 Tron's light-cycle race is one of the movie's best action segments. In it, players must race each other around a track, trying to force opponents to crash into walls or trails left by the cycles. Tron is a 1982 Walt Disney Productions science fiction movie starring Jeff Bridges as Kevin Flynn (and Clu), Bruce Boxleitner as Alan Bradley (and Tron) and Cindy Morgan as Lora (and Yori). David Warner plays the villain, Dillinger (and Sark, as well as the voice of the 'Master Control Program'). It was directed by Steven Lisberger. One of the first films to use computer graphics extensively, Tron has a distinctive visual style.
Plot
Flynn, a game programmer, is absorbed ("digitized") into a digital world tyrannically ruled by the "Master Control Program." In this world, programs are people whose faces look just like their creators; Flynn is initially mistaken for a program named "Clu" he had written. Flynn needs to find "Tron", a security program (created by another programmer, Alan) which can help him fight against the despotic MCP to free his company's mainframe and escape to the real world. Along the way he has to participate in several gladiatorial action games including "Light Cycles" and a kind of Jai-Alai.
The "Light Cycles" game is similar to an old computer game sometimes known as "Surround." The players are in constant motion on a playfield, creating a wall behind them as they move. If a player hits a wall either by accident or by having no more room to move, he is out of the game, and the last player wins. Tron depicts this game as being played by the humanoid programs in futuristic two-wheeled vehicles that resemble motorcycles which create walls of colored light. Countless versions of this game have been created since the release of the movie.
Technical
Tron was one of the first movies to use long computer generated sequences. About thirty minutes of computer generated animation (blended with the filmed characters) were used. Though the movie has been criticized for woodenness of acting and -- perhaps unjustly -- incoherence of plot, the movie is celebrated as a milestone of computer animation.
To be able to create the film, Disney acquired the Super Foonly F-1, the fastest PDP-10 ever made (and there was only one).
The film, however, contains less computer-generated imagery than is generally supposed: many of the effects that look like computer graphics were created using traditional optical effects. In a technique known as "backlit animation," the live action scenes inside the computer world were filmed in black-and-white, printed on large-format high-contrast film, then colorized with traditional photographic and rotoscopic techniques to give them a "technological" feel. The process was immensely labor-intensive, and would never be repeated for another feature film; with multiple layers of high-contrast large-format positives and negatives, it required truckloads of sheet film, and a workload greater than even that of a conventional cel-animated feature.
Legacy
Although the film was initially unsuccessful, the movie inspired several popular video games. The Tron arcade game earned more than the film's first release and made it a cult favorite. Disneyland featured the Tron SuperSpeed Tunnel in its PeopleMover attraction.
Tron 2.0, a computer game sequel, was released on August 25, 2003. In this first person shooter game, the player takes the part of Alan Bradley's son Jet, who is pulled into the computer world to fight a computer virus.
On January 13 2005, Walt Disney Pictures announced a remake of Tron, with more emphasis on the Internet.
Music
The background music for Tron was written by Wendy Carlos, who is most well-known for her Switched On Bach album. Additional music was provided by the band Journey.
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