VGA #1: Tron
Look it was either this or the Pac-Man TV show, and I have a lot of crap ahead of me, so I’d rather start by watching something interesting.
Tron, released on July 9th, 1982, is the brainchild of Steven Lisberger of furry classic Animalympics (1980). The film is an original story, so I'm going to have to forgo any adaptation discussion and measure it just as a movie. So uh, does anyone remember Tron?
To be fair, Tron is an important movie to talk about when it comes to games in their infancy. The story begins about 6 years prior in 1976, when Director Steven Lisberger saw a test real from Computer Firm MAGI, who would go on to work on animation for the first half of Tron in 1982, before going defunct in 1985 (Triple-I did the second half and went defunct in 2001.) Combined with the release of Pong, this gave Lisberger the idea for taking these two technological advancements and turning it into a movie.
The article I read (cited below), also points out the already profitable nature of the Video Game Industry, with Arcade Games making about $8 Billion on average compared to the $3 Billion made by film. That’s important to mention because this winds up being the inciting incident of the movie.
Kevin Flynn, played by a young and hunky Jeff Bridges, is the owner of Flynn’s arcade and former employee of Encom. Three years before the film, Flynn was making Video Games for Encom, including their bestselling “Space Paranoids”, only for the current Senior Executive Vice President Ed Dillenger to steal all credit for the game, fire Flynn and rise in the ranks. Flynn, with no royalties to speak of, can only collect scraps from his Arcade with Dillenger making money hand over fist. Now Flynn wants to hack Encom's system and get proof that he made the games.
“Hey, I thought this was a sci-fi fantasy type thing, not a documentary”
Of course, the bulk of the movie takes place in the digital world of Encom’s system. In fact the movie wastes no time, as not even a minute in we get the first animated lightcycle race, with the first character being the Program Sark, played by David Warner, who also plays Dillenger and the Master Control Program.
How you feel about this movie really depends on how charmed you are by the effects. They are primitive, but the movie does the smart thing and leans into the artifice of it all, not too dissimilarly to how Pixar would later make Toy Story because the CGI of the time didn’t look right for people but fit well on plastic figures. That is to say, the biggest criticism for bad CGI, that it “looks like a video game”, is sidestepped by just being set in a video game.
To expound, a lesser movie may try and make the digital world look “real” in a sense. That once the “real” people cross the veil, they arrive in a fantastical world that is still aesthetically indistinguishable from their own. Some examples that come to mind are the Jumanji sequels or The Minecraft Movie, which isn’t necessarily bad, but when those movies have rough looking effects or dip into the uncanny valley, it can be distracting.
In Tron, the artifice is the point, so paradoxically it looking kinda wonky makes it feels more real. To put it another way, it doesn’t look “good” but since everything is aesthetically the same, it feels right. I especially like how the Programs are animated, with their light up suits and monochrome skin making them feel more at home against the CG backdrops then if they were just human skinned in normal clothes.
To speak of the action itself, it’s surprisingly weighty, helped by a really accurate soundscape that captures the arcade setting. It probably helps that since the characters are physical actors, they still carry the weight of people running and jumping, falling down and battling one another. Again, the seamless aesthetic brings it all together.
Narratively, the thing I appreciated most was that the story doesn’t waste our time. It is a breezy 1 Hour and 36 Minutes, and they don’t spend that time expositing or having Flynn going “this fake, just a dream!” Instead he realizes what's going on, hooks up with the Program Tron, follows his lead and that’s the plot. There isn’t even a “I die in the game, I die in real life” moment, because there's just no time for that.
What's a Program? The humanoid representation of a computer Program or Function. What’s a User? A Human who makes or works said Program or Function. We get one extended scene at the start of Flynn explaining why he wants to hack into Encom’s system, and all other worldbuilding is just repeating the same concepts till understood. I was afraid with how fast it started I would miss key details, but it keeps things simple. It does have a very abrupt ending, but is nonetheless charming in how much of a fairy tale ending it is.
That said, the movie does take its time for characterization, all done sincerely and with proper gravitas. The only comic relief is Flynn, who being a goober in the real world, is still one in the digital world. In a way he fits a sort of C-3PO role, being the character we meet before the actual hero and is out of his depth in trying to navigate things.
Tron doesn’t show up for about 40 minutes, and while you can say he’s a bit bland compared to Flynn, the narrative gives him enough gravitas to work. Tron receiving the information needed by holding up his glowing frisbee so his User, Alan, can download the information needed to beat cylinder head satan is treated with the same reverence and grandeur as Conan finding the Atlantean king and taking his sword. It feels mythical in what amounts to an Anti-Virus going after a bad program.
An interesting thing this movie does is in making the Programs resemble their Users, giving it this Wizard of Oz feel of lining up characters with their real world counterparts. Some are obvious, with Tron and Yori both being played by the same actors as Alan and Lora (Bruce Boxleitner and Cindy Morgan respectively). But it took me a minute to notice that Sark was the same as Dillinger, and that Dumont was also Dr. Gibbs. You can tell just by looking at a Program who their maker was, and see how their personalities match or are unlike said User.
This leads to a recurring theme of belief in the User, which the MCP wants to beat out of the Programs he captures. The MCP has a god complex that he wants to extend to the real world, seeking to take over the Pentagon and Kremlin to run things more "efficiently." As such, in its eyes, belief in the User can only hinder a Program. That and Programs can’t really serve two gods.
In turn, the Program's beliefs revolve around the idea that User’s, as the creators of Programs and the deciders of said Programs will do, must live extremely planned lives. Flynn laughs this off, explaining to Tron and Yori that Programs and Users both work the same way: You just do what it looks like you're supposed to be doing, no matter how crazy it is.
Speaking from experience, that sounds like a very accurate description of software. Sometimes a broken thing just works, and unless you have some knowledge of how the machines work it can seem like a living thing figuring out a problem. Sometimes you just gotta reboot your PC and everybody in the thing gets a jolt to the system, I don’t how the science works, might as be Programs in there.
Tron is unfazed by Flynn’s, merely considering it an intriguing development in his understanding of the Users. To Programs, service to the User is their ultimate guiding function, but there are hints throughout that there is a desire for this to be reciprocated. Ram, one of the first characters we met, holds out hope for the Users to rescue them from the MCP. Later, when critically wounded, he realizes that Flynn is a User and though dying, he can do so peacefully. In the end, Flynn gave him hope that the Programs weren’t alone in this fight.
Like a lot of things, the movie breezes past the implications of Programs being sentient, but if I take the movie sincerely, then they are. These are people within a different reality who can live and die like “real” people. No jokes about respawning or copying one’s code or whatever, dead is dead and it makes the stakes and drama feel real. Ram wasn’t just some rando hanging around, but a lasting member of the cast who winds up being a casualty.
If I had to say there was a riding theme for the movie it’s that our relationship to technology is symbiotic. Neither Tron nor Flynn could save the day, but together with both their unique natures, they were able to defeat the MCP. It’s a pretty prescient story, that both warns of letting technology think for us, but also of the benefits of said technology. Like any machine, if you treat it right it will treat you right in return.
Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by Tron. It’s a charming artifact for this period of time, both for the history of gaming and the burgeoning CGI industry. Likable characters, a compelling world, doesn’t dawdle without skimping on making good drama, and is just one of those movies I can honestly say “You couldn’t make this today.”
When talking about legacy, this is one with a long shadow.
Given the profitability of gaming at the time, it was only prudent to make a Video Game tie-in with the film, thus we got Tron for arcades in August of 1982. A Video Game, based on a Movie, based on the concept of Video games. More miraculously, given that this was a year before the 1983 Video Game Crash, it was well received and is thought to have brought in about $30-45 Million Dollars in revenue by 1983.
But sadly, the film itself didn’t make the splash that Disney needed at the time. This was The Disney Dark age, and were still 7 years out from The Little Mermaid being released, so any plans for a sequel would have to be shelved. To be clear, the film did not bomb, but it only made $50 Million on a $17 Million budget, which was seen as disappointing at the time.
But from Video Games it rose, so from Video Games it would live on. In 2003, 21 years after the original, a Sequel was made in the form of “Tron 2.0” by Monolith Productions and follows the son of Alan Bradley from the first movie. It got good to middling reviews, but considering I only heard about it while doing research here, it wasn’t exactly the “Legacy” they were looking for.
Two years later in 2005, it got another game appearance in Kingdom Hearts 2’s “Space Paranoids” world, and this was probably the younger generation's introduction to Tron. Having not played it though, all I can say is that when I see people posting live action movies showing up in Kingdom Hearts, it’s hardly ever Tron and is usually Pirates of The Caribbean.
Finally, 28 years after the first film's release, a proper sequel was released in 2010 titled “Tron: Legacy”, but that’s for another day.
For now I just want to say that despite never being a heavy hitter, Tron has never left public consciousness. Tron is just one of those movies you hear about even if no one has seen it, and has survived in parody and reference, and in the form of Jay Maynard, also known as “Tron Guy.”
My big take away is that knowing the caliber of Video Game movies i’m going to be watching, this is probably going to be the best thing I watch for a while. It’s not complicated, but it at least has a perspective that it wants to explore. It has ideas, and is trying to push new technology, and I respect it for that if nothing else.
So until next time, I’ll see you on the corner.
“SPECIAL EFFECTS ARE REVOLUTIONIZING FILM.” New York Times, 4 July 1982, www.nytimes.com/1982/07/04/movies/special-effects-are-revolutionizing-film.html.