.png){kind=logo}
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 2: On Like Tron
What keeps pulling us back to the grid when the box office never quite follows? We dive into the whole Tron continuum—from the 1982 cult seed and the overlooked Tron 2.0, through Joseph Kosinski’s neon‑sleek Tron Legacy and the bridge‑building of Tron: Uprising, to the new red‑glow reality of Tron Ares. Along the way, we tackle the question fans argue and studios dodge: is Tron actually sci‑fi, or is it fantasy that borrows the language of computers to tell a myth about creators and creation?
We revisit the ‘82 release headwinds against E.T., the home video era that gave Tron a second life, and the game that quietly solved problems the films wouldn’t touch—interconnected systems, corporate corruption, and viruses as character. Then we contrast Legacy’s towering strengths—world‑class design and that Daft Punk score—with its habit of hinting at great themes and jumping to the next set piece. We talk de‑aging that breaks immersion, the ISO genocide that begs for deeper stakes, and why treating the grid as a pocket universe makes the story read cleanly as fantasy.
From there, we unpack Ares: fabrication lasers that print bodies, light cycles roaring down city avenues, and a Pinocchio arc that raises huge ethical questions without living in the answers. We debate why bringing grid logic into the real world collapses internal rules, how soundtracks keep rescuing the vibe (hello, Nine Inch Nails), and why executives remain convinced Tron can still become the thing we remember it to be. Our take: the concept is timeless, the execution needs courage—consistent rules, character‑driven choices, and ideas that don’t blink when the action starts.
If you love the glow but crave the follow‑through, this one’s for you. Listen, share with a fellow program, and leave us a review with your verdict: should Tron lean full fantasy or build a harder sci‑fi spine? Subscribe so you don’t miss what derezzes next.
Man, we should probably tear the roof off this sucker. Gentlemen, let's broaden our minds.
SPEAKER_03:Are they the proper approach for today?
SPEAKER_00:Negative.
SPEAKER_02:Charge the lightning field.
SPEAKER_01:The generative AI is terrible. Speaking of AI. Speaking of not reaching its lauded potential when it comes to commentary or even just definitions of artificial intelligence, we're talking today once again about Tron. True.
SPEAKER_02:It is July 9th, 1982. Tron has come out to the big screen. But if you were alive and around then, you probably didn't go see it. In its fifth week of release, E.T. the Extraterrestrial was still dominating the box office. Tron opened in second place with four point eight million dollars compared to the 12.8 million that ET was making. That is just enough to beat out uh a few other films at the time. Rocky III at 4.5 million, Firefox at 3.6 million, and Poltergeist, who re-entered the top five in its sixth weekend at 3.2 million. Tron would get released on VHS uh in 1983. VHS was still fairly new, again, battling with the the great uh Pepsi Coke debate of its time.
SPEAKER_01:Even though people sleep on the whole RCA uh uh disc thing. Remember, do you remember the what's it called? The um they were basically just big floppy disks, or you know, oh yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Well not necessarily floppy disks, more like um the later.
SPEAKER_01:Well, we we still called them floppy discs because they were later, the other discs, the hard discs.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. I never actually encountered one of those machines, but I have seen them. I'm aware of them.
SPEAKER_01:My grandparents had one, and that's all they bought stuff on. They didn't bother with VHS. I thought they had laserdiscs. They replaced that with the laserdisc. Oh, okay. But they were like super early adopters of everything. They had fucking satellite uh they had satellite cable in like 1987. So like we had an enormous satellite dish in the backyard.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. You were like part of the SETI program at the time. Those things were huge.
SPEAKER_01:I know. They had a CD player in like 1990 when they cost like$800. You know what I mean?
SPEAKER_02:Well, Tron was on uh VHS, but maybe you weren't able to see it. It kind of became a cult feature for a bit. It was re-released in 85, and then again in 95 by Walt Disney home video, before it probably went into the vault, you know, as all good entertainment should. Yes, like Song of the South. But it would be 28 years later that a new Tron would emerge. A better Tron? Debatable, at least a new generation, as the legacy sequel of Tron lives on. Called Legacy.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, that's on the nose. It's uh 28 years later, Danny Boyle's Tron premieres called Tron Legacy.
SPEAKER_02:God, I can't even imagine what that could be a better movie. I don't know if there's two aesthetics that are further apart from each other.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, that's a good point. His whole thing is he likes to film to make it feel like the time in which it was created. In 28 days later, he filmed on Sony handicams because that's what with the current modern consumer available technology was. And then in 28 years later, he shot on an on a series of iPhones because that's consumer, you know, available at the time. What would he do with Tron? I have no idea. Super 8? Honestly. Cam? I don't fucking know.
SPEAKER_02:A high eight, maybe? I don't know. He did make sunshine, so it's not that he can't do a sci-fi, a visually stunning sci-fi experience.
SPEAKER_01:And that wasn't one of those ones he just did for money. That was actually one uh that was a passion project. And I mean that it's sunshine should be a pod of its own at some point. Yeah, it's half a good movie and then half of a crazy movie.
SPEAKER_02:Uh two-thirds of a good movie. Uh actually two-thirds of a great movie, and then the rest of it.
SPEAKER_01:And then the rest of it.
SPEAKER_02:But that's for another time.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, we could debate that too, because but sure. I yeah, I'm I'm I'm I'm in a similar wavelength.
SPEAKER_02:But today we are moving past the 1980s Tron into the new Tron. Uh, and we shall discuss its ups, its downs, and its whys. As Tron, Tron Legacy, and Tron Ares all fairly underperformed the box office. Yep. Became somewhat of cult hits years later.
SPEAKER_01:Let's start off with the timeline to get to where we are today first, and then we can go down the line of sort of existential commentary and and critique. So Tron was one of those things that, like, you know, geeky kids like you and I were kind of like, oh yeah, I remember Tron, even though we probably didn't really remember it because nobody really watched it, it was hard to find. But we liked, we always had this idea of Tron, and we were like, cool, I want another Tron. It'd be cool if they revisited Tron. Or we did see Tron and we were like, Oh, I hope they come out with a more updated Tron that makes more sense because now that people know kind of how computers work. But that didn't happen for a very, very long time, and for many reasons, most of them having to do with the hierarchy of Disney and its economic situation. But a highly, highly anticipated game, which I mean it's the point of Tron, Tron 2.0 premiered in August of 2003. It was a direct sequel to Tron, and I think people really, really gravitated toward it because people were like, well, this is probably the only Tron we're gonna get. I remember reading about, you know, in various websites and what have you, magazines and what have you, about how people kept pitching Tron sequels and Tron reboots, and it just never happened. And it felt like it was never gonna happen. And so Tron 2.0 comes out as a you know a PC and Mac game, and it's weird because they categorize it as a first-person shooter, which is like not the format you would really think a Tron game would be. Like, if anything, it'd be a racing game. That would make more sense to me.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, or some type of gladiatorial thing. Sure. Or a a pairing of the two.
SPEAKER_01:I mean, I'd I'd be fine with that. I mean, switch back and forth, which this game does switch back and forth between stuff, in in a really interesting way, actually. So the the game focuses around the son of Bruce Box Leitner's character, Alan Bradley. His name is Jethro.
SPEAKER_03:Okay.
SPEAKER_01:Otherwise known as Jet Bradley. He discovered oil on the grid. Texas T. Wow. Cindy Morgan, the female protagonist from the original Tron, who nobody remembers because they downplayed her so hard. She shows up. And then we have, you know, various other characters' artificial intelligences, Rebecca Romains in it. Sid Meade, the famous and futurist designer, does a famous redesign of the light cycle, uh, which is kind of a big get. They basically try to reframe the first film and make it make sense, but also still live within that world, which Tron Legacy will also half-ass kind of do. But in in Tron 2.0, you kind of like hop between computer mainframes and the emergence of devices like PDAs, which I think is fascinating, and kind of helps explain how Master Control was able to do what he did, like assimilating other programs. Because you'd think computers were all siloed if there was no internet, but this kind of goes out of its way to say, even though there is an internet, you kind of hop between these different types of computers because they're all hooked up to some sort of mainframe or data center or whatever. So NCOM gets bought out by a company called Fcon or F yeah, I think it's Fcon.
SPEAKER_02:I don't know. Do we need to get super in-depth on the Tron 2.0?
SPEAKER_01:Well, so the idea is that it gets bought out by another company. At the end of Tron, Flynn becomes the CEO of NCOM, and there's obstensibly a white hat organization just doing programming. Then they get bought out by this bigger corporation who does not have good intentions, and they kind of corrupt the whole thing. And so this game, everything that I've seen, does a really interesting job of expanding the lore and trying to make it not only make more sense but relevant, and kind of like expanding the narrative of the universe. It's kind of mixed as to how it is received, but most people seem to take it positively. Here's an interesting example. It all takes place, quote, inside a computer, which we I think we all can agree, well, not all, but you and I kind of like surmise that it may be just Flynn's interpretation uh of how to make sense of that, of the what's happening. It's all neon lights and the grid and all that. But then there is all there are scenes where you you hop to portable devices like PDAs, and instead of black and neon, they're all just black and white, which I think is really interesting. And also more pleasant to look at than if you did it like Game Boy Greed, because that would be that would just be awful. The idea is that you go around, you collect keys, you go, you move up to different levels, which means you move from mainframe to server to PDA back to a mainframe, yada yada yada. That's kind of how it works. There's a bunch of in-jokes in it, but the idea that Fcon or Future Control Industries instead of Master Control has now taken over. They do this interesting thing where an executive at Fcon who finds out what Flynn had done tries to digitize himself to put himself in the game, but then it becomes corrupted and he becomes a virus. And that virus is one of your antagonists, and you have it like chases you down and tries to kill you. It becomes like a ghostish villain inside the game. So I think that's an interesting innovation. There is a big lore behind it. We don't have to get into a lot of it other than to say it's interesting and it expands on the original. The reason we don't have to get into it too much is because it's immediately wiped out of canon when Tron Legacy comes out. Yep. So Tron Legacy.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Tron Legacy.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, I would like to say before before that though, after Tron 2.8 came out, it did have a comic book tie-in. It was the video game did? Yes. Uh by Slave Labor Graphics. I don't are they even around anymore? I don't think they're around anymore.
SPEAKER_02:I don't think so.
SPEAKER_01:I don't think so either. It was a sequel mini-series called Tron Ghost in the Machine, which sounds kind of awesome, actually. Do you guys like Ghost in the Ghost in the Shell? And do you guys like Tron? Well, let's let's uh let's let's do both. And also, by the way, that game was ported to the mobile phones back in 2003 and four. Tron 2.0 Light Cycles, which is essentially Snake, and then Tron 2.0 Discs of Tron. And all of these things were later ported to the Xbox, which you could play until 2010, when Tron Legacy came out, around when Tron Legacy came out, and then they killed it. But there were backup servers, it's called Insignia, if I remember right. And you can still today you can still play them. I think it's available for Steam now on the PC if you want to. Is it okay?
SPEAKER_02:If you want. I think so.
SPEAKER_01:And there are a fuck ton of Tron fan games out there, too. If you go on Pyko 8 or basically just go to itch.io and you're gonna find a thousand Tron Tron fan-made games, and most of them are just snake.
SPEAKER_02:Again, it speaks to a why the game came out. Uh, you know, it's like a nostalgic property that seemed to be kind of ahead of its time, speaking about, you know, something that's that's coming. The combining of man and machine, which is something that I think prompts the sequel that finally comes out in 2010, Tron Legacy. That was done by Joseph Kaczynski. This was his first feature film that he had made. He was famous for doing a Gears of War commercial that highlighted Gary Jewell's Mad World, the Tears for Fears cover.
SPEAKER_01:Well, from Dottie Darko.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, but he hadn't made a movie before. He has since gone on to be a big-time studio director. Uh he's worked a lot with Tom Cruise, both in Oblivion, which if you know the aesthetic of Tron and the aesthetic of Oblivion, you definitely see similarities. I think he worked with the same cinematographer as well. And also another legacy sequel, Top Gun Maverick.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, wow.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. He had, I think he just did F1 as well, if I remember right.
SPEAKER_01:So after Top Gun, I could totally see that.
SPEAKER_02:But Tron Legacy was was his his first foray into the world of big time movies.
SPEAKER_01:That is a lot to put on a guy for his first fucking directorial debut. I mean, that's that's hefty.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, he was hired to make a proof of concept reel. They showed that at Comic-Con 2008. Yep. Because it received such a great reception. Disney Greenlit the$170 million sequel.
SPEAKER_01:Which is crazy for 2010.
SPEAKER_02:They were shoving some chips in on Tron and focusing a lot on it's a movie set in a computer world. So computer graphics are gonna be a big part of this. You want you know the aesthetic to be there, you want the soundscape to be there. They brought in Daft Punk to do the music on that. Yes, a stroke of genius, to be perfectly honest. It is. Uh, I think a lot of people when it originally came out, it wasn't the most well-received film critically. You know, some people said this is just uh, you know, a two-hour long Daft Punk video, which I'm fine with. I'm totally fine with. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Uh hey, that soundtrack is so effing good. I remember people being really disappointed with it, and I was like, why? It's a score, not a soundtrack. Yeah. This isn't Interstellar 5555, though it makes just about as much sense. There is no soundtrack for Tron, there's a score, and Daft Punk for their first one fucking kills it. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:It's completely on vibe, you know, with the whole concept. Absolutely. It was it was a stroke of genius pairing this world, uh, the visual style of Kaczynski and his idea of what Tron could look like and that sound. It worked. That was probably the best bit about Tron Legacy, if we're being honest.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's the best part of Tron Legacy for sure. Because it's not necessarily the de-aging effects, because those are bad. No.
SPEAKER_02:Tron Legacy came out almost to the day a year after the first Avatar. You watch Tron Legacy and then you go watch Avatar, or you watch Lord of the Rings that came out before Tron Legacy, and you're like, how is it so bad?
SPEAKER_01:If you remember, even X-Men 3 did D-Aging with Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart. And I remember that looking bad, and it does look bad, but it still kind of looks better than what they do here.
SPEAKER_02:So they also often do. I mean, de-aging, I think it's gotten better as time has gone on. You know, the machinery and the software has gotten so much better. It always has that uncanny valley, though, that kind of pulls you out. So when you do it, you need to do it in the background. Utilize shadows, utilize distance. It's when you have the character full front and they're speaking, and the the mouth is not matching the words, and it's not natural movement, expression. Yeah, it just doesn't feel right. And so I think if I were to have made this, I would have gone more stylistically into maybe like a digitized version of people. And because I would have set Clue, which is the character, we'll talk about like the basic plot of Tron in a second, but I would have made it so that he was stylized to maybe be a bit blockier, maybe a bit derezzed a bit, a little so that you could see that is a young, yeah, a young version of Jeff Bridges' character, but it it wouldn't have had like it's not supposed to be human, you know? Right. It would have felt more computer as opposed to what they did where they tried to make everything's computer, Jake.
SPEAKER_01:A good example of that was in Rogue One. I think the weakest points of Rogue One are the Grandmaf Tarkin and and Princess Leia moments. Those are easy fixes though. Instead of Tarkin being there in person talking to the character, have him on a computer monitor. That way it looks more like it makes more sense, and then just don't show Leia's face. It works. You don't have to do that, you give it a buffer. Just like what Del Toro does masterfully, and to a certain extent, Spielberg does absolutely masterfully, especially in Jurassic Park. You have to pick and choose when you use practical effects and when you use special effects. And sometimes makeup is better than CGI, and sometimes putting a filter over the CGI works better and makes more sense. I think, interestingly enough, now that you had brought that up, I think you should do most of the clue stuff either in flashback where it's all shot in black and white with a glow on it, like in the first one.
SPEAKER_00:Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_01:Which would make that effect seem more understandable. It would have helped. It would have helped. It would also have been kind of hard to structure the world that they're creating. Yeah, especially when Clue has to interact now, you know. Well, the only way to do that is to be like, you shoot him from behind. You shoot him from behind, like over the shoulder, where you don't see his face, and you see the person he's talking to. Or you put him in shadow, or you you stick him in a corner somewhere far off, or you know what I mean? Like you don't have him up front necessarily.
SPEAKER_02:Or you do something where like they had a falling out and Jeff Rich's character uses his disc to slice Clue's face. And so you see, like, you know, like the his jaw is gone or something, you know, or it's like it's a different feature where it's still like a young version of the character, but it it takes you out of like what it's supposed to be.
SPEAKER_01:Or he changed his face and then still had Jeff Rich's voice, which would be fine because they did have a falling out. Sure, why not?
SPEAKER_02:When Flynn's son comes into the grid and meets Clue, he thinks that he's his father, so you wouldn't have that if it was a different phase. That's a good point.
SPEAKER_01:So, okay, so we should probably get into the plot of it then, I guess, if we're gonna say that. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:Basic plot, it is years later. Jeff Bridges' character, after the events of Tron, came out to the real world, started making a bunch of money, putting out video games. He wanted to expand the possibilities of what the world of Tron could be, and so he went back into the digital space, and he was going he he created his own new world, the grid, where he was gonna try to make a world that would be beneficial to humanity, and he created a clone of himself called Clue to help him in this adventure, but all the worst parts of himself were cloned into this new version. His uh arrogance, his his drive to dominate and with things, and Clue overthrew the creator, Flynn, and Flynn was exiled because I guess the way you get in, at least from the Tron, was that this laser digitized you and brought you into the digital world. To get out, there is a light portal, pole of light in the digital space that if you interact with it, it will suck you into the real world somehow. So Clue has like kept him.
SPEAKER_01:I want to elaborate just a little bit on that. In the narrative, the idea is that Flynn realizes that even still, and we can still kind of to a certain extent up to the exposition claim that this is how Flynn interprets the world of the Tron universe. But what they do, you're right, outside of the game of Tron, he's created a pocket universe essentially, kind of like the bottle city of Candor, where time moves differently, it moves at a different speed, and it's like creating a universe from scratch, like your god, right? And so he doesn't create clue for this. Clue was the program that he used to fight Master Control in the first movie, but now he's personified Clue. Clue is now him in a human form within the context of the game or the universe.
SPEAKER_02:He he remade Clue in his image.
SPEAKER_01:In his image, right, exactly.
SPEAKER_02:The problem was the world, because it's not the Tron world from the first, it's his own grid digital world.
SPEAKER_01:He created a pocket universe, essentially. And he's realized that he could create a utopia working with Clue, and Clue would be his avatar in the Tron world. And you were right, the problems with that is that Clue is a program, not a person. It doesn't have he doesn't have the context, the empathy, the human aspects that claw back that kind of world building from an authoritarian or a dictator. And so Clue becomes Flynn's vision manifested without humanity, which arguably makes sense considering they are programs and not people. And so Flynn is still the CEO of NCOM, but he's been spending more and more time inside this world to the extent where he's been missing a lot of his son's life. Eventually he's like, things are going wrong. I don't think I don't like the direction this is going. I'm gonna go back in there and I'm going to make it work, and then never comes home. He goes out for a pack of cigarettes and never comes back. And so then he's missing from his son's life, who then grows up without a father. His dad's dead. Yes, yeah, that Flynn is dead. Yes. Basically, that's the exposition of the film.
SPEAKER_02:Yes, because grown-up son, you know, he's uh eccentric and uh a bit of a risk-taking daredevil. He doesn't necessarily want to live in the corporate structure and he wants to make things better, he wants to make the programs and the and the operating system that NCOM is is creating free to the world. He gets a call, well, again, a page or whatever, from dad's old workspace. He goes there, whoopsy daisy, he gets zapped by the laser, he is then digitized. A user has become a program. Hmm. This is another thing they have. So in the original, they all knew there were programs, and then they're the user, kind of the mythical user, a god in a way. You know, like when Zeus would become a goose or whatever. Before Flynn sucked into the first tron, users were thought to be higher beings controlling, pulling the strings, which they are. But then when a user is brought to the program level, he still had powers outside of the thing, and that's that's like whatever. His powers within the the world are vague at best. But he is not simply a program. When Clue takes over, he outlaws the religion of the user. At the same time, there is an AI that has spawned within Flynn's grid world. God, what are they called? Uh isotronic algorithm. Isomorphic algorithms. And and these are things that Flynn didn't create that evolved on their own. They seem to have unique abilities and um but they are quickly rounded up and holocausted. Right. All of them except for one. Users aren't they're still known but not believed in. And these AI creatures have all been killed by Clue except for one, who has met up with Flynn and lives with him. Right, and that's Korra. Yes, that's Korra. So Flynn's son is taken to the grid. Of course, he's put into the games, he's able to survive for a bit, but he's about to be killed until Korra comes and rescues him, takes him outside of the city, uh vague. Then the son and father meet, it doesn't go super great, kind of Christian allegories, but they realize that they need to get out of there and they need to stop Clue because Clue's idea, like Flynn's, was to make things better for him and his people, which is these digital programs. They want to get out into the real world and go nutty, who knows? Which won't be good for humanity. Get Buckwild. Buckwild is the technical term, I believe. It is, it's a medical term, yeah. So they have to stop Clue from getting out. Clue acquired Flynn's disc, which will give him the ability to escape the grid with his army of programs. Flynn and dad make up. Korra is sent with Flynn's son to get out. They get into the light pole and are sucked into the real world somehow. Are they made with the laser again? We don't know. It's not explained.
SPEAKER_01:And I'm really curious as to about how a fucking program, because like in the first one, they're like, Oh, I was a calculator or I was accounting software. And how does that become a fully realized flesh and blood person? No fucking clue. I don't know. Well, that's a question.
SPEAKER_02:Are they flesh and blood? Come when she comes out, uh, we are led to believe that it's flesh and blood, but we don't really know.
SPEAKER_01:No, not until Tron Aries, which they also do a bad job of explaining. But we'll get to that in a second. We'll get to that in a second as well. To expand on Tron Legacy in general, the reason I think this film didn't work very well, and the reason that we don't think it's all that great. Not that it's bad, it's just not that great. Is because they touch on some really cool themes, some really interesting ideas, but never follow through with any of them. Instead, they're like, Well, let's touch on this and then blow something up, or let's touch on this and then somebody skydives, or whatever. It's very clear that obviously the sort of like Battlestar Galactica trope of killing the father to become the thing, and you know and then Clue basically becomes Alexander the Great. He he wants to unite the world through despotic rule because he feels like that's the best method to do so, because his vision is superior, and he believes in a utopia and he believes in a free world, but to get there has to be a dictator. Because he's not human and he lacks empathy and I don't know if he believes in a free world. Well, that's the problem. When you go down that path, there is no point where freedom actually happens. You just keep holding on to that position, and you keep doing it until you die or get deposed. That's what Americans at least think of like Fidel Castro or or Stalin or oh, I guess Lenin really, but the idea that the utopian ideal was great when you have to keep in power and your idea was freedom and democracy, those are antithetical. It's a long story and debatable, but I think that's the allegory they're trying to send, especially since I know for a fact that in Tron Legacy, Korra is supposed to be Joan of Arc. That's what they based her off of. She has a vision, and she is taking on this quest to free the world against the oppressors or what have you, though she's part of the system, and she might be delusional, which I like, but they don't give you that. Which is, I think, the biggest problem with the entire movie. You could get into so many existential concepts. Like you could do a Battlestar Galactica thing.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, there's a lot of philosophy that's underlying, but they gloss over it for the action set piece.
SPEAKER_01:Or they don't mention it, and then you only find out later in interviews they meant to do that. And you're like, well, that doesn't help me.
SPEAKER_02:What are you talking about? The writer's headcanon doesn't matter unless it's on the screen.
SPEAKER_01:Right, exactly. It's interesting too that um we had talked about how like you You don't do the de-aging thing, how to do the de-aging thing well or not? So Clue's right hand man, Rinsler, is this unseen, you know, like badass sort of almost automaton who spoiler alert, for anybody who hasn't seen it, if you don't want to hear, just skip ahead. Why did you click on this? Because we were talking about well, you know what I mean.
SPEAKER_02:These films.
SPEAKER_01:So Rinsler is Tron.
SPEAKER_02:Yes. He's like a brainwashed Tron.
SPEAKER_01:Right. Which is great. The whole movie, you're watching it, and then at one point you're like, hey, wait, where's Tron? And then they're like, oh shit, that's Tron. I didn't see it coming at first, but now it's all pretty obvious, but Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:You didn't necessarily need that because he talked about that he'd made his own new world on the grid.
SPEAKER_01:So Right, so it didn't have to be Tron, right? Yeah. Right. But it is a nice addition. You would think he would have included Tron. So it does make sense, I guess. He goes from Storm Shadow to Snake Eyes, and you never have to see his face.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. Yeah, he does that when he uh he falls into the water. Yes. But again, what is what is water in this digital? I mean, there's with Tron and Tron Legacy, you just kind of wave a lot of those questions away because you're gonna work yourself into a tizzy trying to figure out how this all works. Doesn't matter. Just dig on the vibes, dig on the look because it looks really cool. The costuming, the sets, the the design, not all of the CGI, but a lot of the CGI, like on their light cycles or their oh hell yeah, uh floating ships and stuff like that. It looks really good, but don't get too hung up on how this works or what Flynn's powers are, or you know, uh where Korra comes from, or you know, a lot of these things they don't fully make sense. You just you just get along for the ride. And sometimes, I mean, you're here for a big budget sci-fi uh spectacle, and that's what you get. I know this came out in 3D, and a lot of people have said this is along with Avatar, this is one of the few films that actually like work in 3D. I didn't see it in 3D, so I don't I don't know.
SPEAKER_01:It was really cool in 3D, actually. The thing is, and we're gonna probably touch on this a little bit later too in our summation, but I realized watching Tron Uprising earlier and thinking about our first episode. I was like, okay, so this is not sci-fi. This is fantasy. That's why you don't have explanations for these things. I think people want there to be explanations for these things, and that's why we keep struggling with it. You don't need Metaclorians, all right? No, exactly. Just let it let it be. Even more than Star Wars, which just the only thing about Star Wars that people think of sci-fi is because it's set in space.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it's got spaceships and laser blasters.
SPEAKER_01:This is about computers and lasers and video games. Should be sci-fi. It's not. If you understand that this is not science fiction, that it is fantasy, things start making more sense. Or at least are swallowable. Yeah. Why is the world structured this way, especially if they're just exe programs that are being executed? Like, how does this even fucking work? So that having been said, um, I still feel like there were so many themes that they threw down here. Visually, Tron Legacy, it's this immersive world in a way that is awe-inspiring. It's like it's not quite, you know, Denny Villanoove's Dune, but it's like not that far off. They create a world that you believe, you know, you're there, and it's dark, which is also an interesting thing that they went from white uniforms or white costumes to black costumes when Clue took over, which I think is a pretty obvious fascism thing. And also into the Alexander the Great thing slash Caesar thing, he he brought back the games as bread and circuses. That's kind of a big obvious tell as to what kind of character and what kind of story they're telling.
SPEAKER_02:Here's a basic question if you're trying to figure this out. These other programs are watching the games, but what do they do otherwise? Do they go to the jobs? Do they eat food? We see them drink drinks.
SPEAKER_01:There's a bar! I think the only way you can get around even the strange plot hole conceits of the first movie is by recognizing that this is a different universe that Flint has created. This isn't Tron, the game. This is a pocket universe. Okay, great. Well then give me those rules. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:If we're watching Jumanji, we're not like, well, how does the magic of this board game get you know characters from here to there? It doesn't matter. It's a fantasy adventure. It doesn't matter.
SPEAKER_01:I think that is one of the reasons that Tron is a not all that successful commercially, and B something that everyone wants to be successful commercially, is because it feels like sci-fi, it touches on these things that are real, that are current, but doesn't go far enough to explain itself or to justify itself. And I think that's the biggest fucking drawback of the whole thing. But anyway, so we should go uh from Tron Legacy. By the way, Tron Legacy, if you want to know the trunk plot of Tron Legacy, watch the 2013 Godzilla. It's the same fucking plot. So think about it. Think about it, think, think about it. Father fucks up, disappears, son goes to look for him, son gets caught up in the whole Shabazz, and then has to help solve the day. That's the plot of Godzilla, that's the plot of Tron Legacy. Both of which could have been fixed relatively easily.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, with some like cult followings, just like the first Tron, Tron Legacy didn't do well at the box office, but as the years went by, fans of the idea of Tron, people getting into Tron via Legacy, seeing, oh, this is cool, it's a cool world, it looks cool. I'm into this. It prompted an undercurrent of thought they were gonna do a third one not long after, but because it did do well enough, that got canned. 15 years later.
SPEAKER_01:Wait, before that, we have Tron Uprising, which was a show on Disney. Give me Tron Uprising in a nutshell. Tron Uprising goes out of its way to try and fill in the gaps that Tron Legacy doesn't do. It only lasted for one season, but it fleshes out the world. They show that Clue has become a dictator and how that's changed the universe, and how he's clamped down, how he's basically become the new Master Control. Tron had been left for dead, Clue had defeated Tron in gladiatorial combat, Tron lost his memory, and that's how he was able to be reprogrammed as Rezler. And then they start doing a Spartacus thing. There's like another random program who sees the injustice in this world and then takes it upon himself to become the mantle of Tron.
SPEAKER_00:Hmm.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. He leads a rebellion against the authoritarian regime. That's the long and short of it. And they have a lot of like interesting stuff in it. Lance Henrickson is in it, Box Lightner, Elijah Wood is a voice actor, Nate Cordry, Mandy Moore. I mean, there's there's a bunch of fucking actors in it. Adam Horowitz was a producer at one point. It's interesting. Oh, Paul Rubens. Oh wow, that's great. And Trisha Helford, that's hilarious. It really does try to flesh out the world that they only give you in exposition intron legacy, which I appreciate because there's just so much left on the table. It still falls short because of the weird things that we don't understand. I mean, they go into stuff like there's an isometric algorithm war that's a rebellion against against Clue, and that's one of the reasons this became even more militaristic. That kind of thing. I did not dislike it, and as a companion piece to Tron Legacy, makes Tron Legacy better. But then Yes.
SPEAKER_02:Then 15 years after Tron Legacy, they make Tron Ares. Which just came out a few weeks ago. It just came out, which is why we're we're doing this. We're all Tronified. We both just recently saw Tron Ares, and we thought we'd do a whole Tron spiel because we saw Tron Ares is coming out. We saw Tron Ares do poorly. We both eventually saw it ourselves. The idea of this episode, the Genesis, was why do they keep making these Tron movies? If they do poorly all the time. They do so poorly. They have like these huge gaps of time where anybody who was into Tron, by the time the next one comes out, I can't imagine they're like clamoring for another one. None of these are like really good movies. Now they're they're cool, they might be interesting, they have interesting ideas and and uh visual style that is enticing, but none of them are good movies, which would prompt more films. So why do they keep making these? And I think we'll we'll get yeah, we'll answer that question at the end of this. But let's let's get a little the sinker teeth a little bit into Tron Aries. We're we won't go super deep. The movie doesn't go super deep, so it doesn't it's it's we're gonna go about as deep as as the film goes. So Tron Legacy set up what happened with Flynn and the world and the companies, etc. etc., and brings a program which was like an AI spawned program of its own accord, kind of like a a miracle Joan of Arc, you know, unique singular creature into the real world. With Tron Aries, they get rid of all of that. Maybe it happened. They mentioned that the events of Tron Legacy kind of happened in the opening newsreel footage, similar to the way that they set up what happened in the the time span between Tron and Tron Legacy and the Tron Legacy film. But essentially, none of that mattered. They're not touching on any of that other than digital version of Flynn existing. They want to hearken back to the original Tron. They want to hit that nostalgia button more than the 15 years ago nostalgia from Legacy. But then Jesus. Yeah, you have two big companies, they are competing. A lot of it's uh this corporate back and forth, as if any of us really give a shit about these two multi-billion dollar corporations battling it out. It uh it it reminded me of Phantom Menace. I don't give a shit about trade agreements, uh space embargoes. It's like, what are you doing? You do in Dune, it's just how you do it. Well, yeah, you can do it well. Yeah, this doesn't. No, neither of them do. So in this, you have EndCom still, and there's the Dillinger systems, which is harking back to the Dillinger character who is being controlled by Master Control in the original Tron. Um, like his grandson is now the head of this, and it's this tech bro, this tattoos and his vape pen, who is trying to find the the secrets of NCOM, who's making a new I think they have a new Tron video game that's dropping. I don't know why it's they focus on it like it's the second coming of Christ, who really cares. Nobody's having a shut down the world watch party. But in this world, the NCOM heads, it was like these two sisters, and one of the sisters is dead, and the other sister is looking for her work because what she was working on was like trying to make the world a better place by the future of 3D printing, I think is the concept here.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, fabrication at least.
SPEAKER_02:So the way that we would use the laser in Tron and Tron Legacy to digitize a human and put them into the digital space. What if we kind of reverse-engineered that and used a similar laser technology to create digital representations into the real world that functioned like real, for a better lack of better word, flesh and blood?
SPEAKER_01:Soldiers and equipment.
SPEAKER_02:Soldiers and equipment, but the NCOM woman, she's trying to create a tree that grows fruit. That's what she's trying to do. And we see Dillinger is using a similar technology, but to make disposable super soldiers and super military equipment. In the process of doing both of these things, they are having an issue that they're coming at. There is a time barrier. Right. These things only last for so long, like 20 some minutes. I don't even give a shit how long it was. It doesn't really matter. No, beside the point. She is searching for the source code to making things stay corporeal forever. The infinite code to make things indefinite. So once you create something with your magic laser, it's real in perpetuity. He would like the same thing, but to use for his military programs that he's trying to sell to military investors. So he's trying to do corporate espionage to find what she might know as she is searching for the same thing. In the process of doing this, Dillinger has created Ares. Ares is is like Kron, the program Tron, the super soldier general of his digital army. He makes Aries quote unquote master control. Um, even though in this version he has a user interface, so you see him typing, and it is saying those things in the digital space to Ares.
SPEAKER_01:Well, they do that in the first one, kind of.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, the same way in the first one. Again, it's all harking back to things that happened in the first one. Now, you might question what is this digital space that they have created? Because it's not Flynn's world and it's not the original Tron world, it's its own space, but yet it functions and has the same layout as Flynn's digital world that he made. That again, does anybody else know about that world? I don't are we we're not led to believe that Flynn's son brought anybody else in there. Is he even mentioned? So nobody else would have access to that. He is mentioned in like that news reel photos, like Flynn's son, who disappeared for X period of time and they say he was gone, but they do not care. Essentially, you can function as if legacy didn't happen.
SPEAKER_01:Did you build on that if you were going to do this? Because at least that brought something new to the table. Don't reinvent the wheel.
SPEAKER_02:As Jesse Wigatow, who is the writer for Ares, when he was questioned about that, he said, obviously Jeff Bridgett's character Flynn is essential, but some of the rest of it didn't necessarily carry as much weight. So there was an effort to take it in a new direction. I think to your point, we have reckoned with and wisely, and maybe should have considered this a little bit earlier, what some of the expectations would be from the audience going into this movie, not knowing where is Sam Flynn, the Garrett Hudlin character, where is Quora, the Olivia Wilde character? Aren't those people that we paid money to come see this time out? There is an effort to bridge that in terms of context, but I think a choice is made. This is not a completely left turn, but it is moving in a different direction.
SPEAKER_01:And even just physically manifested in the fact that, like we had talked about in the first one, by the time the movie hit screens, the good guys glowed blue and the bad guys glowed orange in both of those first films, and now they glow red. They still look like Tron characters from Tron Legacy.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, that's pointed, because when I wrap this all up, that becomes more pronounced. Dillinger sends Ares, again, he can make these characters real for a small period of time to go find Greteli's character, the head of NCOM, because he thinks that she has cracked the code to making things real permanently. So he is going to go, they're trying to track her down. Light cycles are brought into the real space as well, and they function the same way. This is where I think you become major problematic elements. Big time. When humans go into the digital world, it's a fantasy land. We are in fantasy, those fantasy rules apply, and we take those with a grain of salt. When you take fantasy rules and bring them into the real world, it raises further questions. How do light cycles work? The beam of light energy that comes out that glows but also can slice through anything. How does that work?
SPEAKER_01:The light cycle thing doesn't make any sense at all. I knew we were in trouble at the end of Tron Legacy when Olivia Wilde comes into the real world. I remember even seeing that in the theater being like, well, this is fucked now. Because how does that work? And now we have the movie to show that it doesn't.
SPEAKER_02:I should probably get through what happens to Tron Ares before we like break that down. Because I think you could do some things with that of like her biology. If you can send someone digitally into the world, fix them, and then bring them into the real space again, could you take away cancer? Could you repair limbs? I think that the secret to possibly living forever or changing genetic things. There's a lot you could do with a digital being churning flesh and blood could have meaning and long-term benefit to humanity. But obviously, they get rid of legacy kind of canonically, and they're doing their own story, which again has its own possible benefits. Again, it's trying to find this source code for the corporeality being indefinite. Ares is trying to get her. She has this drive, but when he gets there, kind of on a dime, he's kind of like, oh, wait, hmm. Maybe I am becoming empathetic. And maybe I shouldn't follow. Are we the baddies? Yeah. It's like maybe I shouldn't follow my user's commands. Yada yada yada. He ends up pairing with her on the next time he is made real because he wants to be a real boy. And she has the way of making that happen. So if he can protect her, then he can become a real person and live in the real world. This is at some point she gets this is another thing. So they have a laser that they charge up, they have it on a helicopter and shoot her with it. Somehow that brings her into that digital space. But is that digital space within the laser? Is that digital space connected to like a Wi-Fi network? A mainframe. How is she getting there? Uh but what is what does that mean?
SPEAKER_01:That haven't we been asking this exact question for all of these movies?
SPEAKER_02:Yes, we have. But before now it didn't mean as much because everything was set essentially in this one room. Yeah. You had this one room with this one laser that sent you to this one place. Kind of. But that rule has been abandoned now. Now you have one digital things becoming real in our space, functioning with their own physical non-limitations. And two, we have an interconnectedness now that definitely didn't happen. Tron was around in Tron legacy, but they made a point not to bring that into effect. But when you make new lasers that are traveling wirelessly to then bring someone into this digital space that may or may not be Flynn's digital space, the grid, I have questions. Again, it's fantasyland, so that's not the biggest questions we have going on. You kind of roll with it, but it doesn't make as much sense. You're kind of breaking your own internal logical rules that you've set up through two films of this theoretical franchise. Ares helps her grid out with the promise that again she will help make him uh a real boy, like in Tron Legacy, and in the Tron, there is a beam of light that they have to get to that will suck them up into the real world, and then she will be re-digitized with a laser, and we see that happen, at least, as opposed to what we don't see in Tron Legacy. We do see that their laser comes online unprompted, and it creates Ares and the Greta Lee character into the real space. I have questions about how this particle laser makes her perfectly as she was, how it can do all that. Uh the story that's inside. Let's get to the end. The second in command Ares is put in control. She is given master control, so now she has super fu. Her kung fu is on the level of Ares now. She goes to like hunt down Ares, and yeah, she can like make flying ships, and and as Ares is as they're trying to make Ares into a real boy, there's a fight, and blah blah blah. They bring in the tank ships to uh hunt them down, which in a trailer or ideal that is cool. Don't know how that works in a logical sense, but in the end, Ares becomes a real boy. Dillinger kind of commits suicide in a way and digitizes himself, and Ares goes on to live his life as a person, as a human, and figure out what it is humans do and how to live. While Dillinger gets goes into digital space, but he has to find a place to go be. Somehow he goes into original Tron land and in doing so takes on the same look and get up of his grandfather, the digital version of his grandfather, in the old Tron outfit style. For some reason. Well, I think because he's in the original Tron, because they have to go find the Flynn, so they go to Tron Land. There's an old copy of Flynn in Tronland or something.
SPEAKER_01:Well, that would have been clue, you'd think, but that they discarded the events of Legacy, so he has magic powers, remember?
SPEAKER_02:So it's Flynn. Yeah. Again, they play fast and loose with all of this. The logic is all over the place with that fucking movie. It really is. And at the end, they have the power. ENCOM now has a monopoly on creating whatever they want, digital to corporeal, and they could theoretically rewrite reality. Have trees that grow fruit that people can eat. They could create anything. They could create giant uh robot wizards with huge dicks that just mow down whatever enemy they want. They could make anything. So one assumes that they're using this for the benefit of humanity, as the dead sister intended. And the CEO has had a uh a come to Jesus moment that she doesn't need to make money or build better video games, make the world a better place, and with power in her hand, she can do that. I think we're led to believe that Earth is on this path towards utopia, but we don't see any of that. No, it has jumped ahead. I don't know how many months or years, who knows? All we know is that there are now trees that are on top of buildings that grow oranges or whatever. Doesn't really matter. You are led, you are left with questions. I mean, you have a ton of questions, but off the top of my head, is Ares flesh and blood? Does he have the superpowers that he had as a program in human form? Because it appears that he does. Will he live forever? Does he have a predetermined end time? Will he grow old? How does DNA work? Uh I mean, I don't I don't understand anything. Does he have DNA? None of it makes sense. I mean, you you think the first thing you'd want to do is delve into some. I mean, these are like super scientists who are also corporate overlords. Do we need like a uh a world of Tony Stark's and Bruce Wayne's, you know, and and Lex Luther's? Um, they're taking like Elon Musk, and what if they could be actual comic book people? Because Elon Musk, he doesn't have any of those abilities.
SPEAKER_01:No, it's not even all that smart. He's not that smart.
SPEAKER_02:The thing is, he bought up these companies and he has actual smart people building rockets or programs for Bitcoin algorithms or whatever, right? He is not the one who is doing the hard science, turning lasers that make anything real. Okay, that's right. That's not how that works. But this is a a simple point-and-shoot method of making a fantasy adventure where the roles are flipped. Jumanji land comes to the real world and exists in the real world in perpetuity. I understand their idea, but it does not work, it only raises more questions. And when you're trying to tamp down these questions or like wrestle with these as a banal plot with characters that don't really matter and have muddy motivations in this generic action sequence, which doesn't the problem is like again, Tron looks a certain way because it's in Tronland. When you take Tron Land out, you are neutering what is bringing people to one, the fantasy of being in the digital space, but two, you're taking the look, the vibe of that digital space, and you're taking that away by putting in the real world. You're going cross-purposes at what brought people to the franchise in the first place. This film doesn't have much to say, it doesn't have interesting characters or an adventuresome voyage. It's just kind of there. Plus, you have the whole Jared Leto-ness of it all.
SPEAKER_01:Don't forget Hassan Minaj, who was also canceled, on top of putting Gillian Anderson in this movie to break my heart even further. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02:So uh we can see like some of the many reasons why this film did not do well at the box office, critically did quite poorly, and again puts the idea of a further Tron franchise legacy on the Rikes. But I guess they said this the say that this they said the same thing 28 years ago and then 15 years ago, and they just keep doing it.
SPEAKER_01:They keep doing it. One of the only bright spots about this, Daft Punk unfortunately did break up, so they weren't gonna do the music. The score is done by 9 inch nails, not Trent Reznor, 9 Inch Nails. It's the first score that they are credited with doing as 9-inch nails since the 1996 video game Quake. Oh, wow. And on top of that, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross were credited as producers. The score? Not that bad.
SPEAKER_02:I don't think it's as good as the Daft Punk one, but it's not. It's a solid follow-up effort to what is uh, I think in modern times, an iconic score in that Tron legacy. And at some point we'll have to talk about the original. I mean, it can't be in this podcast, we just don't have time, but no the original composer that's a whole uh She's great. She's she's she's amazing. Yeah. So we come to our our original thesis. Our end of line here. Yeah. Why do these Tron films keep getting made?
SPEAKER_01:Especially if none of them are all that good. You and I had talked sort of off mic before about how and nostalgia is a big part of it. And we re-evaluate those movies as we go along, either through the lens of nostalgia or we rewatch them and actually find something better in them that we didn't appreciate before, out of context, or or in your case, less good out of context. I still have basically the same problems with Tron Legacy than I did before. And Tron Ares just accentuates those exact problems. I think we're both on the same page about that. I think the entire crux of it is potential. The idea of Tron has potential to be something really cool and to say something real, and they keep trying to do so and never do it. They give you splashy special effects, and they give you explosions, and they give you big actors, and they give you good soundtracks, but they never actually do the thing that Tron is trying to do. Or we wish Tron was trying to do. And so we keep hoping there's gonna be a good one.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, but it's rare. It's rare that something that never had that much commercial success, that much critical praise, that it keeps getting bites at the apple. It just doesn't happen very often.
SPEAKER_01:No, not very often.
SPEAKER_02:I mean, you have you have plenty of film franchises where it's like most of the films are bad. But usually the first one is what drives people. I mean, Highlander I the first film's good. Pretty great. It's a good film. Yeah. The sequels not so much, but that that happens all the time.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, or it's one of those ones like Fast and the Furious, where the first movie is objectively kind of stupid, but then it figures out what it is based on its own sort of zeitgeist, and then people start enjoying it because it becomes self aware. Okay, that's a different approach. That's fine. This doesn't fit into either of those.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, it it's kind of a conundrum. Because there's a lot of films that are like on potential, you see why they get made, but on potential to make two sequels? It's odd. It is odd. And it's it's thought provoking, and there'll probably be more Tron.
SPEAKER_01:Oh yeah. They have two video games and a cartoon and three movies. That's a substantial franchise. And not only that, but how many fan video games out there are there out there of Tron? Uh like a billion. So somebody finds some enjoyment in the concept. I know a lot of people are gonna come at us for thinking like that we're Tron haters. No, that's kind of our point. We want a good Tron movie.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, we we like Tron. Yeah, I enjoy them. I enjoyed the original Tron. I even enjoyed the legacy when I re-watched it, you know, for this pod. I didn't like it as much as I did then, which I think speaks, at least to me, why they made Aries and while they'll probably make more of these. Yeah. In my vision of Tron, the memory is good. But sometimes you need to leave those memories where they are. That's why I don't go re-watch G.I. Joe or He-Man, because those are bad cartoons.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, they're terrible cartoons.
SPEAKER_02:But as a child, I enjoyed them and I can leave them where they are. And I know they don't need to be touched on again because they won't hold up. I didn't think Tron Legacy or Tron held up as much as I remember them at the time, but it's all vibes, coolness factor that I like the idea of Tron that keeps bringing back. My memory of the idea of those films is much better than the actual films that we get. And so I think there's a good chance in seven, twelve, twenty-eight years there'll be another Tron film because our lives have become more in touch with the digital realm. We're more involved in computers than we ever have been before. Questions of artificial intelligence, theological questions, moral questions about computers and artificial intelligence. When this all keeps pushing, the Zeitgeist says make more films like Tron, but those things aren't good, at least haven't been yet. And I wouldn't bank on another Tron sequel hitting that mark.
SPEAKER_01:Right. I think one thing we can blame, I think sort of hilariously, is Ronald Moore's reboot of Battlestar Galactica. Came out in 2003. It took a kind of a hokey cheesy franchise from the 70s and realized its potential. And I think we're all looking for that out of Tro. We want to see the Battlestar Galactica reboot of Tron. Where somebody finally takes it seriously and like gets it and makes it make sense. And I have to say, Battlestar is kind of a unicorn that was almost an impossible job that nobody else has seemed to be able to do with any reboot of any other old cheesy franchises of any kind, including like Kolchak and whatever they try and do. And so I think a lot of executives and a lot of people got hope after Battlestar worked so fucking well that they could do that with Tron, but then it fought itself because it wanted to be a direct sequel and not a reimagining, but then kind of a reimagining, but not really. And then they did the same process over again. And I think it's been a problem of hope. But when you have hope like that, you do get your Battlestar Galacticus. Maybe it's once in a generation, but sometimes you do. And I think we're just all waiting for that Battlestar moment for Tron.
SPEAKER_02:A movie comes out once every generation, so maybe next generation.
SPEAKER_01:That's true.
SPEAKER_02:Tron that's a good one. Maybe the next generation will be the next generation.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, one, why not? Yeah. Let's try something else. There's so many things you could say about the commentary about the digital world and the spaces we live in, and they never do it. They maybe hint at it sometimes. Just do the thing. Hey, you know what? Maybe it would be better as a series.
SPEAKER_02:I think if you wanted to get into some deeper thoughts, that is the way to do that. I think you'd have to. In a big sci-fi fantasy action pick, which is not necessarily what the first one was, but had parts two definitely was and three definitely was. That's what's bringing the ideally bringing people to theaters. You don't have time and space to properly flesh those out. I mean, maybe you could, but we haven't seen that thus far. And so I'm kind of like a prove it to me, then I'll believe you.
SPEAKER_01:Well, we're both from the show me state. So yeah. It's true. Well, unfortunately, they're not gonna show us anytime soon.
SPEAKER_02:So nope. Tron has come to the end for now. Perhaps if we're still potting in in 20 years, maybe uh we'll we'll do the next uh Tron sequel.
SPEAKER_01:But subscribe to our to our holopod in 20 years.
SPEAKER_02:On the grid. But until that time, gentle user, if you wouldn't mind liking, share, and subscribing on our grid. Ideally, you know, maybe giving Five Light Cycles. Again, light cycle is the coolest part of Tron.
SPEAKER_01:Uh, the discs are pretty cool in the sequel. I think the discs are pretty awesome.
SPEAKER_02:They're way cooler than they are in the first reimagined discs. Yeah. Yeah. Because like and then they reimagine even again. I did not like. No. If it meant something, then yeah, that's what I wanted. You know? If you have a disc and then you give a a trying triangular disc, does it give you superpowers? Do you function in a different way?
SPEAKER_01:What what is the purpose? Well, how does that fly better or cut through stuff better? Or I mean it doesn't make any sense. It's like it's like Kylo Wren's fucking stupid lightsaber with the the lightsaber hilt parts, and it's like, why? How does that help your lightsaber? How does that not hurt you more? Yeah, isn't it just gonna cut your hand off, which is like a big thing in Star Wars? What the fuck are you talking about?
SPEAKER_02:Everybody throws in hands. As Bodticker would say, give the man a hand.
SPEAKER_01:Just as one last punctuation to this, this is a review from the Wall Street Journal by Kyle Smith about Tron Ares. Quote Tron Ares is essentially a laser light show redo of the first two Terminator movies with Eve as Sarah Connor, minus the suspense, the scares, and the witty dialogue. I don't know if it's completely accurate, but he's also not wrong.
SPEAKER_02:No, there are definitely elements there. I don't I don't fully agree with that, but the tone I agree with. He's not wrong. And if you'd like to write a review via Apple Podcast, the greatest way for the kids to get heard and thus seen, that would be fantastic. Giving us five light cycles on the grid. Please do. Who knows what you'll hear next time on your favorite geek podcast. But until we all d-rez skip, what should they do?
SPEAKER_01:Well, they should probably make sure that they have their ID disks, their identity discs on them at all times. You will be checked. Make sure that you have partaken of the data stream to restore your energy. Make sure that you have, as a user, supported your local comic shops and retailers. That having been said, Jake and I would like to say Godspeed, Fair Wizards.
SPEAKER_02:End of line.
SPEAKER_03:Please go away.