No, Honey, It's a Sequel

The "honey" in the title of this post is not my wife, but her youngest sister, Stephanie, who thought the film Tron: Legacy was some fancy original computer film. I guess you can't blame her, since she was born eight years after the original came out, in 1982.

Disney funded the original because it was trying to harness the new phenomena of the Summer Blockbuster. 1982 was a great year for movie geeks, but what made it such a great year--besides Tron, the world got ET, Blade Runner, and The Wrath of Khan--made the bizarre blueish Disney film suffer at the box office.

I showed Stephanie the original Tron preview on YouTube, and she got excited when they showed a quick scene with the light cycles, adding a perky ,"That's on my phone!" Sure enough, she has a video game on her iPhone that is the exact light-cycle game from Tron. I played for a while, and it was fun.

It's probably not unfair to ask why the cinema event of the holiday season is a $170 million sequel to a twenty-eight year old film that most people agree wasn't that great?

The answer is that Tron did what very few science fiction movies ever do: it successfully predicted the future. The story about trying to find exonerating evidence inside a memory bank was original at the time, but has been obscured by the powder-white-on-blue memories. The metaphor that inside a computer you, or a piece of you, could exist and be active on a certain level has not only endured, but come to pass.

When the honchos got together to make the sequel, they decided to do a test like had been done with the first installment. In the early '80s the test "preview" they produced was for selling their idea--it had a similar look to what they wanted to do for the whole movie. Since they'd decided that any sequel would have to have three things: 1) Jeff Bridges; 2) light cycles; 3) to not look like any other movie before it, they figured they'd need all three things in their test.

They'd been working with their story and universe long enough to know how it would look, and they knew it would have light cycles, but they still hadn't gotten Jeff Bridges aboard. They planned a meeting with him at his property in California, knowing that he if he turned them down the project was finished. They weren't sure how he would feel about basically a B-move from before he was famous. He was, after all, going on to win the Oscar for Crazy Heart.

In Bridges living room they started to pitch, "Okay, so the old you is the good-guy, and the young version of you is the villain, and you have a son who--" and at this point the Dude got up from his spot on the couch, excused himself, and left the room a little tense. He returned with the helmet he wore from the first film. They spent the rest of the time walking around his property taking pictures with everyone wearing the helmet. He was definitely in.

When they first showed the test at the (big, original) Comic Con (in San Diego), they hadn't actually been given the green-light to make the movie. They thought that if the reaction was positive enough, there'd be no going back. The crowd cheered upon seeing Jeff Bridges, both young and old, in that test, and the rest is history.

Possibly only in circles of old-school digital film effect gurus can the specter of Tron be fully remembered. Computer rendering in films, for characters, effects, backgrounds, and sounds, was seen as a threat to actors, to traditional effects people, and to traditional animators. I don't think that's ever been gotten over, that fear. It seems like people have simply embraced the tool that is the computer.