teeth so they wouldn't show up as brightly as their costumes. Finally, they were all composited into the final frame. Pretty much the only parts where a computer was involved are the vehicles and landscapes.
In the building where Tron was being edited, they were working on "The Fox a 15:57 nd The Hound" across the hall. One day, a young man who was working as an "in-betweener" on that film, wandered across the hall to check out Tron. He was blown-away. In fact, he went to his superiors at Disney to convince them that computer animation was how stories would be told in the future. The Disney suits promptly fired the guy because he wouldn't shut up about computer animation. So the guy moves to the bay area and goes to work for George Lucas. Eventually, the Lucasfilm computer animation department was sold to Apple. After a few successful short films, it was time to animate the first, full length computer animated feature film. That film was "Toy Story" and that young man was John Lassiter.
If you grew up in the 1970s/80s, this movie was what we all imagined it was like inside our Atari 2600s or early PCs. It was a touchstone for computer nerds that only ReBoot could match a decade later. The combination of film compositing, hand-drawn animation and CGI is still as otherworldly as ever. You should watch a making of for this movie, it's incredible how much work went into it.
@@StCerberusEngel Personal opinion is just that. Mileage may vary. I never watched much of the series to follow a story line, so for me it was just the novelty factor of being CGI. I wasn't interested in Saturday morning cartoons at the time.
@timmooney7528 I understand, but I'm simply saying that both properties filled a niche with their audience that few others did. And at a time when nerd was still widely considered a pejorative rather than a demographic.
Trivia I love: The guy Flynn beats in the jai-alai game, the one Sark murders... is Peter Jurasik... who went on to play a beloved Shakespearean character "Londo Molari" in one of the best science fiction tv series of all time, "Babylon 5" The cool part: Alan01 / Tron is played by Bruce Boxleitner, who went on to play Captain John Sheridan, commanding officer of the space station known as... Babylon 5. Two of the top characters in B5 were both alum of "Tron".
@@alaneskew2664 If you listen closely, you can hear him shouting about how in the glory days of the republic, nobody would have dared do this to a Centauri ambassador as he falls to his doom.
As someone with a computer science background, how all of the data bits and computers and programming was depicted was genius. Recognizers, deresolutions, breaking through the barrier between programs and running amok in a computer system, input output tower to the human interface, AI programs hijacking other programs to do their bidding (viruses), countermeasures (the tanks) to eradicate stray and run away code or processes in the operating system, just awesomeness.
As a software engineer (or developer or programmer--it's just a title), I agree. I also like to compare and contrast this with the more "object-oriented" visualization in _Wreck-It Ralph_ , which is pretty good, too, albeit not as elaborate and nerdy as what we see in _TRON_ .
Tron Legacy had a lot of telling instead of showing. It feels like there should have been a whole other movie with the rise of the AI's, or whatever they called them. I thought the Tron video game that came out a few years before had a better story.
There are actually only around 20 minutes of footage that uses computer graphics at all. Nearly everything with actors in frame was instead done through photographic techniques. In particular, they did a lot of backlit matte shots, where they would get a matte of, say, the glowy lines on the costumes. Then they photograph that matte negative (clear for the lines and black for everything else) with a light behind the negative. When they composite it back with the regular shot of the actors, the backlight gives a glowy effect to that part of the shot. This technique was super popular at the time, especially in animation, with movies like Heavy Metal using it extensively.
27:35 -- DATED... Christ Addie... Look at all the dreams this movie created... Back in 1982, computers didn't have video on their screens.. Touch screens like Dillanger's desk didn't exist.. Flatscreens as big as his desk didn't exist.. Being able to view security cameras VIA the web or IP address didn't exist.. This movie made all those technologies possible because people wanted what they saw and worked toward it.. Worked toward making it real.. --- In 1982, the computers had JUST started getting into homes.. The internet, as it is today, was only a dream.
Yes, it did look incredible at the time. My best friend and I saw it during our summer break from school, and later spent time in the yard with rope rings on the lawn throwing Frisbees at each other. When the actual video game showed up in our local arcade, it did a pretty good job of replicating the action from the movie, especially the light cycles. Even so, I thought it was funny; a video game based on a movie featuring made-up video games.
Twelve-year old me was gobsmacked by this movie, and it still tickles that part of my brain 😃 edited to add: the CGI effects, and mixing live-action with CGI, was pretty groundbreaking at that time.
I'd say the effects were as ground breaking as the concept of the story. I had never seen anything like this when it came out so I know whatcha mean by tickling that nostalgia part of the brain where children dream.
One of my favorite Sci Fi movies! Thia got snubbed at the Oscars for Best Visual Effects, because the Academy thought that using CGI was considered cheating and that practical effects should be used instead. In 1992, it received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Best Visual Effects.
Considering the sheer amount of work and effort that creating pure CGI effects took at that time, the idea of considering it "cheating" is laughably ridiculous! But I have heard that before. Hey- they didn't know, I guess. New things are often not recognized in their time.
I visited a three-letter agency back in the day when I worked for a fortune 500 tech company. After they processed me in, i passed through a door that was probably two or three feet thick. That door opening scene in this film reminds me of that.
Welcome to the grid, Addie. TRON (1982) is one groundbreaking sci-fi movie for it's time. It's been TEN YEARS since the last time I traveled to Walt Disney World in Florida and I highly doubt that I'll ever get to go back there soon (although I visited Disney Springs in November 2014 and recently in May 2022). The TRON Lightcycle / Run looks awesome. I even got to ride the original TRON Lightcycle Power Run TWICE at Shanghai Disneyland, in October 2018, and it's my all-time favorite Disney ride to date. The only difference is that you place your personal belongings in lockers in the Florida version whereas cast members have bins for them in Shanghai. I do hope you & Jeremy are having a magical time at Walt Disney World. See you real soon for TRON: Legacy (2010). You're DEFINITELY gonna love that one.
fun fact: They didn't have enough processing power to full animate the MCP's face, so they animated it going "Bwah". They then rocked the footage back and forth, to give it the illusion of speech. In this movie there's only a few minutes of actual CGI and the rest is accomplished using physically models with special paint on them.
The "Special Paint" is a post production effect. Masks had to be hand painted for every frame to control where the lights appeared. There's a really good behind the scenes special about Tron and everything they had to do to create those effects.
If you’re wondering about seeing Mickey in that scene Addie. In Disney they have what is called a hidden Mickey that appears in films, shows, video games, and theme parks.
Also, when Sark looks at the big labyrinth display - right before he beats the soldier to the ground - you can see Pacman in that display at the right edge of the screen.
At the time nothing like this had been attempted. It was totally stunning seeing something with such a different aesthetic on the big screen. Truly a work of art.
From *DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN SLANG* (Grand McNally, 2050) *slip us a Mickey* (late 20th/early 21st century) - Derivative of "to slip (someone) a Mickey (Finn)", meaning to surreptitiously administer a soporific drug in an alcoholic beverage; refers specifically to a traditional tactic of the (Walter E.) Disney corporation whereby Mickey Mouse's image is cleverly hidden within one of its motion pictures. See also *Easter egg.* 😁 🤓
That ending bit where the camera pans over to the city and the speeded up footage takes us to night with Wendy Carlos' synth tones playing is one of my favourite bits in movie history. It's definitely a flawed movie - the pacing is off, and they were trying to do things nobody had done which impacted how well things turned out, but it still - partly due to effects, and partly to the music married to it - feels like no other movie before or since.
Thank you for the honesty! And yet, your amazing positivity always comes through. Despite what some people may claim, even in the 80s, there was a good amount of sentiment that this movie was pretty cheesy, goofy, strange, or whatever else. It made approximately $33 million at the box office, while some very popular movies made hundreds of millions in the early and mid 80s, so it wasn't exactly a huge smash right away. In fact, I probably like it more now than I did then. Very impressive and entertaining movie, and a pretty big part of our culture. Thanks for reacting to it!
I was never into this movie until I got older and appreciated all that they had to do with special effects, lighting, and painting to get something that has never been seen in cinema.
In '82 Computers weren't really a thing in the home or a part of daily life. (and certainly not things like handheld touch screen phones full of apps as the norm) Back then, I was learning about computers in grade school enrichment programs. We were taught about bits, bytes, how to write in BASIC, etc.... and we didn't even have a computer in the classroom. So from that point of view, this movie was pretty much just another fantasy movie. This one was just about making the insides of computers 'more human' to tell a story. What's really funny is in '86 my dad got a job at the place that made the computers that made this movie. They still had TRON posters in the lobby. Those computers cost $45,000 in 1987 dollars (same price as about 54,000 gallons of gas), and get this...... They had 6 MILLION COLORS!!!!!! They also did some petty neat graphical simulations for a certain government that I wasn't allowed to see (and damn sure can't talk about after seeing it anyways :) )
Computers were starting to be a thing in 1982, but it was still very niche. I'd seen my first one (A Commodore "PET" computer) demo'd in my classroom in 1980. By 1982 the earliest Apples were out, as were early IBM's (later "PCs"). Atari had its 400 (membrane keyboard) and 800 (regular keyboard). Tandy (Radio Shack) had its TRS-80 series. There were a few others. At my school (9th grade that year), we had a full-year computer science class. I loved that class. I was - and still am - a huge nerd, but back then it wasn't an even slightly cool thing to be, quite the opposite. The computers available for the whole class to use were one decrepit TRS-80 Model I, three Atari 400s, and two TRS-80 Model III (with the monitor built into the computer - so futuristic!). Everyone wanted to use the Ataris because they were in - *gasp* - COLOR! The Trash-80s on the other hand were just monochrome. I got ahold of a BASIC compiler, which would convert something in BASIC to (if I remember right) Assembly code, dramatically speeding it up. At the end of the year, we were supposed to do a project that showed what we'd learned during the year. Others were doing some very basic graphics work on the Ataris (ex: An apple is shown on the screen, a small worm moves in from the left, going "into" [behind] the apple, the exits from the right of the apple, larger than before, and goes offscreen. That project got an A). I used the extended character set on the Trash-80s, which included a little stick figure guy, a smiling face, and some things that looked like mushrooms on legs that worked okay as robots, to write a version of the arcade game Berzerk. At the end of the year, I happened to get a glimpse of the teacher's computer's screen, which faced away from the class so I didn't normally see it. The maze from my game was burned into the monitor. :)
@earlbrown: did you mean 16 million colors? Because that's what you get when you express every primary color (red, green, blue) with a granularity of 8 bits (0..255), just like most computers today. The remaining ones are already at 30 bits per color and can show things like HDR...
My dad bought us a Radio Shack TRS-80 computer in 1979 or so--he told me "someday computers are going to be huge." Was he ever right. Later we got a Commodore 64 before finally getting our first PC in 1990 or so. Learned how to program on the TRS-80, though, long before hard drives or disk drives...I had to hand type a program from a book or manual, which could take hours, just to play a game. When I got to C64s and their minutes of loading time for a game, it felt like lightspeed. Now I play games like No Man's Sky or Red Dead Redemption 2...and I can still remember what it was like playing Pong at home in 1975 or so. We've come so far.
@@rikk319 My first computer was an Atari 800. I bought the fancy version with the full 48k of memory. (Yes, kids... "k". Not megs, not gigs, certainly not terabytes... it had 49,152 bytes of memory, and some of that was allocated to system files. But I digress.) There was a game on it I liked called Telengard. It was a text-only dungeon adventure game. I rewrote it so that it used a redefined character set to add graphics, expanded other parts of it, and basically turned it into a different game with a similar theme. I remember having to go through line by line replacing the word "PRINT" with the shortcut "?" to save the four bytes of memory for each one, because I needed those bytes elsewhere to add something. Gamers today with their effectively unlimited memory use in games don't know how good they have it.
When this movie came out, I was right there in the middle of the target audience. I was a young kid that spent lots of time in the arcade playing video games, playing video games at home a lot, too, and I loved sci-fi. I can’t even remember how much time and money I spent on this game in the arcade, but it was so worth it.
TRON is an underappreciated gem. The significant impact this movie had is seen in almost everything in cinema. It also highlights the necessity of practical effects and sets as well. Many of the things the characters interact with are physically built sets and props. For everything filmed as inside the computer, that was all filmed in black and white. All the colors were filled in by artists and by hand. TRON Legacy is a worthy sequel to this and TRON Ares, well, we shall see.
Oh, you're going to love Tron: Legacy, the way you keep harping on 'we could work _together_ ."... Note that both Flynn and Tron are prepared to go it alone. Also make special note of the lightcycle battle; I'll reference it when you react to Legacy. Make note that Tron says to take them one-on-one... There is a lot in this movie about individuality and self-determination.
We all anticipated Tron Legacy sooo much that the story inevitably had to disappoint me a little. But that was completely overshadowed by the awesome soundtrack by Daft Punk. I must've listened to it hundreds of times.
Try and look at other tech available at the time for the home user. The Atari 2600 was still going strong. The height of kids electronic toys were Simon and the Coleco handheld football game, the one made from a few LEDs and some beeping noises. It’s hard to comprehend exactly how far we’ve come in the last… oh god, 42 years. I’m old. Anyway, this was absolutely unheard of graphics. Absolutely nothing came even remotely close.
Hey Addie...or...Greetings, Program! When I was a kid when this came out, and it was amazing to see. It wasn't a huge hit, and some of the reviews were less than kind. There will be a Tron 3 called Tron:Ares starring Jared Leto, Cameron Monaghan (Cal Kestiss in Jedi: Fallen Order and Jedi: Survivor video games), Evan Peters (Quicksilver in X-Men; Days of Future Past and Apocalypse), Gillina Anderson, and Jeff Bridges (this was just confirmed a couple of days before the posting of this video to TH-cam). - All of the game system footage was filmed in black and white, with the actors in white costumes that had black electrician's tape mapping out the circuits, and all of the sets were black. After filming it, each frame was blown up, and hand painted. Depending on what was in the frame, a single frame of film could have had many layers that were separated out, painted, and then rotoscoped back together like an animated movie. While there were a few CGI bits in the film, most of it was just one fashioned animation techniques with live action footage. - Tron/Alan Bradley was played b Bruce Boxleitner, who is mainly known as a TV actor. He did The Gambler TV movies with Kenny Rogers and Reba McIntyre, the TV series Scarecrow and Mrs. King with Kate Jackson (He played an intelligence agent codenamed Scarecrow), and the seminal sci-fi series Babylon 5 as Captain John J. Sheridan. I mention Babylon 5 as 1) it was the first TV series to use heavy CGI to cut production costs and 2) another actor in Tron was also a cast member of Babylon 5. Peter Jurasik, who plays Crom, the program that Flynn fights first, was a major cast member of B5 as Ambassador Londo Mollari. While Boxleitner and Jurasik have no scenes in together in Tron, they had a lot in B5. Boxleitner returned to the Tron universe in Tron: Legacy and in the animated series Tron: Uprising. - Lora Baines/Yori was played by the late Cindy Morgan. She didn't do too many movies, but was mainly known for Tron and Caddyshack. However, both Cindy and Bruce Boxleitner teamed for a short-lived TV series called Bring 'Em Back Alive shortly after Tron, and it was like a bad cash grab for the Indiana Jones fans that failed. Cindy passed just the end of last year. - Ed DIllinger/Sark/Voice of the MCP was played by the brilliant David Warner, who was Lovejoy in Titanic, Dr. John Leslie Stevenson in Time After Time (1979), Evil Genius in Time Bandits, Chancellor Gorkon in Star Trek VI - The Undiscovered Country, as well as many, many other films and TV appearances. He was a brilliant actor who is also regarded as one of Britain's most brilliant interpreters of the role of Hamlet onstage, which he played in the 1970s. He died in 2022. - Ram was played by Dan Shor...who is also known for playing Billy the Kid in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure.
I consider this movie to be a real trailblazer. Not just in special effects but in anticipating movies like The Matrix. It was made at a time when people were still playing simple games like Pac Man. To envision a world existing in the computers and software of the time is visionary.
I appreciate how engaged and animated you were in this reaction. Much more than some others you have done. I was 16 when this came out and already tinkering on a TRS80 Radio Shack home computer. No other movie had featured computer graphics like this. I was enthralled. I saw Tron 12x the first month it came out. It changed my life. I went from fast food to coding to now building 3d worlds using SFM and drones. It's weird how one stupid event can drive a life forward. Thanks for this. You did an AWESOME reaction. It made feel like a teen watching this again.
RIP Barnard Hughes (July 16, 1915 - July 11, 2006), aged 90 RIP David Warner (July 29, 1941 - July 24, 2022), aged 80 RIP Cindy Morgan (September 29, 1954 - December 30, 2023), aged 69 You will be remembered as legends.
Glad you enjoyed it, even if just a little. Worth noting that while there is CG in key scenes, a lot of this film is actually hand-drawn animation with an electronic aesthetic. They weren't even able to insert CG into moving video well, which is why many of the scenes have static backgrounds with no camera movement. They literally bolted a camera to the ground and moved sets around it so that the computer would have static frames to work off. Also remember that this is a G-rated animated Disney film, not a modern Pixar film. In the 80s, G meant no violence, no sexuality, no coded jokes for the adults. This is pure kid-targetted fun. It's not just the CG that's dated, this whole style of film-making is outdated. Side trivia: Although the film was not a commercial success, the video game was one of the most popular arcade games of all time and easily made back the film's budget.
Back in the day TRON was a favorite game to consume my quarters! Of course the one I played most was Galaga. Actually I still play them in game palaces around the Dallas area! LOL As we say in Texas; y'all be safe.
Absolutely brilliant film that was groundbreaking for the way it integrated CGI and live action. Still one of my favorites. About a decade ago I saw a showing using an original film print in a little indie film theater and it held up tremendously well. I enjoyed TRON: Legacy quite a bit as well, and now I'm looking forward to TRON: Ares next year. TRON in 1982 and then WarGames in 1983 were the reason why I got my first computer for Christmas in 83 and here I am working in instructional design, specializing in online learning, 40+ years later.
it took them days to render each effect. They didn't have 3d modeling programs; they had to draw the graphics up by hand, and input the data into the computers. Your smartwatch could probably render better/faster than their computers.
This released the same year I graduated high school. Big group of us went to see this movie over five times, it became its own weekend event. Still love the eerie polished look of it to this day.
One of my all-time favorite toys, as a kid, was my TRON lightcycle. I played with that thing constantly. And the arcade games were some of my favorites, too.
Back when Disney really were experimental! There were two movies that nearly broke Disney ... '20,000 Leagues Under The Sea' (definitely worth a watch) and Tron. lt's a real shame what Disney has become nowadays.
The year this movie came out, I was in 2nd grade. The last day of school before X-mas break, they brought all of the students into the auditorium and played this movie on the projector. It blew my damn mind!
I just went to Disney World a couple of weeks ago and rode the TRON ride and the Guardians ride for the first time ever. I nearly cried on TRON because it made me feel like I was in the game. It was glorious. As far as this film goes, you have to consider the time it was made. It was truly groundbreaking in its use of computer animation. I saw it opening weekend when I was eleven years old. It changed my life.
I'm glad that you decided to watch this movie Addie. I'm 54 years old. I saw this movie in theaters and as you should understand it was a mind-blowing film. No other film have had those effects before. The idea of a digital adventure inside a computer was very original too. You must remember that the era 1980-1985 was the era of rapidly growing of the personal computer. For the very first time you could have access to the early models of computers in your home, not only at an office, so this movie is the reflect of such impact. Check about Commodore 64, Atari 2600 XL, ZX Spectrum and the other computers (you had to conect them to your TV) from that era that were the spark of this digital [R]evolution.
Always nice to see Moses in his early film roles. And just keep in mind- the new video games released before Tron came out were Robotron and Q-Bert. Those were video game state of the art at the time
I really liked this movie, it came out when I was a teenager, so video games were a big part of my free time. My favorite part of this movie is the light cycles, I also like the "killer frisbees"
The original Tron is built around it's effects concepts, so it was going to look dated as soon as those do. So yeah, I think it is best appreciated in it's historical context, kinda like watching old Harryhausen claymation movies. Tron Legacy is great. Looks awesome and fantastic soundtrack.
Yes this movie was indeed ground breaking when it came out. Firstly it was the first movie to make any meaningful use of CGI. There hadn't been anything before this where CGI was used for anything beyond animating a single object for a brief second or two. Secondly this was the birth of the entire concept of a digital virtual reality. Lawnmower Man, Matrix, Avatar and a thousand or so other movies took a huge amount of inspiration from Tron.
I believe Tron's 3d Renderings, were made on a Cray Research Computer (massive mainframe station). The glowing effects on the Costumes, had to be masked/painted, by HAND, frame by frame (insane undertaking, that took teams of people... a ton of time to accomplish). When Tron was released, virtually nobody had a computer, nor knew much about them. If you listen closely, you will hear a LOT of Computer terminology being used in the film... such as "RAM" (which is represented as a character). These are still the same terms that we use today... In many ways, TRON was so far ahead of its time... that it didnt initially take off in the Theaters. There may have been more to it that that... such as bad timing / other film competition..etc. However, Tron quickly became an Immortal Classic. Two Arcade Video Games, were also made and released around the same time period. Tron, and Discs of Tron. The Discs of Tron came in two different cabinets... and one of those is an extremely decked out cabinet, with a 3D Hologram on the back of it, surround sound inside of it, a semi 3D monitor display effect (using a half-silvered mirror and several artwork layers), and Blacklights that made the cabinet artwork, and Translucent Blue Joystick.. Glow Brightly. While the computing power of today, is capable of so much more... I say that the worlds they created in TRON, still hold up well today... because its a "Stylized" form of Art. That digital world, was never meant to look like the Real world. Its simplistic, but pretty in all of the right ways. The only part that is slightly cheesy, are the costumes... which could have been made to be a little better. As far as the Sequel goes... I dont care what others say... it simply Pales in comparison to the original. Its a stale environment, that is more of a mirror of the actual real world (IE: Boring). It mostly uses monotone color schemes... and virtually no details at all. Its nowhere near as Artistic, nor Creative. To make things worse.. is that the actors (aside from Jeff Bridges), cant act their way out of a paper bag. They are lifeless, like cardboard cutouts. They are also not likable.. let alone just "Believable". But even Jeff couldnt save that Turd. The story is also very Weak, and brief. Its all CGI effects, and nothing else. The sequel's soundtrack is also very generic Techno. Where as the original Tron.. has a much more emotionally provocative score. This mirrors how both films differ. The original has depth of emotions... where as the sequel is lacking of almost all emotional depth. The people whom rave about the sequel, are the very young kids that saw it (far before they watched the original). These kids will have a certain nostalgia, because its what they experienced as a kid. But as a young kid... you tend to just accept anything you experience as being "Decent" or good. No depth of experiences to compare. And once those kids develop into adults, they tend to turn their noses up at anything "older". Many of them also are not aware of the computer terminology either... so those things in the original film, are often completely missed by them.
In 1982, computer effects basically did not exist on film. This was very cutting edge. As far as computers existing in the home, you're talking basically Commodore 64 levels of computing power.
I was 11 years old when this came out in 82 and it was so influential in my life. Totally geeked🤓 out over Tron Legacy sequel and raised my now adult kids on that Daft Punk soundtrack. Have fun at Disneyworld. Honeymooned there in 98 and missed out on the not yet built Tron Legacy ride. My oldest son knowing how much I loved "Legacy" and the franchise gifted himself Disneyworld to celebrate his college graduation last year sent me pictures of the ride and yes i teared up🥺😢 at this 40+ year love affair with this franchise. Thank you for a great reaction where a rare few other reactors have gone.👍🏾👏🏾
David Warner is one of my all time favorite actors. While he has acted in pretty much all aspects of film, theatre and radio, but if you wanted to give your Sci-Fi adventure class, you get David Warner!
In 1982 home computers were still very new and most people hadn't used one before, so they were very mysterious machines, which explains the odd plot lines of how beings exist inside the machine.
Yes, the FX were great in 1982. I saw this in the theater and loved it. When the sequel finally came out I was SO excited. I look forward to your reaction to it.
TRON is the first movie to use computer rendered graphics for any amount of scenes. The Last Starfighter was the first movie to use computer graphics to represent real-world objects. Well, real-world in the sense that they were meant to exist in the real world alongside people, and not be inside a computer. BTW, TRON was an actual programming command that stood for Trace On. The corresponding command was TROFF, Trace Off. Both were used in tracing the execution of a program in order to debug it.
There were many breakthrough movies back then. Tron, Back to the future, Star wars, Karate kid, and many original ideas that they did an amazing job at. Original, did very well, and very entertaining. Throw in Exorcist, Jaws, Close encounters, Dirty Harry, Saturday night fever, and the list goes on and on.
One interesting fact about this film is if you notice Jeff Bridges suit in the Grid is different from other. They had to add the cloth that covered his pelvic area because Jeff was a little too endowed below the waist for a Disney film.
While everyone rightfully brings up the use of CGI as a breakthrough in a mainstream movie, one thing which is often neglected praise was the filming and post production process for the CGI scenes. Making the suites glow was a cinematic stroke of genius, and crazy labor intensive. This movie was a labor of love by so many talented people, I highly recommend watching the lengthy Making Of Tron (around 90 min)
Have you ever seen Disney Animation's _Wreck-It Ralph_ (2012)? This was an idea about "life" inside video games that had been around since the 1980s, but was never produced. Years later it was finally made into a now-retro movie about video games and arcades, and like _TRON_ it features characters who "live" inside video game cabinets, which are really specialized computers. Instead of being programs, the characters are code that can move between the game programs and cabinets. Aside from the concept, it is a darn good movie with a terrific and fun story, too.
When it came out it was mind-blowingly good. I watched it twice the first day and I think 4 or 5 times the first weekend. If you want better graphics then watch the sequel Tron: Legacy (2010). They are planning on a 3rd movie.
This was the first movie to make real use of CGI, very ground breaking. It took an incredible amount of work to pull it off too. It took months to just do the lightcycle game part, and today Corridor Crew was able to recreate it (with better graphics) in a couple days. In terms of the story and tech aspects, it is still very relevant. AI, cyber attacks, even bringing China into it, all very much in line with today. Computers are faster and prettier, but the fundamentals are the same. When this came out home computers like the Commodore 64 were hitting the market too, and a lot of people were inspired by this movie to go into IT as a career.
Remember CGI was still a young kid back then. Westworld was the first movie to have cgi in a scene. Tron was the first movie to have entire scenes of only computer graphics.
I love this movie! Watching it for the millionth time- you notice little things. 2 lines that are very close to each other don’t fit. RAM says put a cork in it. There’s no way he would know what that is. And then a tank driver said: no signs of LIFE. I think they could have picked another word than life , you know.
To give you some sense of how Tron stood out look at the other movies it was up against in 1982: Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan, Carpenter’s The Thing, E.T., Blade Runner, The Dark Crystal, Poltergeist, Firefox, The Secret of NIMH, Swamp Thing, and Mega Force. A wide variety of traditional effects, models, animation, animatronics, and stop motion. A few tried really cheesy laser effects or explosions using computers, but Tron went the full Monty, inventing techniques never before seen, or even imagined. And, it would be many years before anyone would try and duplicate the effort.
The actor who plays Alan/Tron is Bruce Boxleitner, who played Captain John Sherriden in Babylon 5 and Lee Stetson in the Scarecrow and Mrs. King TV series. I got a movie reaction suggestion for you, it's one of my favorites, The Final Countdown (1980) The U.S.S. Nimitz goes back to December 6th, 1941. It's filmed on the Nimitz. It's like Top Gun meets Back to the Future.
I also remember him as Frank Buck in the short-lived _Bring 'em Back Alive_ from around that time as well -- one of a handful of TV shows that tried to capitalize on the success of Indiana Jones.
David Warner was great in Time Bandits... Ram was the same guy who played Billy The Kid in "Bill & Ted".... In 1982, the only computer I had was a Commodore 64
When you end up watching Tron: Legacy, make sure to pay attention to the music. It's one of the best soundtracks for a movie imo and goes so well with the tone of the movie.
Yes. Excellent movie. Love the visuals. And, can't miss Jeff's iconic silly laugh. Very refreshing. Indeed, you will like Tron Legacy. And, I hear that Tron 3 is in the works, so we have that to look forward to seeing. I'm going to catch that in the theater for sure. Thanks Addie. ~ Tony.
So, the thing to remember is that when this came out it was beyond cutting edge, beyond bleeding edge. Nobody had seen anything like this.
... And yet this movie did NOT get the Oscar for Special Effects that year. Went to 'E T' instead. It may be that the Academy later got a clue, because it gave 'Tron' a 'Special' Oscar very recently.
@7thsealord888 Yeah, at the time they said they felt using computers like that was "cheating". Yet another example of the Academy having their collective head firmly lodged in their collective sphincter.
This came out five years after Star Wars. Cutting edge?
Yes.
@@revbladeStar Wars used no computers, outside of computer controlled camera rigs and some very rudimentary wireframe graphics. So, yeah. It was absolutely cutting edge. The lightcycle scene had to be designed entirely mathematically, with no 3D user interface to see what the final outcome would be. A single frame could take six hours to render. One of the computers used had around 2 MB of memory and about 300 MB of storage. This was all very new stuff that Star Wars wouldn't get into until the 90s.
Pixar exists specifically because of TRON. Its founders were so blown away by it that they pivoted from traditional animation to creating their own computer animation studio.
RIP David Warner. He had the best villain voice.
He was amazing in Star Trek in his many roles too.
He was amazing as the evil guy in time bandits.
a true seeker
He was also the voice of the Master Control Program.
@@Smokie_666 There are FOUR! LIGHTS!
Lots of people went to design school because of Tron. That’s how groundbreaking this was. It was literally THE first major movie to use CGI and explore visual effects and push their capabilities. 🤓👍
CGI animation was used in Star Wars to create the death star exhaust port diagrams, and before that in 1973 the view from the gunfighter's point of view had CGI elements. These were only a few seconds of animation compared to the "several" seconds of animation in Tron.
Yeah Westworld was one of the first
No matter how dated and silly this movie is, there's no denying that it was a hugely important part of the story and history of CGI. This was three years before Young Sherlock Holmes and seven years before The Abyss. And those movies had CGI shots measured in seconds, Tron's are literally measured in hours. Love or hate the movie, you still have to respect what it accomplished. I'm biased though, I'm old enough to have seen this in the theater, and it was a big deal to that 14-year-old.
The liquid animation in The Abyss is an extension of what was done in Terminator 2. The T2 animation still looks pretty good today.
@@timmooney7528 I think I understand what you're trying to say Tim, but you've got it backwards: The animation in T2 was an "extension" of the animation used in The Abyss.
@@mikepeterson9362 yep You're correct
*What does dated and silly mean to you?*
@@timmooney7528
I've seen several effects teams try to recreate the liquid metal effects from T2 using all the modern tech and several more decades worth of available knowledge about digital effects. And while they were able to achieve a result that was somewhat similar, it took them absolute ages to get there and it was still noticeably inferior to the T2 effects in significant ways.
This was the 80s Jurassic Park, in the sense that no one had ever seen CGI incorporated into film like this. Star Wars was all models, which is impressive on its own scale, but TRON did something completely new.
To be fair, Star Wars _did_ have a smidge of CGI… the schematic of the Death Star during the rebel's attack briefing.
@@MetamorfeusThose lasers and lightsabers, totally real.
@@FuhqEwe They were practical and/or animated elements optically composited in, they weren't CGI. At least not until the special editions.
@@Metamorfeus The actual answer is, “rotoscoping”, but I’ll continue hoping lightsabers are real.
@@FuhqEwe Rotoscoping is but one stage of compositing whether done digitally or optically.
R.I.P. Cindy Morgan
Some of the effects are not actually digital, but analog simulations of computer graphics.
Most, actually. Every frame "inside" the computer had to be reproduced, on film, four or five times. Then artists touched up and added effects to each frame. Not just to add the glowing effects, but to tone down the actor's eyes and teeth so they wouldn't show up as brightly as their costumes. Finally, they were all composited into the final frame. Pretty much the only parts where a computer was involved are the vehicles and landscapes.
Star Trek Wrath of Kahn came out that same year and is recognized as the first movie to have a completely CGI scene.
In the building where Tron was being edited, they were working on "The Fox a 15:57 nd The Hound" across the hall. One day, a young man who was working as an "in-betweener" on that film, wandered across the hall to check out Tron. He was blown-away. In fact, he went to his superiors at Disney to convince them that computer animation was how stories would be told in the future. The Disney suits promptly fired the guy because he wouldn't shut up about computer animation. So the guy moves to the bay area and goes to work for George Lucas. Eventually, the Lucasfilm computer animation department was sold to Apple. After a few successful short films, it was time to animate the first, full length computer animated feature film. That film was "Toy Story" and that young man was John Lassiter.
And that's how Pixar was born.
“Greetings, programs.”
You'll still see people who like his movie saying that in on-line chats. It's a kind of handshake among companions.
I literally typed "End of Line" in an online argument the other day. LOL.
I put many, many quarters into the original TRON arcade game. 😆😆
If you grew up in the 1970s/80s, this movie was what we all imagined it was like inside our Atari 2600s or early PCs. It was a touchstone for computer nerds that only ReBoot could match a decade later. The combination of film compositing, hand-drawn animation and CGI is still as otherworldly as ever. You should watch a making of for this movie, it's incredible how much work went into it.
ReBoot had a limited appeal. At first it's like, "wow! This is all CGI." After a minute or two the excitement wears off.
@@timmooney7528 If you say so. Both properties have a cult following to this day and are remembered fondly for their nerd appeal.
@@StCerberusEngel Personal opinion is just that. Mileage may vary. I never watched much of the series to follow a story line, so for me it was just the novelty factor of being CGI. I wasn't interested in Saturday morning cartoons at the time.
@timmooney7528 I understand, but I'm simply saying that both properties filled a niche with their audience that few others did. And at a time when nerd was still widely considered a pejorative rather than a demographic.
It was fun to watch the graphics in ReBoot improve as the show went along. The story also got more serious and more adult as the seasons progressed.
The CGI may looked dated, but it’s still LEAGUES ahead of anything Disney is doing nowadays. Looks better, too. Personal opinion.
Trivia I love:
The guy Flynn beats in the jai-alai game, the one Sark murders... is Peter Jurasik... who went on to play a beloved Shakespearean character "Londo Molari" in one of the best science fiction tv series of all time, "Babylon 5"
The cool part:
Alan01 / Tron is played by Bruce Boxleitner, who went on to play Captain John Sheridan, commanding officer of the space station known as... Babylon 5.
Two of the top characters in B5 were both alum of "Tron".
David Warner made a guest appearance on B5 also :D
That's awesome I did not know that was Peter Jurasik. So cool
@@MagsonDare Yep, the Seeker after the Holy Grail. One of David Warner's rare heroic characters.
Unrelated, but the actor who plays RAM played Billy the Kid in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.
@@alaneskew2664 If you listen closely, you can hear him shouting about how in the glory days of the republic, nobody would have dared do this to a Centauri ambassador as he falls to his doom.
As someone with a computer science background, how all of the data bits and computers and programming was depicted was genius. Recognizers, deresolutions, breaking through the barrier between programs and running amok in a computer system, input output tower to the human interface, AI programs hijacking other programs to do their bidding (viruses), countermeasures (the tanks) to eradicate stray and run away code or processes in the operating system, just awesomeness.
As a software engineer (or developer or programmer--it's just a title), I agree. I also like to compare and contrast this with the more "object-oriented" visualization in _Wreck-It Ralph_ , which is pretty good, too, albeit not as elaborate and nerdy as what we see in _TRON_ .
God I loved that movie as a kid. Decades later nothing has changed.
As I said to a friend and fellow TRON acolyte... this movie may be dated, but it'll never get old.
Watching Corridor Digital's reaction to this is pretty good to get an idea of how crazy the special effects were at the time
I used to love playing the Tron arcade games when I was a kid!!
Especially the one with the stand up booth!
Tron legacy is so underrated! Definitely watch it
Agreed
Tron Legacy had a lot of telling instead of showing. It feels like there should have been a whole other movie with the rise of the AI's, or whatever they called them. I thought the Tron video game that came out a few years before had a better story.
There are actually only around 20 minutes of footage that uses computer graphics at all. Nearly everything with actors in frame was instead done through photographic techniques. In particular, they did a lot of backlit matte shots, where they would get a matte of, say, the glowy lines on the costumes. Then they photograph that matte negative (clear for the lines and black for everything else) with a light behind the negative. When they composite it back with the regular shot of the actors, the backlight gives a glowy effect to that part of the shot. This technique was super popular at the time, especially in animation, with movies like Heavy Metal using it extensively.
27:35 -- DATED... Christ Addie... Look at all the dreams this movie created... Back in 1982, computers didn't have video on their screens.. Touch screens like Dillanger's desk didn't exist.. Flatscreens as big as his desk didn't exist.. Being able to view security cameras VIA the web or IP address didn't exist.. This movie made all those technologies possible because people wanted what they saw and worked toward it.. Worked toward making it real.. --- In 1982, the computers had JUST started getting into homes.. The internet, as it is today, was only a dream.
Yes, it did look incredible at the time. My best friend and I saw it during our summer break from school, and later spent time in the yard with rope rings on the lawn throwing Frisbees at each other. When the actual video game showed up in our local arcade, it did a pretty good job of replicating the action from the movie, especially the light cycles.
Even so, I thought it was funny; a video game based on a movie featuring made-up video games.
Twelve-year old me was gobsmacked by this movie, and it still tickles that part of my brain 😃 edited to add: the CGI effects, and mixing live-action with CGI, was pretty groundbreaking at that time.
I'd say the effects were as ground breaking as the concept of the story. I had never seen anything like this when it came out so I know whatcha mean by tickling that nostalgia part of the brain where children dream.
another of it's era film that I think holds up even better, in it's own way, would be The Black Hole (1979)
The Bit is always one of my favorite parts, especially "Pretty good driving, eh? *drives off a cliff*" "No."
'another mouth to feed.' "Yesyesyesyes."
One of my favorite Sci Fi movies!
Thia got snubbed at the Oscars for Best Visual Effects, because the Academy thought that using CGI was considered cheating and that practical effects should be used instead.
In 1992, it received the Lifetime Achievement Award for Best Visual Effects.
About 20 minutes of its run time is pure CGI. The rest is hand-drawn animation.
Considering the sheer amount of work and effort that creating pure CGI effects took at that time, the idea of considering it "cheating" is laughably ridiculous! But I have heard that before. Hey- they didn't know, I guess. New things are often not recognized in their time.
I visited a three-letter agency back in the day when I worked for a fortune 500 tech company. After they processed me in, i passed through a door that was probably two or three feet thick. That door opening scene in this film reminds me of that.
Welcome to the grid, Addie. TRON (1982) is one groundbreaking sci-fi movie for it's time. It's been TEN YEARS since the last time I traveled to Walt Disney World in Florida and I highly doubt that I'll ever get to go back there soon (although I visited Disney Springs in November 2014 and recently in May 2022). The TRON Lightcycle / Run looks awesome. I even got to ride the original TRON Lightcycle Power Run TWICE at Shanghai Disneyland, in October 2018, and it's my all-time favorite Disney ride to date. The only difference is that you place your personal belongings in lockers in the Florida version whereas cast members have bins for them in Shanghai. I do hope you & Jeremy are having a magical time at Walt Disney World. See you real soon for TRON: Legacy (2010). You're DEFINITELY gonna love that one.
fun fact: They didn't have enough processing power to full animate the MCP's face, so they animated it going "Bwah".
They then rocked the footage back and forth, to give it the illusion of speech.
In this movie there's only a few minutes of actual CGI and the rest is accomplished using physically models with special paint on them.
The "Special Paint" is a post production effect. Masks had to be hand painted for every frame to control where the lights appeared. There's a really good behind the scenes special about Tron and everything they had to do to create those effects.
If you’re wondering about seeing Mickey in that scene Addie. In Disney they have what is called a hidden Mickey that appears in films, shows, video games, and theme parks.
Also, when Sark looks at the big labyrinth display - right before he beats the soldier to the ground - you can see Pacman in that display at the right edge of the screen.
The actor who played tron, went on to become the commanding officer on Babylon 5. Amazing special effects for its time.
And Crom (from Tron) became the ambassador from the great Centauri Republic.
I know him also from Scarecrow & Mrs King-a spy show where one of Charlie's Angels (the actress, not the character) is a single mom
At the time nothing like this had been attempted. It was totally stunning seeing something with such a different aesthetic on the big screen. Truly a work of art.
20:36 It Sure Was...
In a Disney Movie, that Easter Egg is known as a "Hidden Mickey".
From *DICTIONARY OF AMERICAN SLANG* (Grand McNally, 2050)
*slip us a Mickey*
(late 20th/early 21st century)
- Derivative of "to slip (someone) a Mickey (Finn)", meaning to surreptitiously administer a soporific drug in an alcoholic beverage; refers specifically to a traditional tactic of the (Walter E.) Disney corporation whereby Mickey Mouse's image is cleverly hidden within one of its motion pictures.
See also *Easter egg.* 😁 🤓
That ending bit where the camera pans over to the city and the speeded up footage takes us to night with Wendy Carlos' synth tones playing is one of my favourite bits in movie history.
It's definitely a flawed movie - the pacing is off, and they were trying to do things nobody had done which impacted how well things turned out, but it still - partly due to effects, and partly to the music married to it - feels like no other movie before or since.
Thank you for the honesty! And yet, your amazing positivity always comes through. Despite what some people may claim, even in the 80s, there was a good amount of sentiment that this movie was pretty cheesy, goofy, strange, or whatever else. It made approximately $33 million at the box office, while some very popular movies made hundreds of millions in the early and mid 80s, so it wasn't exactly a huge smash right away. In fact, I probably like it more now than I did then. Very impressive and entertaining movie, and a pretty big part of our culture. Thanks for reacting to it!
I was never into this movie until I got older and appreciated all that they had to do with special effects, lighting, and painting to get something that has never been seen in cinema.
In '82 Computers weren't really a thing in the home or a part of daily life. (and certainly not things like handheld touch screen phones full of apps as the norm)
Back then, I was learning about computers in grade school enrichment programs. We were taught about bits, bytes, how to write in BASIC, etc.... and we didn't even have a computer in the classroom.
So from that point of view, this movie was pretty much just another fantasy movie. This one was just about making the insides of computers 'more human' to tell a story.
What's really funny is in '86 my dad got a job at the place that made the computers that made this movie. They still had TRON posters in the lobby. Those computers cost $45,000 in 1987 dollars (same price as about 54,000 gallons of gas), and get this...... They had 6 MILLION COLORS!!!!!!
They also did some petty neat graphical simulations for a certain government that I wasn't allowed to see (and damn sure can't talk about after seeing it anyways :) )
Computers were a thing at home... even if you had just an ATARI. Person Computing was becoming big in 82.. but was still expensive.
Computers were starting to be a thing in 1982, but it was still very niche. I'd seen my first one (A Commodore "PET" computer) demo'd in my classroom in 1980.
By 1982 the earliest Apples were out, as were early IBM's (later "PCs"). Atari had its 400 (membrane keyboard) and 800 (regular keyboard). Tandy (Radio Shack) had its TRS-80 series. There were a few others.
At my school (9th grade that year), we had a full-year computer science class. I loved that class. I was - and still am - a huge nerd, but back then it wasn't an even slightly cool thing to be, quite the opposite.
The computers available for the whole class to use were one decrepit TRS-80 Model I, three Atari 400s, and two TRS-80 Model III (with the monitor built into the computer - so futuristic!). Everyone wanted to use the Ataris because they were in - *gasp* - COLOR! The Trash-80s on the other hand were just monochrome.
I got ahold of a BASIC compiler, which would convert something in BASIC to (if I remember right) Assembly code, dramatically speeding it up. At the end of the year, we were supposed to do a project that showed what we'd learned during the year. Others were doing some very basic graphics work on the Ataris (ex: An apple is shown on the screen, a small worm moves in from the left, going "into" [behind] the apple, the exits from the right of the apple, larger than before, and goes offscreen. That project got an A). I used the extended character set on the Trash-80s, which included a little stick figure guy, a smiling face, and some things that looked like mushrooms on legs that worked okay as robots, to write a version of the arcade game Berzerk. At the end of the year, I happened to get a glimpse of the teacher's computer's screen, which faced away from the class so I didn't normally see it. The maze from my game was burned into the monitor. :)
@earlbrown: did you mean 16 million colors? Because that's what you get when you express every primary color (red, green, blue) with a granularity of 8 bits (0..255), just like most computers today.
The remaining ones are already at 30 bits per color and can show things like HDR...
My dad bought us a Radio Shack TRS-80 computer in 1979 or so--he told me "someday computers are going to be huge." Was he ever right. Later we got a Commodore 64 before finally getting our first PC in 1990 or so. Learned how to program on the TRS-80, though, long before hard drives or disk drives...I had to hand type a program from a book or manual, which could take hours, just to play a game. When I got to C64s and their minutes of loading time for a game, it felt like lightspeed. Now I play games like No Man's Sky or Red Dead Redemption 2...and I can still remember what it was like playing Pong at home in 1975 or so. We've come so far.
@@rikk319 My first computer was an Atari 800. I bought the fancy version with the full 48k of memory. (Yes, kids... "k". Not megs, not gigs, certainly not terabytes... it had 49,152 bytes of memory, and some of that was allocated to system files. But I digress.) There was a game on it I liked called Telengard. It was a text-only dungeon adventure game. I rewrote it so that it used a redefined character set to add graphics, expanded other parts of it, and basically turned it into a different game with a similar theme. I remember having to go through line by line replacing the word "PRINT" with the shortcut "?" to save the four bytes of memory for each one, because I needed those bytes elsewhere to add something. Gamers today with their effectively unlimited memory use in games don't know how good they have it.
When this movie came out, I was right there in the middle of the target audience. I was a young kid that spent lots of time in the arcade playing video games, playing video games at home a lot, too, and I loved sci-fi. I can’t even remember how much time and money I spent on this game in the arcade, but it was so worth it.
TRON is an underappreciated gem. The significant impact this movie had is seen in almost everything in cinema. It also highlights the necessity of practical effects and sets as well. Many of the things the characters interact with are physically built sets and props. For everything filmed as inside the computer, that was all filmed in black and white. All the colors were filled in by artists and by hand. TRON Legacy is a worthy sequel to this and TRON Ares, well, we shall see.
Another great Disney sci-fi movie that was live action, the black hole. Incredible special Fx for its time. It also had an amazing cast.
Yeah, I don't care how much Neil DeGrasse Tyson hates it. It's a fun romp.
@@ComeOnIsSuchAJoy Yes, you do care, because you have to lie to prove you don't care.
As a 10 year old kid seeing this in the theater was beyond incredible, blown mind!!!
Oh, you're going to love Tron: Legacy, the way you keep harping on 'we could work _together_ ."... Note that both Flynn and Tron are prepared to go it alone.
Also make special note of the lightcycle battle; I'll reference it when you react to Legacy. Make note that Tron says to take them one-on-one...
There is a lot in this movie about individuality and self-determination.
We all anticipated Tron Legacy sooo much that the story inevitably had to disappoint me a little. But that was completely overshadowed by the awesome soundtrack by Daft Punk. I must've listened to it hundreds of times.
Try and look at other tech available at the time for the home user. The Atari 2600 was still going strong. The height of kids electronic toys were Simon and the Coleco handheld football game, the one made from a few LEDs and some beeping noises. It’s hard to comprehend exactly how far we’ve come in the last… oh god, 42 years. I’m old. Anyway, this was absolutely unheard of graphics. Absolutely nothing came even remotely close.
I vividly remember seeing this with my dad the day it came out in theaters. Our jaws dropped a lot.
Hey Addie...or...Greetings, Program!
When I was a kid when this came out, and it was amazing to see. It wasn't a huge hit, and some of the reviews were less than kind. There will be a Tron 3 called Tron:Ares starring Jared Leto, Cameron Monaghan (Cal Kestiss in Jedi: Fallen Order and Jedi: Survivor video games), Evan Peters (Quicksilver in X-Men; Days of Future Past and Apocalypse), Gillina Anderson, and Jeff Bridges (this was just confirmed a couple of days before the posting of this video to TH-cam).
- All of the game system footage was filmed in black and white, with the actors in white costumes that had black electrician's tape mapping out the circuits, and all of the sets were black. After filming it, each frame was blown up, and hand painted. Depending on what was in the frame, a single frame of film could have had many layers that were separated out, painted, and then rotoscoped back together like an animated movie. While there were a few CGI bits in the film, most of it was just one fashioned animation techniques with live action footage.
- Tron/Alan Bradley was played b Bruce Boxleitner, who is mainly known as a TV actor. He did The Gambler TV movies with Kenny Rogers and Reba McIntyre, the TV series Scarecrow and Mrs. King with Kate Jackson (He played an intelligence agent codenamed Scarecrow), and the seminal sci-fi series Babylon 5 as Captain John J. Sheridan. I mention Babylon 5 as 1) it was the first TV series to use heavy CGI to cut production costs and 2) another actor in Tron was also a cast member of Babylon 5. Peter Jurasik, who plays Crom, the program that Flynn fights first, was a major cast member of B5 as Ambassador Londo Mollari. While Boxleitner and Jurasik have no scenes in together in Tron, they had a lot in B5. Boxleitner returned to the Tron universe in Tron: Legacy and in the animated series Tron: Uprising.
- Lora Baines/Yori was played by the late Cindy Morgan. She didn't do too many movies, but was mainly known for Tron and Caddyshack. However, both Cindy and Bruce Boxleitner teamed for a short-lived TV series called Bring 'Em Back Alive shortly after Tron, and it was like a bad cash grab for the Indiana Jones fans that failed. Cindy passed just the end of last year.
- Ed DIllinger/Sark/Voice of the MCP was played by the brilliant David Warner, who was Lovejoy in Titanic, Dr. John Leslie Stevenson in Time After Time (1979), Evil Genius in Time Bandits, Chancellor Gorkon in Star Trek VI - The Undiscovered Country, as well as many, many other films and TV appearances. He was a brilliant actor who is also regarded as one of Britain's most brilliant interpreters of the role of Hamlet onstage, which he played in the 1970s. He died in 2022.
- Ram was played by Dan Shor...who is also known for playing Billy the Kid in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure.
I consider this movie to be a real trailblazer. Not just in special effects but in anticipating movies like The Matrix. It was made at a time when people were still playing simple games like Pac Man. To envision a world existing in the computers and software of the time is visionary.
Saw this in theaters as a kid with my Dad and my friend Jason. Absolutely love this.
I appreciate how engaged and animated you were in this reaction. Much more than some others you have done. I was 16 when this came out and already tinkering on a TRS80 Radio Shack home computer. No other movie had featured computer graphics like this. I was enthralled. I saw Tron 12x the first month it came out. It changed my life. I went from fast food to coding to now building 3d worlds using SFM and drones. It's weird how one stupid event can drive a life forward.
Thanks for this. You did an AWESOME reaction. It made feel like a teen watching this again.
RIP Barnard Hughes (July 16, 1915 - July 11, 2006), aged 90
RIP David Warner (July 29, 1941 - July 24, 2022), aged 80
RIP Cindy Morgan (September 29, 1954 - December 30, 2023), aged 69
You will be remembered as legends.
Glad you enjoyed it, even if just a little.
Worth noting that while there is CG in key scenes, a lot of this film is actually hand-drawn animation with an electronic aesthetic. They weren't even able to insert CG into moving video well, which is why many of the scenes have static backgrounds with no camera movement. They literally bolted a camera to the ground and moved sets around it so that the computer would have static frames to work off.
Also remember that this is a G-rated animated Disney film, not a modern Pixar film. In the 80s, G meant no violence, no sexuality, no coded jokes for the adults. This is pure kid-targetted fun. It's not just the CG that's dated, this whole style of film-making is outdated.
Side trivia: Although the film was not a commercial success, the video game was one of the most popular arcade games of all time and easily made back the film's budget.
Back in the day TRON was a favorite game to consume my quarters! Of course the one I played most was Galaga. Actually I still play them in game palaces around the Dallas area! LOL
As we say in Texas; y'all be safe.
Absolutely brilliant film that was groundbreaking for the way it integrated CGI and live action. Still one of my favorites. About a decade ago I saw a showing using an original film print in a little indie film theater and it held up tremendously well.
I enjoyed TRON: Legacy quite a bit as well, and now I'm looking forward to TRON: Ares next year.
TRON in 1982 and then WarGames in 1983 were the reason why I got my first computer for Christmas in 83 and here I am working in instructional design, specializing in online learning, 40+ years later.
I've been watching this movie for 30 years and I never noticed Mickey's face until you pointed it out...
Ram died, was killed by Chrome.
it took them days to render each effect. They didn't have 3d modeling programs; they had to draw the graphics up by hand, and input the data into the computers.
Your smartwatch could probably render better/faster than their computers.
This released the same year I graduated high school. Big group of us went to see this movie over five times, it became its own weekend event. Still love the eerie polished look of it to this day.
One of my all-time favorite toys, as a kid, was my TRON lightcycle. I played with that thing constantly. And the arcade games were some of my favorites, too.
20:34 - "Did we just go over Mickey Mouse?" Yep! One of the fun easter eggs they put in.
This is the first movie my parents allowed me to go to by myself in the theater.
Back when Disney really were experimental! There were two movies that nearly broke Disney ... '20,000 Leagues Under The Sea' (definitely worth a watch) and Tron. lt's a real shame what Disney has become nowadays.
The year this movie came out, I was in 2nd grade. The last day of school before X-mas break, they brought all of the students into the auditorium and played this movie on the projector. It blew my damn mind!
I just went to Disney World a couple of weeks ago and rode the TRON ride and the Guardians ride for the first time ever. I nearly cried on TRON because it made me feel like I was in the game. It was glorious.
As far as this film goes, you have to consider the time it was made. It was truly groundbreaking in its use of computer animation. I saw it opening weekend when I was eleven years old. It changed my life.
I'm glad that you decided to watch this movie Addie. I'm 54 years old. I saw this movie in theaters and as you should understand it was a mind-blowing film. No other film have had those effects before. The idea of a digital adventure inside a computer was very original too.
You must remember that the era 1980-1985 was the era of rapidly growing of the personal computer. For the very first time you could have access to the early models of computers in your home, not only at an office, so this movie is the reflect of such impact.
Check about Commodore 64, Atari 2600 XL, ZX Spectrum and the other computers (you had to conect them to your TV) from that era that were the spark of this digital [R]evolution.
Always nice to see Moses in his early film roles.
And just keep in mind- the new video games released before Tron came out were Robotron and Q-Bert. Those were video game state of the art at the time
RIP Cindy Morgan (Lora/Yori). Most people remember her more for Caddyshack than this movie, though.
... for 2 fairly obvious reasons... 🤭
I really liked this movie, it came out when I was a teenager, so video games were a big part of my free time. My favorite part of this movie is the light cycles, I also like the "killer frisbees"
The original Tron is built around it's effects concepts, so it was going to look dated as soon as those do. So yeah, I think it is best appreciated in it's historical context, kinda like watching old Harryhausen claymation movies. Tron Legacy is great. Looks awesome and fantastic soundtrack.
This movie is iconic. I was a kid when it came out. And yes, it was amazing at the time.
Yes this movie was indeed ground breaking when it came out. Firstly it was the first movie to make any meaningful use of CGI. There hadn't been anything before this where CGI was used for anything beyond animating a single object for a brief second or two. Secondly this was the birth of the entire concept of a digital virtual reality. Lawnmower Man, Matrix, Avatar and a thousand or so other movies took a huge amount of inspiration from Tron.
Yes, 42 years ago this was mind-blowing. To give some perspective, in '82 this was even more impressive CGI than Jurassic Park was 11 years later.
I believe Tron's 3d Renderings, were made on a Cray Research Computer (massive mainframe station). The glowing effects on the Costumes, had to be masked/painted, by HAND, frame by frame (insane undertaking, that took teams of people... a ton of time to accomplish). When Tron was released, virtually nobody had a computer, nor knew much about them. If you listen closely, you will hear a LOT of Computer terminology being used in the film... such as "RAM" (which is represented as a character). These are still the same terms that we use today...
In many ways, TRON was so far ahead of its time... that it didnt initially take off in the Theaters. There may have been more to it that that... such as bad timing / other film competition..etc. However, Tron quickly became an Immortal Classic. Two Arcade Video Games, were also made and released around the same time period. Tron, and Discs of Tron. The Discs of Tron came in two different cabinets... and one of those is an extremely decked out cabinet, with a 3D Hologram on the back of it, surround sound inside of it, a semi 3D monitor display effect (using a half-silvered mirror and several artwork layers), and Blacklights that made the cabinet artwork, and Translucent Blue Joystick.. Glow Brightly.
While the computing power of today, is capable of so much more... I say that the worlds they created in TRON, still hold up well today... because its a "Stylized" form of Art. That digital world, was never meant to look like the Real world. Its simplistic, but pretty in all of the right ways. The only part that is slightly cheesy, are the costumes... which could have been made to be a little better.
As far as the Sequel goes... I dont care what others say... it simply Pales in comparison to the original. Its a stale environment, that is more of a mirror of the actual real world (IE: Boring). It mostly uses monotone color schemes... and virtually no details at all. Its nowhere near as Artistic, nor Creative. To make things worse.. is that the actors (aside from Jeff Bridges), cant act their way out of a paper bag. They are lifeless, like cardboard cutouts. They are also not likable.. let alone just "Believable".
But even Jeff couldnt save that Turd. The story is also very Weak, and brief. Its all CGI effects, and nothing else.
The sequel's soundtrack is also very generic Techno. Where as the original Tron.. has a much more emotionally provocative score. This mirrors how both films differ. The original has depth of emotions... where as the sequel is lacking of almost all emotional depth.
The people whom rave about the sequel, are the very young kids that saw it (far before they watched the original). These kids will have a certain nostalgia, because its what they experienced as a kid. But as a young kid... you tend to just accept anything you experience as being "Decent" or good. No depth of experiences to compare. And once those kids develop into adults, they tend to turn their noses up at anything "older". Many of them also are not aware of the computer terminology either... so those things in the original film, are often completely missed by them.
Hope you are having an great and awesome day Addie ❤️
This disc was one of the first I bought when DVDs came out.
This movie was made before the internet, and before computers became mainstream. They did a hell of a job for the time period.
In 1982, computer effects basically did not exist on film. This was very cutting edge. As far as computers existing in the home, you're talking basically Commodore 64 levels of computing power.
I was 11 years old when this came out in 82 and it was so influential in my life. Totally geeked🤓 out over Tron Legacy sequel and raised my now adult kids on that Daft Punk soundtrack. Have fun at Disneyworld. Honeymooned there in 98 and missed out on the not yet built Tron Legacy ride. My oldest son knowing how much I loved "Legacy" and the franchise gifted himself Disneyworld to celebrate his college graduation last year sent me pictures of the ride and yes i teared up🥺😢 at this 40+ year love affair with this franchise. Thank you for a great reaction where a rare few other reactors have gone.👍🏾👏🏾
David Warner is one of my all time favorite actors. While he has acted in pretty much all aspects of film, theatre and radio, but if you wanted to give your Sci-Fi adventure class, you get David Warner!
When I was 10 I would have given anything for a Light Cycle 😂😂😂
In 1982 home computers were still very new and most people hadn't used one before, so they were very mysterious machines, which explains the odd plot lines of how beings exist inside the machine.
Yes, the FX were great in 1982. I saw this in the theater and loved it. When the sequel finally came out I was SO excited. I look forward to your reaction to it.
TRON is the first movie to use computer rendered graphics for any amount of scenes. The Last Starfighter was the first movie to use computer graphics to represent real-world objects. Well, real-world in the sense that they were meant to exist in the real world alongside people, and not be inside a computer.
BTW, TRON was an actual programming command that stood for Trace On. The corresponding command was TROFF, Trace Off. Both were used in tracing the execution of a program in order to debug it.
There were many breakthrough movies back then. Tron, Back to the future, Star wars, Karate kid, and many original ideas that they did an amazing job at. Original, did very well, and very entertaining. Throw in Exorcist, Jaws, Close encounters, Dirty Harry, Saturday night fever, and the list goes on and on.
It was beyond groundbreaking back then, now you should watch the sequel, TRON: Legacy (2010)
One interesting fact about this film is if you notice Jeff Bridges suit in the Grid is different from other. They had to add the cloth that covered his pelvic area because Jeff was a little too endowed below the waist for a Disney film.
While everyone rightfully brings up the use of CGI as a breakthrough in a mainstream movie, one thing which is often neglected praise was the filming and post production process for the CGI scenes. Making the suites glow was a cinematic stroke of genius, and crazy labor intensive. This movie was a labor of love by so many talented people, I highly recommend watching the lengthy Making Of Tron (around 90 min)
Have you ever seen Disney Animation's _Wreck-It Ralph_ (2012)? This was an idea about "life" inside video games that had been around since the 1980s, but was never produced. Years later it was finally made into a now-retro movie about video games and arcades, and like _TRON_ it features characters who "live" inside video game cabinets, which are really specialized computers. Instead of being programs, the characters are code that can move between the game programs and cabinets. Aside from the concept, it is a darn good movie with a terrific and fun story, too.
When it came out it was mind-blowingly good. I watched it twice the first day and I think 4 or 5 times the first weekend. If you want better graphics then watch the sequel Tron: Legacy (2010). They are planning on a 3rd movie.
This was the first movie to make real use of CGI, very ground breaking. It took an incredible amount of work to pull it off too. It took months to just do the lightcycle game part, and today Corridor Crew was able to recreate it (with better graphics) in a couple days.
In terms of the story and tech aspects, it is still very relevant. AI, cyber attacks, even bringing China into it, all very much in line with today. Computers are faster and prettier, but the fundamentals are the same. When this came out home computers like the Commodore 64 were hitting the market too, and a lot of people were inspired by this movie to go into IT as a career.
Remember CGI was still a young kid back then. Westworld was the first movie to have cgi in a scene. Tron was the first movie to have entire scenes of only computer graphics.
All the lab (laser) scenes were filmed in my home town. When we all saw the movie in the theaters, it was mind blowing! 🖤
The Tron arcade game is basically all the games in this movie.
I love this movie! Watching it for the millionth time- you notice little things. 2 lines that are very close to each other don’t fit. RAM says put a cork in it. There’s no way he would know what that is. And then a tank driver said: no signs of LIFE. I think they could have picked another word than life , you know.
To give you some sense of how Tron stood out look at the other movies it was up against in 1982: Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan, Carpenter’s The Thing, E.T., Blade Runner, The Dark Crystal, Poltergeist, Firefox, The Secret of NIMH, Swamp Thing, and Mega Force. A wide variety of traditional effects, models, animation, animatronics, and stop motion. A few tried really cheesy laser effects or explosions using computers, but Tron went the full Monty, inventing techniques never before seen, or even imagined. And, it would be many years before anyone would try and duplicate the effort.
The Tron video game was my favorite, back in the day! 👍
The actor who plays Alan/Tron is Bruce Boxleitner, who played Captain John Sherriden in Babylon 5 and Lee Stetson in the Scarecrow and Mrs. King TV series. I got a movie reaction suggestion for you, it's one of my favorites, The Final Countdown (1980) The U.S.S. Nimitz goes back to December 6th, 1941. It's filmed on the Nimitz. It's like Top Gun meets Back to the Future.
I also remember him as Frank Buck in the short-lived _Bring 'em Back Alive_ from around that time as well -- one of a handful of TV shows that tried to capitalize on the success of Indiana Jones.
There's also an animated series.
The Disks of Tron arcade game was awesome.
David Warner was great in Time Bandits... Ram was the same guy who played Billy The Kid in "Bill & Ted".... In 1982, the only computer I had was a Commodore 64
When you end up watching Tron: Legacy, make sure to pay attention to the music. It's one of the best soundtracks for a movie imo and goes so well with the tone of the movie.
Yes. Excellent movie. Love the visuals. And, can't miss Jeff's iconic silly laugh. Very refreshing. Indeed, you will like Tron Legacy. And, I hear that Tron 3 is in the works, so we have that to look forward to seeing. I'm going to catch that in the theater for sure. Thanks Addie. ~ Tony.
I have watched this movie 100 times and I never caught the Mickey outline on the ground at the edge of the land in the Solar Sailer Simulation scene!