Just Look at How Amazing the First “Tron” Was

I am yet to see “Tron: Legacy” (this week­end prob­a­bly) and my expec­ta­tions are not high. I fore­see the movie as being full of styl­ish eye-candy and doing fine with rudi­men­tary plot and aver­age act­ing. But I can­not wait any­way. After all, I have been long­ing for the sec­ond part in the fran­chise for almost twenty years. Yes, the orig­i­nal was released in 1982 but I did not see it until around 1990.

“Tron” was an excep­tional movie, both tech­ni­cally and visu­ally. The con­cept was formed dur­ing late ’70s and the story was brought to life through first years of the fol­low­ing decade. It was a con­se­quence of fas­ci­na­tion with the emer­gence of video games and the cyber­punk genre. Design-wise it was noth­ing less than spec­tac­u­lar, with ascetic, beau­ti­ful envi­ron­ments built of clean, neon-light edges and mono­chro­matic planes, rep­re­sent­ing the inside world of the ENCOM Corporation main­frame, a fic­tional super-computer set on world dom­i­na­tion. Using a smart mix­ture of live-acting, com­puter gen­er­ated and back­lit ani­ma­tion, even painted back­grounds, what movie fans were served with was absolutely unique and remains so even today.

In the fic­tional uni­verse of “Tron”, pieces of code lived their own lives, formed polit­i­cal fac­tions, loved, hated, feared and cre­ated a reli­gion wor­ship­ing real world users, or their cre­ators, as gods. The set­ting was so alive it made pro­grams look romantic. It really made you think twice before remov­ing a pro­gram from your floppy disc or mag­netic tape.

If you have not seen the movie (you might have been too young or just not inter­ested) and do not know what you have missed, look at the pic­tures below. Remember the time these scenes were shot – almost thirty years ago. Do not for­get to check the Light Cycles, too. They were so unbe­liev­ably cool to look at it made you want to hop into one of them right away.