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Dispatch Ajax! Podcast
A Geek Culture Podcast - Two life-long Nerds explain, critique and poke fun at the major pillars of Geek Culture for your listening pleasure.
Dispatch Ajax! Podcast
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.
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SPEAKER_02:Disgust. It's a jumping off point. There's your pod right there. It's called cereal, but spelled with a C. Oh shit. The most popular podcast of all time. Yeah, by accident. We're gonna be the asylum studios of podcasting.
SPEAKER_01:Gentlemen, let's broaden our minds.
SPEAKER_00:Are they the proper approach button for today? Negative.
unknown:Charge the lightning field.
SPEAKER_02:Welcome back to Dispatch Ajax, the podcast that is the reason that Jeff Bridges keeps a spare data disc in his crunk. Yes. Today we're oh I'm sorry, I'm skipped. Yes. Yes. You have to do an and if you're gonna yes and. That's an integral part of the process. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Well, anyway, he's Jake. Yes. You just ran out. Alright.
SPEAKER_01:Well, it's like I love the bits in the original. I wish those had sustained throughout the rest of the series.
SPEAKER_02:Well, and the reason we bring these kinds of things up is because today we're gonna be talking about Tron. Raw. All hail Tron, destroyer of worlds. 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 tackle not just the history of the franchise of Tron, and not just the review of Tron Ares, but also bandy about the ideas, concepts, legacy, no pun intended, and weirdness of Tron and why it's somehow still relevant to some people, I guess. If it is. If that is the case. And the box office numbers on Tron Ares would say otherwise. However, it's hard to know what that means anymore because everything is also simultaneously streaming, so who the f who the fuck knows?
SPEAKER_01:That's true. But if we go by history, Tron, Tron Legacy, Tron Ares. None of them did well at the box office. That is true.
SPEAKER_02:Well, they all did okay. None of them did well, but none of them bombed technically. So the original Tron was disappointing because it was supposed to save the company's, you know, new endeavors into live action, but it also didn't lose 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. And just like with the first Tron, Tron Legacy, I think more people have seen it in hindsight than did at the time. I think it it's gained more popularity and put more eyes on screens as time has gone on.
SPEAKER_01:Well, but I think you could say that for most films because it's let me rephrase that. Okay.
SPEAKER_02:It's more popular now, I think. I think m people were look back on both of them a little more fondly than they did at their release or right after their release.
SPEAKER_01:Okay.
SPEAKER_02:There are people that went back and have like they have a love for Tron Legacy, which I didn't love at the time. Now I kind of appreciate it in a different way, but uh, you know, it still got the Tron problem.
SPEAKER_01:I went back and watched all of the Tron films along with the new Tron Ares. I have found that I like them less than I did. Yes. I find them to be far worse products as feature films than I recalled, but we can get into the specifics.
SPEAKER_02:And we will, and that's gonna be part of our premise, I think, as we go along here. To start off, we'll just kind of catch everybody up on. Let's get let's get digitized, Jake. No. He might have a spare data desk to plug in here. So this is a 1982 film from Disney, and it was directed by Steven Liseber. It was actually his creative vision. Reportedly, he just wanted to see a video game character on screen. Apparently, he was enamored when Pong came out. This is how fast this technology has come along. We were mesmerized by Pong.
SPEAKER_01:It was a different time. People nowadays, you gotta think about how far we've come. In a short period of time. Yeah. I always think of this the oldest person governing you in Congress, they were still around when people were plugging in switchboards to connect you over the telephone lines. They had prank operated record players. They were of a time the TV didn't exist. And they were just listening to things on the on the radio.
SPEAKER_02: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:Yeah. We have gone so fast and so far, and that at least for Congress, and the my biggest problem with the older people governing us and no term limits and whatnot. They are so disconnected from their lived experience to ours, not just by time, wealth, by how fast culture and technology has progressed. I mean, think about trying to tell your grandparents how to use remote control or or use their phone. But imagine those people trying to decide on how AI should be policed.
SPEAKER_02:Think about this. Bill Clinton, who at the time was like the second youngest president ever elected, was the first 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 this perspective. He was a boomer. A fucking boomer. Not even Gen X. Uh how old is Bill Clinton now? He's like 80 something now.
SPEAKER_01:He's 79. 79, okay. Our last two presidents were older. We're currently older in office. Decades after Bill Clinton was gone.
SPEAKER_02:Trump had no office. He had an office in the skyrise somewhere that he, I'm sure, was in defaulting mortgage payment payments on. But you know, you know what I'm saying, like they were in power. All this stuff it's come along so quickly. Guys like Lisber were so enamored with something like Pong that he wanted to tap into this emerging technology and this emerging new culture. And so he decided that was the future, and it was the future of movie storytelling as well. And so he was going to do whatever he could to bring American cinema into the future. And to be fair, he kinda did. I know it's a cliche, but literally ahead of its time. This was barely even a culture at this point. Arcades still were yet to be cultural tent poles, and then suddenly Flynn has like the hippest arcade in the world in like Los Angeles. And I think his overall vision for this is a fascinating snapshot of the actual future that transpired after that. And I think that's one of the reasons people didn't connect with it, but it's also one of the reasons that people always look back fondly, at least at the ideas of it. We'll get into some of the more philosophical and existential stuff in a bit. But Liseber went to the school of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, really awkward name for a school. He started his career in animation in 1973 with a film that he directed and animated with a colleague named Eric Ladd called Cosmic Cartoon. It's a psychedelic thing where they do a lot of experimental visual stuff. He then started his own animation studio. Unfortunately, the center of animation as an industry was not on the East Coast. So everybody was going to Los Angeles and even for upstarts. So he and his business partner, Donald Kushner, decided to move the studios in 1977 to California, and it did see a big pickup. Now, that's when he first discovered video games. Quote, I realized that there were these techniques that would be very suitable for bringing video games and computer visuals to the screen. And that was the moment that the whole concept flashed across my mind. He didn't like the sort of early on tech bro culture, which is obviously different than it is now, and the niche inaccessibility of video game culture. He thought if he made a film that brought that to the masses, that it would open the world up to computing, to gaming, and to tech in general, what we would think of as modern tech. In some ways I think he did that, and in some ways I think he completely did not do that. We'll have to get into that. Now, Kushner would end up going on to be a producer in Hollywood, with maybe the strangest filmography I have ever seen for one person. These are the movies that he's known, and these might be the only ones he's produced, and this these are the movies he's known for producing. Tron, Monster, the uh Eileen Warnos one? Yep.
unknown:Okay.
SPEAKER_02:The Brave Little Toaster. I mean a classic. And Blitz, a Jason Statham revenge movie.
SPEAKER_01:What? Uh you know what? I applaud him for not being pitch and holed. Kind of galaxy braining this and like just, you know, spraying it all over the field.
SPEAKER_02:Diversifying his portfolio, as it were. So even just broadcast their brand to the world, the Liceburger Studios logo featured a character created completely out of light using backlit animation. So essentially you're creating negative spaces so that when you shine light through the back of it, that is what lights up what you would normally consider the outlines of the character. That would go on to sort of set the tone for his aesthetic in Tron. You had something to say about how he named Tron, didn't you? If people are stupid, it comes from the word electronic, but there is more of a story to that.
SPEAKER_01:It does. So uh at least from what I had read from Lisberger himself, is that in the in the late 70s they're working with the Olympics, his studio was, and they were gonna do something called Animal Olympics, which I guess are animals doing gladiatorial games or whatnot. Oh, good. Then he said he saw Pong, and to use a bad pun, you want to connect the dots. And so they're working on Neon logos for Animal Olympics, and he thought that they should create the character in Neon, and that character they just called Tron. And then again, he said a lot of people thought it came from Tron, which is a debugging command in basic programming language, meaning trace on. However, Lisbberger stated in interviews that he took the name from the word electronic, and he didn't know anything about basic commands until much later.
SPEAKER_02:Which is so funny because that would actually make way more sense. That right there is maybe a microcosm of the Tron Gestalt in general. Maybe we're assigning too much meaning to something that is really just flash and no substance.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, they were just trying to make something cool and fun, and then they're like they didn't think hard about what all this stuff was and meant and where it could come from.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and that's gonna become very apparent as we go along and extremely confusing. He first and foremost just wanted to make a movie. And it was originally conceived as an animated film, with the live action stuff being in the real world as bookends. The middle animation stuff would be a combination of what we now call CGI, and also that backlit animation we were talking about before. Now he was going to do this independently because who the fuck is going to understand this concept in a at a movie studio? And so he approached several computer manufacturers, but they wouldn't bite on it either, mostly because this is long before venture capitalists and private equity. There was one company though, Information International Incorporated, II, that's weird. They were interested. Called Try-Eye. Try I, that's good. And they started talking about how they would integrate live action, photography, and backlog animation in a way that would be integrated with the graphics that try-eye would help to facilitate. I made that up. I don't know if that's why I know, but it's better than I'd saying III all the time. And at this point, he actually had a good thing going because he had his entire script written and storyboarded. Actually, he had done some test computer animation as a sizzle reel. So he had the complete package. The problem was he was pitching it to computer companies. It's not gonna get you very far in this era. Today, Apple would throw so much money at you. He spent three hundred thousand dollars in early eighties money developing the concept for Tron. That is a lot, but at the same time, based on that effort, had secured between four and five million dollars of private banking in early 80s money, which is like bigger than most budgets of films back then. Unfortunately, he then just sort of hit a wall. And so I think all of that kind of went away. I think it went back to its investors. In a last ditch attempt at doing this, he drug his idea like a hobo carrying his bindle up to the front doors of Disney, which sounds like to people like us kind of crazy because Disney is the behemoth that it is. To modern audiences, younger audiences, perhaps, not that weird because they do a lot of stuff now and own a lot of stuff. But back then, Disney, which had been the powerhouse of animation, was really on the skids. Walt Disney was dead, they were about to lose Don Blut, and Disney had a long history of live action stuff. They used to do nature films, they used to have a show hosted by a Nazi. Now I'm not talking about Walt Disney, an actual Nazi. They had uh TV shows, they had Swiss Family Robinson, which then eventually became Lost in Space. They had they had the Waterfalls.
SPEAKER_01: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 child actors, Kurt Russell, which famous last words of Walt Disney on his deathbed. That is so weird. They would then transition that into like, you know, later into like the Mickey Mouse Club, um, the Mousketeers, you know, you you have a lot of famous people come from that. That progresses on to Disney then takes those live action elements, makes TV programs for kids that go on decades and decades after that. But at the time, right before Tron, they had been trying to focus a little more effort because they weren't doing super well with their animated features. So they're trying to do some live action stuff. That's where they did Escape to Witch Mountain in 1975, The Black Hole in 1979, and The Watch in the Woods in 1980, trying to expand their genres and what else they could do, but none of them were commercial successes. So they were bombs. Yeah, Disney was trying to find something that was going to really hit.
SPEAKER_02:The crazy thing is that they tried Black Hole and then tried Tron. It feels like they would have been like, no, we're not doing this shit again. Because Black Hole came out, and you you can see why they did Black Hole, because Star Wars had just come out in 77, 77. Um never heard of it. Never heard of it, never who? Go see a Star War. Then Battlestar Galactic had had been developed as a film, but then transitioned into TV in like 78, and then Star Trek the Motion Picture Kit comes out in 79, revitalizing that franchise. So to compete, because you know, it's uh the NFL is a copycat league, Disney comes out with the black hole to compete with the success of Star Wars. It is a complete disaster, the black hole. And so you would think they, you know, their first real foray into the sci-fi genre, or at least sci-fi adjacent genre, would have like turned them away from another big swing like Tron, because that was a big swing. But they needed to do something to up the game, so they hired a guy named Tom Wilhite, an ascending, you know, executive within the Disney hierarchy. And he was the one that was enamored with the concept based on the reels that they had shown him, based on the sizzle reel and the storyboards and everything, how professionally done the whole pitch was. It was one of those ones where a lot of times when you pitch something to a studio, you have an elevator pitch, and you might have even a test screen, but you don't normally have an entire script already completed and storyboards done and a sizzle reel. You have one of those things maybe, 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 of the company was excited about it. You were talking about that earlier.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So there were some that were very opposed to the project at Disney because they didn't believe that artists should get involved with computers at the time, but there was a faction within the Disney higher-up executives that thought we need to look towards the future and really try to like push the limits what we can do with this feature film. Now, at the time, they didn't have uh the tech to make it a real reality. Bill Croyer, who was the co-lead animator of the feature, he described it as jumping off a cliff and building your wings on the way down, which is how they made the film. They ended up drafting four main companies: Digital FX, Robert Abel, and Associates, Mathematics Applications Group Incorporated, or Magi, and a little group called Triple I that you might have heard of. Oh, Tri-Eye.
SPEAKER_02:ICubed.
SPEAKER_01:They got together in what they called symbiotic creativity. Kroyer and Jerry Reese would do the storyboards for the whole movie and ended up doing all the animation. But they they asked the guys at at 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 able to come up with.
SPEAKER_02:I think Triple I is triple H the next generation. You know what I mean? He's the next iteration of Triple H. Alphabetically at least.
SPEAKER_01: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: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 a tech shaman, I mean, he's really archetypal. He journeys to the other dimension where he solves the problem because he has powers that most of the characters in that world don't have. I like that idea, and that's kind of something they would steal for the Matrix later, or Dark City, or various other things, but he doesn't really do that in this movie. The sequel.
SPEAKER_01:No, in the first movie, that's not I feel like that's something that in retrospect, that's an idea that maybe they're applying, but not what was actually delivered for the film.
SPEAKER_02:What he's implying is that he intended him for him to be Neo, post-woke Neo, but he's not in either of those films.
SPEAKER_01:In the second one, I mean in the second one, he's kind of like a god figure. I mean, he has created all of the people, all of the city. You know, he can essentially like walk on water.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I mean he can do some things, but he's been like in hiding as a basically like a shunned monk. Yeah, he has access to the source code, but he doesn't really utilize it all that much. He does it to help out his kid and like to help some of the underground rebellious stuff, but I mean he could just turn on the lights at any point, and he doesn't. Exiled shaman instead of a god. But then they try and make him like a god when the plot requests it. Then it just doesn't really make a lot of sense, like, why he did what it what he did the whole time.
SPEAKER_01:I'll be honest, when you start trying to like break down what makes sense within the Tron films. Oh boy, I know. You start treading on dangerous ground.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, on deadly ground. Which is dangerous because there's some fire down below. Um That'll mark you for death. You're gonna watch it. We've got to remain above the wall. The serious practical and logical issues with this entire concept, I think, is going to be the bulk of what we're gonna be talking about pretty soon, but we're just laying down the groundwork. So before we do that, let's see. Leiseburger was talking about the casting of Jeff Bridges. He started reaching out to see who would be interested, and a lot of them, because you know it's it's old Hollywood, sort of the death of old Hollywood, when they heard that it was about video games, they were like, fuck you, and then hung up on him. Because either they didn't think the video games were serious, they didn't think they were the future, they felt that it was childish. It's like a lot, a lot of actors felt, you know, when Donner Superman came out, even though they managed to somehow nail down a bunch of really famous actors. So when they actually started production, they managed to snag Jeff Bridges. He was a young guy, just kind of fresh on the scene. He was very much into the idea of this being the future of things, and he was enthusiastic. And so when they were trying to get people into the concept on set, when they were building the soundstage, they lined it with video games, with actual arcade cabinet. I guess an immersive thing, even if symbolic. But Jeff Bridges took to it like a fish to water and wouldn't stop playing them, to the extent where they would have to drag him away from Battle Zone to actually show up to perform in scenes. And he liked Battle Zone because it was essentially the template for the visuals of Tron. According to him, quote, all the those lines and the grid and all that, and man, they'd have to tear me off this game. I'd say, I'm preparing for the scene. That's pretty good, actually. As he takes a hit off bong and bumps some more quarters in. Yeah. Got those headphones on listening to bowling. And then so then Disney had agreed to finance a test reel outside of the sizzle reel that already been created, because the flying disc thing was a big action element in the film. And so they financed a what the research I found was a flying disc champion, which I think a lot of college bros call themselves, but I don't know that that's really a distinction. I'm not exactly sure what that involves, uh, because I don't think they're talking about discus. I think they're talking about frisbees. So they created this test reel to have a live-action, I guess, frisbee expert, throw around a couple of prototypes of the prop disc, which then get redesigned in Legacy. It was impressive enough that you know what it was? He was essentially like the sizzle reel that Sam Raimi presented to Sony when he pitched Spider-Man. Have you ever seen that one? Yeah. Because they were like, Toby Maguire, he looks like a wiener, and he's like, well, he's supposed to be a high school kid and he's supposed to be a wiener. So Sam Raimi had Toby Maguire, who at that point was ripped because he'd been working out for the role, do a scene where he fights off a bunch of muggers in an alley, but shirtless, so that Sony would understand what he was pitching. But Disney liked it so much they were like, you're right, I love it. Rewrite it and re-storyboard it. It was going to be under the purview of Disney itself. Now, I think you could probably find the original script online. I haven't looked for it yet. You can find most unmade scripts online, but I am curious the difference. It's been greenlit, Disney likes it, they're filming the thing. It has cast pretty interesting number of players. You have obviously Jeff Bridges as Flynn, the main character. You have the evil corporate overlord in David Warner, a great character actor who had just come off of things like, I think this was before, Time and Time Again, where he plays Jack the Ripper, who travels through time, chased by H.G. Wells, played by Malcolm McDowell. Talk about a cult classic. And would become one of the most renowned villainous actors of all time. And then you have young upstart Bruce Boxleitner, who had just come off of, or I think maybe was currently on no, actually hadn't done it yet. He would go on to star in The Scarecrow and Mrs. King in the 80s, and then later become the second commanding officer at Babylon 5 in the 90s, mostly built on his his sort of gestalt that this movie generated, and he plays, you know, the sort of the in-between, the go-between between Flynn and David Warner's character. The what really is interesting about the narrative of the film is that it does seem to predict a lot of stuff that would come later. Surprisingly so. It deals with corporate espionage, it deals with cutthroat tech bros, it deals with capitalism and its negative co-opting of technology, a future technology, and also plays into a lot of the fears about AGI, about AI in general. And I think that it's and I think that's one of the things that leads into its eventual appeal upon retrospect. And we'll get into that here in a bit.
SPEAKER_01:I would say with it's probably that and the look of the film. True. Which was not necessarily groundbreaking, but it definitely pushed a lot of things forward. And it's one of the best parts of the film today because it it still holds up. Now, Tron wasn't the first feature to use either green screen or blue screen. Chroma Keith, as they call it, that was invented all the way back like in the 1930s. There's even double exposure and optical printing and traveling mats. That was all back in the early 1900s. But you had The Thief of Baghdad in 1940, which was the first use of a proper blue screen process to create a traveling mat. That won the Academy Award for Best Special Effects back in 1940. You further had other films that use it like in the 1958 Old Man in the Sea with Spencer Tracy, further developing blue screen techniques. But one of the things that they did for this film is that they shot everything in black and white. And then because this is long before software, you don't have after effects or anything, so they would send these frames off to Korea and then they would all get colored in. The look of Tron, you have the good guys, you know, quote unquote, are in these black suits with like blue stripes that glow, and the bad guys are in similar outfits but with red stripes. Originally they were supposed to be yellow and blue. So the yellow would be the good guys and blue would be the bad guys. And so you can still see a little bit of the hint of the yellow in some frames, but they changed that so that the I think it would pop more with the red and the blue, but they had to go in and color all of those hand painted.
SPEAKER_02:Two anecdotes about that. Interestingly enough, they were actually white suits. They weren't black until Tron Legacy. Yes, that's what I meant, but continue. And also it's kind of a and we've talked about this before, but it's kind of a Star Trek effect because they are supposed to be red and blue, but they effectively on screen come off as orange. And so by the time you get to Tron Legacy, it's just orange, not red. Which is odd, but I mean a product of technique, not uh an intentional choice.
SPEAKER_01:Along with the interesting look of the suits, it was they had actual computer-generated elements, you know, something that the animators had pushed very hard against. They thought that it might be the depth of the industry. Boy, were they prophetic in that. Right. Now again, CGI had been used in films previously to different degrees. You know, you had uh Looker, is that one of them? I thought it was Q Q the Winged Serpent? No, no. There was some previous stuff. There was some in Andromeda Strain and Westworld um using CGI wireframe displays in the background, and then further push with Star Wars, but the biggest leap was in 1981 with Michael Crichton's Looker with a CGI Susan Day. That's what I thought. Yeah. Now the actual first functional character, maybe the CGI, came after this. I think it was in that Sherlock Holmes film that had uh are you talking about young Sherlock Holmes with the stained glass medieval stained glass night, yeah. That was from 85. So still like three years from this. I think 20 minutes worth of CGI footage used for Tron, which is not a lot. No, but I mean at the time it was a lot. The state-of-the-art computer used for the film's key special effects had only two megabytes of memory and 330 megabytes of storage, but we're still able to produce honestly pretty cool graphics, especially for the time.
SPEAKER_02:If I had a memory card that had those stats, I'd throw it away.
SPEAKER_01:If you believe the stories, astronauts flew, you know, to the moon with less computer power. Yeah. You know how good Tron looks because of its computer elements, it was shunned by elements of the Hollywood elites. So it wasn't even nominated for best special effects at the time that ended up going to E.T., I believe.
SPEAKER_02:I mean, that's also pretty good special effects, but I mean this was so much more pioneering. Think about it. When they filmed those black and white segments, right? They shot 75,000 frames of footage, and each of those had to be hand painted. The special effects work that went into this is so monumental that the fact that it wasn't even nominated is fucking crazy.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think that same year, if I remember right, the thing wasn't nominated for special effects either.
SPEAKER_02:But ET is? Are you kidding me? What the fuck?
SPEAKER_01:I'm trying to remember off the dome. I think that Blade Runner, E.T. Which is fair, and what was the other thing? Was it Wrath of Khan?
SPEAKER_02: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 uh Genesis project uh pitch thing's pretty good. These lot of vector graphics stuff. But I mean, come on, it's Tron. That doesn't really make a lot of sense. And you know, God love Blade Runner, but 90% of that movie is just painted mats. Like there's not a lot of stuff in there.
SPEAKER_01:Oh no, I was wrong. So things that weren't nominated that year The Thing, Conan of the Barbarian, Star Trek 2, Breath of Khan, Tron. Tron, none of those were nominated. The three that were nominated were E.T., Blade Runner, and Poltergeist, with E.T. taking home the Oscar.
SPEAKER_02:Okay, well, Poltergeist I'll give you. That definitely is up, should be up there.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. People had to work around the clock on Tron to handle a reported 76,320 frames, each of which had multiple elements that required anywhere from 12 to 50 passes to generate a final shot.
SPEAKER_02:That's insanity.
SPEAKER_01:Which is one of the reasons it's it still looks the way it does, you know. The hard work and the attention to detail, it pays off in the final shot. And I think that's one reason that that look, along with the things it was prophetically speaking about, kind of stuck in the memory of viewers then uh for years to come.
SPEAKER_02:The reason this is just differs from, I don't know, like Connecticut Yankee and King Arthur's court or something in that vein is that Flynn starts out 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 more interesting, and then tries to become an ethical hacker, tries to hack into NCOM's mainframe or whatever with a program called CLU or Clue. But the Master Control program, which is the AI running NCOM behind the scenes, also played by David Warner, figures this out, and then he and the actual physical corporate evil villain played by David Warner collude to not only stop Flynn's hacking abilities, but also to just get rid of him. And to do so, they see that the video game that Flynn has created can be used, and this is where it starts to get real fast and loose with logic, as sort of like a place to silo off unwanted programs, and they decide actual living physical people. And so they start up the laser, they quote digitize him, which really seems, if you really think about it, kind of crazy because they take him apart atom by atom, like a transporter. He's no longer physical, like and then he shows up as a digital version within strangely a sort of human-oriented physical user interface environment?
SPEAKER_01:Like the metaverse, kind of it's always that question: is this the way his brain can interpret the digital world and landscape, or is this how things actually are in this again, metaversal digital landscape? Right. How literal is this? It's hard to tell. I mean, it technically it doesn't really matter because you're off to have weird adventure in tech land.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I think some of the appeal of it is we want to figure that out. Because they so don't go out of their way to explain anything logically at all.
SPEAKER_01:No, it matters more after the fact as you pour over it and then as you build upon that world. But upon first viewing, you take it at face value, you just go along the ride.
SPEAKER_02:I know. If you think about it in that sense, it makes total sense that Disney would do that because think about all the animated stuff they do. The anthropomorphization of non-human characters. It was kind of, you know, Disney's bread and butter throughout its animated era, right? Anthropomorphization of now they just apply it to a new concept. Now they don't understand what the concept is. Computer programs, but that's what they've done. They've personified a new tech buzzword and given them agency.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Put them in an environment that we can understand as if it's the real world in which we interact.
SPEAKER_01:Right. Because there are only two entities that do not have a fully human physical reality on the grid, right? There's the bite, which is like a cube that only speaks in, you know, binary. So kind of yes and no, one and zero. And then Master Control, which is a big hologram, but in a like a laser tube. He looks like the living laser. He does look or like when the Emperor would talk to Darth Vader holographically, you put that on top of a laser beam. That's it. But they're the only two that are different. All the other programs appear to be human-like. Continue.
SPEAKER_02:Basically, what happens is it becomes this gladiatorial dystopian environment inside the game he's created, which does beg the question, is this just the way he's perceiving reality? Because he invented Tron, the game. If it comes from his imagination, so is this how whatever is happening to him is being manifested? It's really hard to say. Does that mean that the programs that he encounters, do their fates actually correspond with what's happening to them, or is that him creating a narrative? I I don't really know. I don't think, well, none of us know, because they never tell you in any way, shape, or form.
SPEAKER_01:Although maybe in the sequel we get a further idea, but we'll get to that.
SPEAKER_02:That statement right there is kind of the problem. Maybe someday. So Dillinger, who is the David Warner evil corporate character, he at some point finds out that MCP has been, as an AI, doing a bunch of illegal corporate espionage, and basically what tech companies do today, it's actually relatively prescient. He's been appropriating different programs, he's been basically stealing software, hacking into software from normal people, businesses, and the government. And he's doing so to the way they frame it is that by gathering these programs together, whether it's privacy software or accounting software or whatever, by gathering these things together, he's basically creating a big portfolio that increases his ability to control the internet. He's essentially Google. Oh, no internet.
SPEAKER_01:Well, they're on DARPANET. Well, no, that that one's is important. I think we need to like put a pin in that. There is no internet. There is a lack of interconnectivity.
SPEAKER_02:Though that's right, they are siloed off. Right. Yes. That is a problem because they don't even talk about that until later.
SPEAKER_01:That raises big questions that I have for everything down the line, but we can get to that.
SPEAKER_02:DARPANET did exist. I mean, they had something very similar to this back in the 60s. There is a possibility of connectivity, but I mean it's not the instant connectivity or the reliable connectivity that we have now.
SPEAKER_01:When you say the internet or even like connected networks, we don't see that. There is no like interaction between this system and other systems. It all seems self-contained.
SPEAKER_02:Well, that begs the question then, how does he acquire or access, how does MCP access these other file systems?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I mean at the time, you know, you you were they were plugging in floppy disks to store the information and utilize. I mean, perhaps they were physically maneuvered out. I think there's a lot of questions like how do we create these programs in the first place and what therein creates their identity and personalities and XYZ kind of go down the line. But it is unknown how those other programs are attained, but we do not see them travel outside. There doesn't seem to be further grid interconnectedness within Tron, any version of Tron, really.
SPEAKER_02:Makes me wonder if NCOM, Google, you know, because they buy up startups and they integrate them into their ecosystem or what. And I feel like that's what MCP is doing. Like he doesn't have to be connected to them to steal them, he just takes them over, like Google does with they did with YouTube, or they did with, you know, any number of companies they've integrated into their into their corporate hierarchy. Yeah, but that's the most sense I can make out of it.
SPEAKER_01:I know, but that's that's like the actual interconnectedness of the internet. That's a game changer. I try to utilize that metaphor within this rationalization of the story and what's happening.
SPEAKER_02:It but in war games, he was able to do that. He was able to connect to the DARPANET, the Defense Department original prototype for the internet. So why couldn't MCP do that? It was around the same time as just a couple years after this. That technology existed. I'm not saying that it didn't. I'm saying that we don't see that. True, and I don't think most people even understood it.
SPEAKER_01:No, and and what is this what is displayed in this version and in the other two versions of this world in the subsequent sequels, there isn't a wide-ranging, far-flung, interconnected world. It is siloed, it is by itself, there isn't like a connection to further systems, which is what leads me to believe retrospectively that this is its own internal network system.
SPEAKER_02:There is yet to be a series of tubes, is what you're saying.
SPEAKER_01:Tubes do not seem to be present. Uh there is water, but no tubes. You mean data streams? I mean data streams that don't serve like data streams in the following sequels. No, not at all.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, they're actually energy taps. If we get into how things work.
SPEAKER_01:Do you remember in this does Flynn get hurt? Does he have blood?
SPEAKER_02:He lose I don't rem Yeah, and that's how they find out he's our user, right?
SPEAKER_01:Well, that's how they do it in the other two films.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, you're right. I know he's weak, and that's how they introduce him to the to the power tap or whatever, the stream they drink out of. It's a lot of trying to explain technology through metaphor that audiences would understand without context, that doesn't at all explain the stuff that they're talking about. Doesn't make any sense.
SPEAKER_01:But it has its own internal logic in this first film.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it does.
SPEAKER_01:He was digitized into a program version of a user, of a human being interacting with these human-like programs. In the subsequent sequels, that is not what happens.
SPEAKER_02:And they do give a little bit of a reason, but we'll get to there. So essentially what MCP is doing, it is, like we said, it's consolidating its power base by collecting these quote unquote programs from other systems around the world in other sectors of society, and then to cull the weaker of them basically pits them into gladiatorial combat in Flynn's interpretation of this reality, where they have to literally fight each other with data discs. Which were actual frisbees. Whose are frisbees that glow? And the frisbee is basically, as a program, your entire identity. It's kind of like your papers, you know, your passport or um Yes, because you can function without it.
SPEAKER_01:But you have to have it to do anything. Well, not necessarily. I mean, they leave in multiple versions of this film, people leave their discs and other people take them and are able to attain knowledge from them, and they can still function without their discs. See, they're all important, and then they're like not important.
SPEAKER_02:Not important. Right. It's the problem of trying to, once again, square a metaphor of this being a physical object that's a tool that you use that you can lose or not have, but also try to explain how data works and how like a program uses not only a physical disc at this point to function, but also how all of the information that makes up the thing is on that disc. And they're really trying to square that circle, and it doesn't really work, but it gets so close that you're like, you think it should. And I think that's one of the biggest appeals about this entire franchise. But we haven't even gotten through the first movie yet.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, no, next, you've got to explain the end in two minutes. Do it.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, so gladiatorial combat, they introduce a lot of elements to it that you know, there are the the flying like MCP arch they're like flying tanks. Well, there are actual tanks too. That's true. The actual gameplay of the game of Tron in the real world is essentially like snake, except there are two light cycles and they create these trails of their color that are permanent, they don't go away, and they are solid physical objects. And so the strategy is to figure out how to out-rase this other character and or to trap it in its own or your digital wake so that it's destroyed and you win. That's the basic gameplay of that. And so that becomes a big plot device in the movie, where in another sort of Ben Hur gladiatorial combat, they take these light cycles and they race against each other. And so they do that, there's some intrigue, it basically just becomes sort of a Spartacus gladiator type thing, where there's an underground resistance, of course, to the Master Control program among these programs, because this virtual reality world, this metaverse that he's perceiving is a dystopian autocracy. So he enlists two friends, Ram and Tron, other programs, and Tron is like the best at all the gladiatorial games. And does Ram die? Yes. Yeah, Ramp dies. Funny enough, there's more than one Babylon 5 actor in this film. We don't want to detail every beat 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 underground resistance type situation. Think about it like there's the French resistance or whatever. It includes a wise elderly. Also that, yeah. It's a new hope. You're right, the beats are there. I didn't even think about that. So that's actually basically what they're trying to do is overthrow the Master Control program. And in parallel, Bruce Broxleiger's character and Flint's girlfriend are trying to figure out what happened. In the real world. In the real world, and David Warner's evil corporate villain, they realize that he's on the take, even though he's a slave to an AI, which is really interesting. So there's sort of a parallel like revolt going on on the outside. Except the difference is that MCP is the real controlling villain in both. Flynn realizes that Tron's the key. The really interesting thing about it is in most films you would think that Flynn would just become the character of Tron, right? Because Tron's the main is the character you play when you're playing Tron the game. But Flynn isn't Tron. Flynn's just Flynn, and he finds Tron. That's odd. Tron is not the main character, he's the titular character, he's not the protagonist, he's almost the MacGuffin.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, if it's I mean, the way I kind of think of it is like if if you were like transported into a fantasy world and you found the strongest knight, you fight alongside the knight, but the knight is the strongest and the best, and you need that knight and utilize that knight to win the day, even though you're the main character, you know what I mean?
SPEAKER_02:I do. I and I I understand, and there are narratives just like that, countless. But the fact that you're trying to adapt a video game in which you play as the main character, and then when you actually go into the video game, you're not playing as the main character.
SPEAKER_01:Well, he's also beyond it. He's I mean, he's a user.
SPEAKER_02:Right. He's outside the system. But Tron is barely in the movie. I mean, he does the big hero things when he needs to, but Flynn is your hero. So why have both?
SPEAKER_01:I don't think it necessarily contradicts itself. I think it maybe even gives it a little more flavor than a standard just Mary Sue like wins the day.
SPEAKER_02:It's just not what you would think of from the premise that they're giving you off the bat.
SPEAKER_01:Well, in a way, it's kind of like if Jack Burton just gets dropped into Tron, and then like That's a good analogy. It's it's Tron's story. Tron's the one who's the key to defeating Master Control, but Jack Burton's helping. Yeah, that's true. But also, Jack Burton is not a prototypical, it's a it's a unique story where they are they are a side character that's the main character, you know.
SPEAKER_02:You're right. I mean, structurally, that's essentially the same thing. Out of place, dropped into the middle of a of a of an actual narrative, a battle going on of good and evil, and he's just like, what? But the weird thing is he created this universe. That's the difference. If Jack Burton was egg shed, it would be different. Or whatever.
SPEAKER_01:Right, but again, he's out he's outside it and he's been dropped into it.
SPEAKER_02:But by but by creating it, you would think he would have more agency and control over the universe. You know what? If this was the last Starfighter, it'd be different. If you didn't create the game, but you got sucked into it, it would make more sense, even though in last Starfighter you are the main character. But if you kind of combined those two ideas, him being the creator of the game and yet having no control over the game and having to rely on the character, but not controlling him, letting him use his own skills to play out the narrative, that doesn't happen very often as a narrative.
SPEAKER_01:Uh yeah, but I mean, I don't think it's that different from like an author getting dropped into their story, and then they're like, they're out of their depth because, well, they're an author. They're not a horse writer or a captain at arms or whatever the what's happening in the story, you know.
SPEAKER_02:I mean, yeah, I guess if you in that scenario, you're helpless to the narrative you created. But because they set up that he created 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 a little odd that it was called Tron, and Tron's just kind of there and does his thing, but nobody remembers Tron. No, nobody if you if if you ask the person on the street who'd seen Tron as a kid and go, Who is Tron? They would go, Oh, it's Jeff Bridges.
SPEAKER_01:It's right, right. Both on the inside the game and outside. I mean, Bruce Box Leitner's the guy who's creating this technology, and he's the one who's fighting in the real world against NCOM's nefarious dealings, and he's also the one on the inside the game that's fighting against master control. In a lot of ways, Jeff Bridges is outside, he's doing his own thing, he kind of stumbles in, decides to dick around, gets sucked into the game, then he's kind of helping out the storyline playing inside. So, in a lot of ways, he's just the observer who passes through. So I don't know if you should necessarily have more volition than he does. But we should get to the end of the movie.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, okay. So essentially all that happens is that uh they end up physically go into the memory core of the Tron universe, which is the MCP. However, it's tapping into the game. Do they go is that the giant like light pole thing? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Okay.
SPEAKER_02: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:It's hard to know. Oh, it's become a trope now, but it's the magic glowing laser light into the sky of whatever needs to be done.
SPEAKER_02:That's after they destroy the MCP. That becomes their conduit out of the game. Hmm. Okay, yeah. Or or, well, they don't get out of the game until later. Exactly. But not. What happens is MCP, I guess you could say, is sort of like a virus or a Trojan horse that has quietly taken control and then become the dystopian dictator of the Tron world, and then MCP is destroyed, this giant column of light, the source code of the entire universe or whatever.
SPEAKER_01:Tron He needed to put his disc into the light stream to win the day?
SPEAKER_02:Just a tip. Tron allows Flynn to re-materialize in the real world. He's able to send Flynn back through this column of like. Yeah, and so then Flynn shows back up in the real world. Tron doing so has released all of the programs that MCP had had pirated. Then we find out that Dillinger had basically stolen and plagiarized all of Flynn's programming, and that's why he left Encom in general. When Dillinger the villain shows back up the next day after all this goes down, it has been released publicly that he did all of this, and then he is vanquished, and then Flynn becomes CEO of Encom. The end. That's that. That's Trond. That's Tron.
SPEAKER_01:Tron the movie, folks.
SPEAKER_02:Tron the movie.
SPEAKER_01:You got Trond. Bitch, you got Trond. Which didn't happen to a ton of people in 1982. Again, Tron did okay, but not great. In fact, it did poorly enough that it kind of scuppered a lot of live action programming for years to come from Disney.
SPEAKER_02:A lot of articles are like, well, that ended all of that for Disney. I'm like, I saw Flight of the Navigator. What the fuck are you talking about? What are you talking about? They still did shit all throughout the 80s.
SPEAKER_01:That's not true. I think they were still doing things, but I think the focus got pulled back even further. Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_02:They focused more on animation.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. They were swinging for some things and they were striking out.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. That's why Little Mermaid happened.
SPEAKER_01:Aladdin happened. I mean, a lot of that, I mean, that's there's a lot of confluence of elements of certain animators, certain voices within the Disney works, being there at the right time, the right place, making those things work and those really jumping off.
SPEAKER_02:Don Bluth was putting out actual really cool stuff back then, so Disney was kind of like behind. And so they felt like they had to go back to the animation in the first place, especially since the live action stuff they did bombed, which totally makes sense. And now ironically, they're making their animation live action, which is this hilarious time is a flat circle scenario.
SPEAKER_01:Well, if you want to talk about master control capturing uh programs and utilizing them in perpetuity for their own money-making goals, then that that is Disney currently.
SPEAKER_02:Really, really interesting tidbit about the look and design of Tron. Mobius was the production designer, 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, complete genius, and was also the production designer on Yodoraski's ill-fated Dune.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. A visionary sci-fi design guy. But like I said, Tron didn't do super well, but the video game did. Tron itself, the movie, earned 33 million, but industry analysis estimate the arcade game made between 100 and 200 million dollars in revenue during its peak. People played the shit out of that video game.
SPEAKER_02:That was just Tron, the original Tron video game, right?
SPEAKER_01:Yes, just the original Tron video game. You're looking about 20 years after the movie and video game came out, that they put out the sequel 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:Which was greenlit in 2008 based on, once again, a sizzle reel at Comic Con, which is really funny. Uh, we missed that one. I know I was there, I just missed that.
SPEAKER_01:There's definitely a lot to get into about well, what does all this mean? And definitely like, why are they making these?
SPEAKER_02:Right, and what's the appeal, and why do we all still kind of go, cool, a new Tron? We're gonna end this one here, because we laid the groundwork. But next time we're gonna pick up where we left off, where you don't need as much backstory. Now we get to talk about the cultural impact, the the sort of zeitgeist, and the reasons why Tron keeps happening, why they keep trying to make Tron happen, and why we're all okay with that. Or are we?
SPEAKER_01:I am! I want a good Tron movie! Like the Final Destination franchise. First one was an interesting idea, and they kept making sequels that were all bad to batter.
SPEAKER_02:Reddit's gonna kill you on this one, man.
SPEAKER_01:Until the last one, which is the best film of all of them. It would have made a great X-Viles episode. I think it has more legs than just an X-Viles episode. I think there is some fun things that they do and like the but overall, there isn't much meat on the bone. Now I understand a bit with that. There is Sequelitis that goes through horror franchises. They're easy and cheap to make, and you can just kind of pump them out, give new kills, give new 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 for was something great to come along. There are things that are really good that deteriorate over time. A Star Wars. Star Wars is fantastic. Subsequent prequels and sequels have been various levels of disappointing.
SPEAKER_02:Those are for complicated reasons.
SPEAKER_01:In grand scheme of things, for a lot of people, it kind of whittled away their desire to see more Star Wars. True. To where they got to a point, I liked my old stuff, but I didn't really like the new stuff. I would check it out, but I wasn't invested. I didn't care. But then Mandalorian and Andor came out, and I'm like, okay, it's not Star Wars itself that I have a problem with. It's poor scripts, it's poor acting, it's poor stories, it's bad Star Wars that was turning me off. Star Wars can still be good, but the thing about Tron is Tron was never good. So why is it that we why do we keep wanting more Tron? And do we want more Tron?
SPEAKER_02:It was really just vibe. It's we we want the vibes of Tron to be good. That's what we're feeding off of. The ideas. It's a combination of nostalgia and potential, unrealized potential, and often wasted opportunities for really cool stuff, but we still want that one good one to happen. It's like how everybody everybody thought one day Coldplay was gonna finally put out that good album.
SPEAKER_01:Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_02:And it never happened.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I can see that. But we'll get into more of that and go over the specifics. What is it about the phenomenon of Tron? We're not haters of Tron.
SPEAKER_02:If a cool Tron movie came out, we'd be like, fuck yes, let's do this. But it hasn't yet.
SPEAKER_01:I like Tron. You know, I don't love Tron. I think I overestimated it upon its release way back when and when I was a kid. The first times I saw it. When I saw Legacy, I went back and looked at what I had thought of it. It's like, oh man, I liked it a lot more then than I do now. I enjoyed my rewatch of it. We can get into the details. I actually like Legacy more now than I did when it came out. That's really funny. We should put a pin in this. Again, we're not hating Tron. We wouldn't be doing an entire two-part series on Tron if we weren't at least interested and liked it somewhat. Yeah. Things don't have to be great for us to be into it. And we could be hopeful about bad things turning good. Yeah, we're optimistic and we're inquisitive about the nature of Tron, the world of Tron, and the phenomenon of Tron and its sequels, its legacy, pun intended. The Trinomenon. The Tronomon.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, the Trinomenon.
SPEAKER_01:That's that's what we're all saying. That's what all the kids are talking about. TM TM TM TM. They've got a case of tronomon going on in their undercarriage as we speak. Trinomenitis. But until until this podcast gets its legacy sequel, we'd like to thank you for traveling to this digital pathways, uh, drinking from our deep data stream, uh, and listening to the podcast uh as we put it on for you. If you wouldn't mind like sharing, subscribing, that would be great. That's it gets all the bits and bites out there for others. Beeps and boops, possibly uh hear us and thus see us and and rise up the ranks. If you wouldn't mind giving us five master controls on the favorite podcast app of your choice, ideally Apple Podcasts. That's the best way for us to get our trhenomenon out there for the masses. And again, thanks. Thanks for uh checking us out. We hope you come back for part two, where we kind of dig in deep into the trhenomenon, as we keep saying, TMTM. But skip. Until the particle laser sucks them into digital pathways and they become not a user, but a program. What shall they do?
SPEAKER_02:Make sure they have charged their compilers, their recognizers, their light cycles, and make sure they have agree, make sure they have supported their local comic shops and retailers. That having been said, we would like to say, Godspeed, fair wizards. Yes.