REACTING to *Tron (1982)* THIS IS SO TRIPPY!!! (First Time Watching) Sci-fi Movies

[@whitenoisereacts]

What is your favorite 80s sc-fi movie??

[@martinbraun1211]

All of "Star Trek" 🖖😌

[@iceman7757]

deez nuts

[@peterschmidt4348]

Back to the Future

[@Emily-tb1cp]

Star Trek 2

[@EChacon]

Back to the Future and Tron.

[@gumbyx84]

Please watch a documentary on the making of Tron. It's so much more than what you think it is. This was not a "cheap" movie. This was not "easy".

[@bidwell13]

Especially when this was done with a computer that had 2mb of memory and only 330mb of storage. It’s sad it didn’t do too well in the theaters.

[@NewTypeZero0]

And so much of it was practical...

[@orcdoc]

The fact that the CGI was done with just coding rather than a graphical interface just hurts my brain. Not being able to see any issues until the shoots were fully rendered, that would cause far too much anxiety 😂

[@someonesane]

@@orcdoc - Right? They're completely taking for granted the fact that this movie was made at time when they didn't have programs doing all the calculations for them (or even computers capable of handling them). They had to "animate" by jotting down vertex point locations and had to wait minutes to get a single frame rendered.

[@lanolinlight]

Not to mention all the hand-painted and composited rotoscope animation. And, yes, an animator in early CG animation days was as much a programmer, coder and engineer as artist. The friendly user interfaces and computer power that these kids take for granted did not exist.

[@conflictstar]

Without Tron, there is no Jurassic Park, no Photoshop, no Pixar. You can draw a direct line from the people who worked on this film to all of those other things.

[@mnomadvfx]

That's a huge leap and then some. It's not like there were already stuff in the works for a decade in the realm of CG prior to this. TRON was the first film to make a major use of CGI VFX, but it wasn't the first film to use it full stop by any measure.

[@joegreene7619]

@@mnomadvfx If you look at the specific people that worked on TRON, they're literally the ones that did things like cofound Pixar. It's not a leap when it's the exact people working on TRON that started the companies that did most of the major innovation in CGI over the next decade+.

[@EChacon]

Even Chris Wedge and a couple animators who worked on _TRON_ also later founded Blue Sky Studios.

[@myphone4590]

Tron underperforming at the box office is the reason industrial light and magic sold its digital effects arm, because George Lucas saw no future in computer graphics. Lucas sold it to Steve Jobs who paid him using the money he made selling his Apple stock as Sculley fired him (for pouring money on the "failed" Macintosh at the expense of their bread and butter Apple II), and Jobs renamed it "Pixar". That is literally where Pixar came from.

[@nathancruz9172]

I love tron.

[@DanGamingFan2406]

Fun Fact: Back in 1982 (same year this movie was released), the Academy Awards refused to nominate _Tron_ for the Special Effects Awards Category due to movie makers using computers to create these effects. The Academy believed this was 'cheating'. In effect, they were 'disqualified'. Nowadays, CGI is used in almost every movie to a certain extent.

[@mnomadvfx]

Ye - this is just one more sad entry in the rather dark history of the Academy among many.

[@blueroninstudios]

Yeah crazy right? And then ten years later JURASSIC PARK CAME OUT and everybody was like "Holy crap, lets use CGI for everything! Meanwhile the guys who worked and salved over Tron were snubbed?! Injustice, I tell ya! They at least got their credit years later.

[@Guitcad1]

Yeah, apparently the unions freaked out like they always do when new technology arises. (To be clear, I still support unions.)

[@GamerSpartanFire]

@@blueroninstudios As i recall wasn't Jurassic Park 1, 2 and 3 famous for being practical effects rather than CGI?

[@aasamspb967]

@@GamerSpartanFire Jurassic Park have more CGI than you think. Just watch corridor crew breakdown of the T-Rex break out scene in the night (the rain scene).

[@hilarywilliams1909]

For programmers of the time, TRON was an abbreviation of Trace On. Which was a command to start logging/recording information about a program's execution.

[@PWN3GE]

However the filmmakers actually got the name from their working title: "Electronic Warriors" simply shortening it down to TRON

[@vilefly]

Sensing some Ti99/4a vibes here.

[@ghost7524]

@@vilefly And many other computers of the time. BASIC was one the main programing language used for teaching beginners programming. I had a Tandy Color Computer II, which came out the same year as the Ti99. I didn't get mine until 1985 and I didn't see TRON until after that. But it didn't surprise me that the name of the movie was also the name of a computer operation. I loved play the TRON arcade game.

[@motodork]

@@PWN3GEcorrect. Lisberger had no knowledge of the Trace On command when he made this film.

[@sinistan1002]

I used those in the very early 80's that was too my initial thought. But I have also myself heard simply a shortened form of electron i.e. the idea of quantum mechanics that down small enough is a separate universe itself

[@arieljaquez5444]

This reaction is what one can expect when reviewed by kids raised AFTER all the progress of computers have been made. I am 50, and was raised during revolutionary technology progression. This movie inspired video games, technology, and many of the things that are commonplace now.

[@atty61]

Kids can't be blamed for being young, and I found their comments interesting although at times they were totally missing the point. The film needs to be watched more than once to be understood.

[@Vyperus69]

I love how they didn't even have a reaction to the line about future computers thinking and future humans not thinking. Especially as that's what's been happening in recent years, after all now is the future when looking at it from 1982.

[@SJHFoto]

@@atty61 I don't "blame" them for being young, but it really seems like young ones today can not understand the way the world was before they were born. I'm a Gen Xer, and I read Asimov, Heinlein, Wells, and Verne as a kid. I understood that their world was generations before mine and did not have the same knowledge (Asimov's foundation trilogy used "atomics" as the be-all of any technology for instance). Youth today can't do that. I read the Hardy Boys to some young ones, and they couldn't grasp that they had no cell phone or GPS to use

[@danifeatherby]

I'm 46, and same! I get that they're young and don't have an understanding of what the world was like before their level of technology, but we grew up at a much more technologically advanced time than the 30s and 40s and '50s, but I enjoyed movies from those times, still do, and had little difficulty divorcing myself from my modern reality to take in the reality of the day. I think part of the problem is that the younger generation has gotten, not entirely to their fault, spoiled and lazy when it comes to having to understand things from before their generation.

[@SJHFoto]

@@danifeatherby I agree. That's what I said too-I guess the internet age really set a line of demarcation for awareness of what came before.

[@blueroninstudios]

Kind of a watershed moment for computer graphics in the 80s. Computing at that time had to be written on paper and planned out, coded, it took days or weeks to render one frame which is why the movie took a lot longer to animate than as if it were hand drawn traditionally - although some of the effects were hand drawn as well, which is realy amazing if you think about it, they were kind of blending every single technique they knew of that was possible at the time, and the art style was also very much ahead of its time as well. One massive credit goes to Syd Mead a visual futurist who came up with the design of Tron and Flynn's costume, the lightcycles, and a few other designs that are considered classic. The world the programs live and work in is called The Grid. As a child of the 80's both this and Star Wars were a few of my faveorite childhood memories of growing up in one of the BEST DECADES of films ever and a lot of ground was broke by this film and others years later.

[@joegreene7619]

Welcome to one of the most transformative movies of its time. It spawned arcade games, toy and costume sales, and quite a bit more that simply wasn't normal at that time. Throw in a really good sequel almost 30 years later and there's really nothing quite like it.

[@knightwolf3511]

Ricochet 🙃

[@BakeAFingerPie]

Not to forget, this movie also spawned... Tron Guy!

[@NewTypeZero0]

And CGI... in general.

[@dtwilight73]

Definitely looking forward to their video if they make a reaction for Legacy.

[@vilefly]

Arcade games were already in place in culture. This movie simply ran with the trend....or not so simply as the price tag illustrates. Not a fan of the sequel....it was a little weak in plot. I got too old. Could see everything coming.

[@EChacon]

I’m going to be real, since I was born in the mid-late 1990's and several others who were born in the mid-late 1990’s or early 2000's (unless a few of your parents or relatives did had a Tron Poster or VHS/DVD) we weren't familiar with the movie _Tron_ nor have we seen it, but when it became a world in _Kingdom Hearts II,_ most of us started watching the film for the first time and we became familiar with the movie and it's contributions to the Disney legacy so you can thank _Kingdom Hearts II_ for introducing mid-late 90’s and early 2000’s kids to _Tron._

[@ryank4955]

I was born in the mid-90s and was lucky to come across a copy of the VHS at my library, I rented it because the cover art looked cool and I was surprised to find a Disney movie I had never heard of. Imagine my surprise when a couple of months later I get Kingdom Hearts II and Tron is featured on the back cover!

[@shainewhite2781]

The first live action movie to use CGI! They filmed the movie in black and white, wuth the actors shot against a black velvet background, then the VFX artists were brought in to painstakingly paint in the costumes with rotoscoping animation

[@LordLOC]

Vertigo was the first film to use any CG at all (in 1958 no less) and then Westworld was the first film to have CG as a main part of the film/story, which was in 1973 if I remember right. And there are a few others either right before Tron came out, or right after Tron came out that used CG as well (some were filmed before Tron finished filming)

[@Buggins]

Except the special effects in westworld are generally not in fact computer generated. They used actual computers for all of 2 minutes to produce the pixelisation effect. Everything else is traditional work.

[@LordLOC]

@@Buggins It may not be what we consider computer graphics work, but it is still CG after all. Even if it's just for the aforementioned 2 minutes or so of the pixelated "vision" stuff.

[@mnomadvfx]

"The first live action movie to use CGI" No it wasn't - it seems like I keep seeing this comment repeated over and over, and it isn't correct at all. The first film (that I know of) that used 3D CGI for an effect was The Andromeda Strain (1971) (The Andromeda Strain was directed by a young Michael Crichton 19 years before the release of his most famous novel Jurassic Park) That's still 11 years before TRON was released - Westworld + Futureworld followed this with more CGI use during the 70s. It would be correct to say that TRON was the first feature to use 3D CGI for a significant fraction of the screen time though.

[@shainewhite2781]

Sorry, my mistake everyone, I'm sorry.

[@Zombiesnyder13]

I love a Disney movie that doesn't look like something done by Disney

[@ZERXERZANZIGER]

🤭 with ya 💯% 🥂

[@Martman5150]

The Black Hole.

[@_Althena]

Watch "The black Hole". Best Disney Movie.

[@Pendergasted]

I’m sure you’ve seen many but Touchstone Pictures would be a good source to check for more movies to see. This is disneys film studio where they would release titles that they didn’t want to release under the Disney name.

[@ghostsquirrel8739]

It’s because it wasn’t. Four different digital effects companies handled all the computer animation. Outside animators were also used to draw and ink some of the backgrounds.

[@flibber123]

To me, Tron is like The Matrix's grandfather. It's very similar, it's just that back then not as many people knew much about computers. This movie is arcade game focused, and that makes sense. Back then arcade games were already a big hit which made it easier for audiences to understand it. By 1999 the internet was a thing, so The Matrix could dump the arcade game aspect and bring in computer networks.

[@sntxrrr]

Five companies worked on the 15 minutes of CGI in this movie. For some sequences the Disney animators had to calculate all the coordinates of everything in the scene per frame on a calculator, write all the numbers down and fed-ex all the papers to the computer company. They would enter the numbers by hand and a week or so later the animators would receive a tape with the few seconds of animation. If there was something not okay they had to do it all over again. 3D animation software like we know it today just did not exist back then. And even though the story is wild, the movie showed something that was never seen before. But it wasn't as far fetched as you might think. Back then computer games, like pac man, were so primitive that they hired illustrators to draw game visuals for the packaging and marketing. So the idea of there being this virtual 3D world inside of the computer was very much alive back then.

[@gwendyp125]

I watched a documentary about the effects of this movie. Those guys were so talented and work so hard. Very impressive work

[@mnomadvfx]

Indeed. Looking back it seems like a vastly greater effort in both design and world building than the sequel which was a poor continuation after 28 years of waiting.

[@ssark7632]

I was 10 when I first watched this movie. The CG was so revolutionary for the time. I believe this was the first movie-length presentation that used CGI. Disney taking a risk. Just like Black Hole. They were making interesting choices.

[@mnomadvfx]

"I believe this was the first movie-length presentation that used CGI" *for a significant amount of screen time. It wasn't the first movie to use CGI though, and Wrath of Khan which came out the same year also used REYES based CGI to produce its Genesis demonstration video.

[@alucard624]

I miss the Disney of that era. Not everything was a hit but they were memorable for the most part.

[@mycroft16]

I really wish they had gone through with the remake of The Black Hole from the same guy that did Tron Legacy. Black Hole was a really cool movie that does NOT get enough play. Dark movie too.

[@cyberingcatgirls7069]

Ditto. After this movie came out pretty much all of my classmates were playing Tron at recess and fighting over who had to be Sark and the MCP. 😂

[@Gavrev]

@@mnomadvfx Love TRON! A great flick at the cinema. I believe The Black Hole was one of the first to involve CGI with the opening title sequence

[@heavycritic9554]

Fun fact: The program Crom, the compound interest program in the beginning (and who had to fight Flynn), is played by Peter Jurasik, who later went on to give an amazing performance as Londo Mollari in the show "Babylon 5". In that, he joined Bruce Boxleitner (Alan/TRON), who played John Sheridan in B5, starting from season 2. MCP has been revamped as "Moses" in "South Park".

[@DrewSwenson]

You are most certainly not a moonfaced assassin of joy!

[@xenocore01]

Wow, didn't think to look up that dude. That's Peter!! Freakin fantastic!!

[@TwilightLink77]

Plus Bruce reprise his role as Tron for Kingdom Hearts 2

[@chrism7395]

David Warner was also a guest star on B5 as Aldous Gajic (season 1 "Grail")

[@heavycritic9554]

@@chrism7395 Indeed! Bonus points for you and a big old facepalm for me. I can't believe I actually forgot that the awesome David Warner - R.I.P. - was on B5 (seriously, he was criminally underrated). Shame on me. 😮

[@Buggins]

While the movie is indeed dated I think you're underselling quite how influential it was. Its visual language has pretty well informed the movie and pop culture look of 'cyberspace' and futurism for decades right up to ready player one (rather knowingly admittedly) and many others along the way. The movie is pretty hokey in many ways but that look has defined more than a generation.

[@EChacon]

Homer Simpson (as a 3D character in the 3rd Dimension: _"Um....it's like, uh.....did anyone see the movie Tron?"_ Sorry I couldn't resist putting that joke in. 😅

[@TheMrPeteChannel]

The answers to Homer's question about seeing Tron. Hibbert "No" Lisa "No" Wiggum "No" Marge "No" Bart "No" Patty "No" Wiggum again "No" Flanders "No" Selma "No" Frink "No" Lovejoy "No" Wiggum yet again "Yes uhhh, no, no heh"

[@psterud]

As an old dude who was 9 when this came out, it's fascinating to watch young people react to it. You all had some really good takes on the movie, and also some, naturally, that lacked perspective. Video games were not only really young at the time, but were also a total tidal wave in our collective experience. Pac-Man and Donkey Kong were still dominating the arcade experience, and that was basically the fidelity we were dealing with. The amount of pure creativity and ingenuity in this movie is astounding for its time. It's a miracle that it got made, and we kids went crazy for it. We were obsessed with arcade games, and although other movies tried to capitalize on that trend, this one was by far the most accomplished and interesting. They could have just made a cheap, silly movie about arcade games, but the artists involved here went to the extreme, and that's what I most appreciate about it now, 41 years later. If you look into it a little, just the effort to get those light cycles to look half-decent was herculean. Nevertheless, it's fun to watch young people experience and appreciate and critique something that was at the core of our young lives in the early '80s. When I saw the trailer for the sequel for the first time, I nearly fainted. If you're all interested in another arcade-game-based movie from that era, The Last Starfighter (1984) is decent. Different.

[@illuminotme825]

My thoughts exactly. I was a little annoyed at them not realizing how amazing these "cheap looking" graphics were back in the 80s but realized they just don't know the history of computer graphics. It's just taken for granted nowadays but was groundbreaking back then. After seeing this movie, I would play my Atari 2600 and dreamed of the day videogames would look like this movie. We are well past that now but this was totally game changing back then. I begged my parents for a copy of Tron on Laserdisc too.

[@psterud]

@@illuminotme825 One thought that always makes my head spin is imagining sharing today's video games with our young '80s selves. Our little brains would implode.

[@illuminotme825]

@@psterud Most definitely. I'm still an avid gamer today because of my love of arcades and my first of many consoles in the 80s and beyond. I don't think our young minds could conceive that video games would look better than the computer generated movies we saw back then. It's amazing and humbling how far we've advanced and what we've seen in our decades of living. I wish you the best and hope you're still enjoying gaming today.

[@psterud]

@@illuminotme825 I still enjoy the occasional game, usually an indie of some sort. But to be honest, the original Dark Souls on PS3 really spoiled me for other games. Spent a few thousand hours with it. My young self playing Adventure on Atari, and playing D&D with friends, would have been thrilled to see it. I play more board games than video games these days. The last video game for me was Elden Ring, which was a lot of fun. What do you play? And what are your favorite arcade games from back in the day? I'd have to go with shooters, personally, like Gorf or Phoenix, stuff like that. I played Space Invaders on an arcade machine not too long ago, and that thing is darker and scarier than I remembered it. That music, especially on good cabinet speakers, is quite metal.

[@illuminotme825]

@@psterud There are so many it would be hard to describe. But some of the highlights that I recall after all this time: -ARCADES : I was obsessed with Defender, Donkey Kong, Zaxxon, Time Pilot and Tron Deadly Discs. -ATARI 2600: Like you, I loved Adventure on Atari and was caught up in it even though our character was a square and the dragon looked like a hopping duck. I think my love for single player open world RPG type of games was because of Adventure.Also loved playing Pitfall, and Yars Revenge. Then there was a gap of time where I went to college dating, socializing so I didn't play games. - Playstation: After college, I picked up gaming again and bought a Playstation. Resident Evil 1 and 2 along with the original GTA was my obsession along with Gran Turismo, and Metal Gear Solid. - Dreamcast: Shenmue gave me the first taste of an open world RPG with many side activities and SeaMan was just weird but so different I had to play it. I also enjoyed Jet Set Radio with the awesome soundtrack. - Nintendo 64: Goldeneye and Turok Dinosaur Hunter. Strangely enough, I'm just not into many Nintendo franchises. - Xbox : Of course original Halo and Halo 2, GTA San Andreas. -Xbox 360: My love for open world RPGs really started with Elder Scrolls Oblivion which has carried on to Skyrim, Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas. Also GTA 4 was groundbreaking for its time. I've spent thousands of hours on Skyrim and several hundred on the others. - PS5 : I 100 percented GTA 5 and Spiderman to completion and became obsessed with Destiny playing online every night and I'm usually not an online gamer but I found I could keep with the "kids" with the online shooting. -PC: I mostly game on PC now from small indie games to AA and AAA games. Spent over a thousand hours on Ark Survival Evolved and No Man's Sky. Spent hundreds of hours on Valheim, 7 Days to Die, Elite Dangerous and others and 100 percented Cyberpunk 2077. Right now I'm playing a relaxing puzzle game called Dorfromantik and doing a replay of Sleeping Dogs while I impatiently wait for Starfield. I've already put in for a short vacation to play Starfield. If it's anything like the other Bethesda single player exploration/story RPGs I will love it. These things are so big now they only come out once in a decade so I need to enjoy these last few decades of gaming that I have (hopefully).

[@jh5131]

I know it's cheesy now but as a 6 year old in 1982 this was mind meltingly awesome

[@Bawookles]

This movie was mind-blowing when it came out in 1982, no one had ever seen anything like it. You have to realize how ridiculously hard it was to render that stuff in 1982, it was all just putting in shitload of code over and over, it was not like animating today where you can move around 3D models on a screen.

[@Ykoz2016]

“Why is everything moving SO slow? It’s a computer!” 😂 It’s like 1980. This IS how fast computers ran 😂😂😂

[@2old4gamez]

*waves frantically* Here I am! Its me! The fanbase. Tron was mind blowing for a kid who grew up in the 70's and 80's. Still love both this and Legacy.

[@DrewSwenson]

Oh heck yet! One of my favorites! Legacy is a sequel, but regularly mislabeled.And yes Tron: Ares is in the works. The live action footage in the Grid were all done with Black and White film, with painstakingly tedious hand animation for the colors. Most of the film is traditional animation with some segments using early CG. Unfortunately they missed out on many awards because the effects weren't considered to be done by real artists. The music was done by Wendy Carlos, a phenomenal composer who made a ton of classical music with synths.

[@mnomadvfx]

Yeah people often ignore the Wendy Carlos soundtrack which is sad considering the other notable score she made was for A Clockwork Orange.

[@paulhammond6978]

Oh, of COURSE this was Wendy Carlos! I can't believe I forgot this was one of hers.

[@bountyhunter779]

This was such a groundbreaking movie on so many levels!

[@JohnWilkins-kq3jw]

Finely someone is watching this masterpiece 😊

[@porgyt7177]

If people from 1982 were watching this reaction, they'd be asking two questions. - What is a Laptop? - What the hell is a youtube reactor? (P.S . I saw this in the theater... not on drugs. I was 12. and as a kid, this was pretty neat). This was also an Arcade video game and on the Atari. It was not LIMITED by the technology, it was the HEIGHT of technology. Be careful judging movies from the past, based on todays standards, is a bit silly.

[@thomasgrimm1664]

You might want to go back and check what was actually on television in 1982 when you draw comparisons. Using computer generated effects to this scale was absolutely groundbreaking. Star Wars on the other hand used lots and lots of very detailed models and shot them on film, going for a realistic look.

[@joelavcoco]

Exactly this. Star Wars (Ep. IV) represented the pinnacle of practical visual effects after decades of development, and Tron comes at the very infancy of CGI.

[@Yakerina]

I feel old. Remember Automan?

[@thomasgrimm1664]

@@Yakerina With his friend hugging the passenger side window on every turn? That was fun!

[@SJHFoto]

@@Yakerina YES! I LOVED that show!

[@kuronaialtani]

My dad and I watched Legacy in theaters and then rented the original through Netflix, to immediately hit the theaters again to rewatch Legacy with the new info the original gave us Absolutely a classic and, for the time, revolutionary effects

[@Cau_No]

Back then I watched the first one on DVD in home cinema with the friends I went to the theater the next day. (We had seen it before on TV a lot, we are of that age …)

[@mnomadvfx]

To be honest after Legacy came out I appreciated the original far more because to me Legacy seemed like a very poor return on 28 years of waiting for a sequel. Both in terms of the script and the art design which were terrible for the script and somewhat meh given the vast improvements in CGI VFX since the OG TRON film was produced. The only thing I could really commend about TRON Legacy was the Joseph Trapanese/Daft Punk soundtrack which is still legendary. To me the only true sequel to TRON was the Monolith Productions videogame TRON 2.0 which alternately is about Alan Bradley and his son getting trapped in the game grid.

[@kuronaialtani]

@@mnomadvfx there was also that tron: uprising cartoon, set through and then after the events of legacy

[@lewisner]

I've never seen Legacy but I saw the original in a cinema in 1983 and it blew my mind, especially the Light Cycle scene.

[@Lumibear.]

They only had enough computing power to render still images, one frame could take a whole day, and motion required the animators to program it via a keyboard by entering the co-ordinates for where each object should be in 3D space for each frame, including the camera, all of which they had to mentally visualise and work out on graph paper first. Each frame took so much memory that at this time it couldn’t be stored and played back digitally, only recorded on one frame of celluloid film by pointing it at a CRT screen, and then digitally erasing it so that the next frame could be programmed in and then left to render, they didn’t see it move until they processed the resultant finished sequence on celluloid, so it’s insane that they ever managed to create the CGI elements for this movie at all. That’s why so much if it was hand animated to look CGI, it was quicker and easier that way, but even that took insane amounts of time and man power, the live elements had to be separated, transferred onto huge photo prints and drawn on by hand, backlit using coloured gels and then re-photographed again, frame by painstaking frame, like a cartoon. To say this movie was before its time is a massive understatement, it was technically impossible, but they did it anyway.

[@bidwell13]

This movie was the first feature film to combine live action and CGI. The “state of the art” computer that was used for the film's key special effects had only 2MB of memory and 330MB of storage. The suits were done by “backlight animation”. A funny thing about this movie was apparently Jeff Bridges was built a little too well for Disney so they had to modify his suit to cover below the waist. 20:54 the “disks” they are using is just a frisbee. 24:36 yes they just opened a ride recently at Disneyland or Disneyworld that is based on Tron. In 2025 the third Tron movie is supposed to come out called “Tron:Ares” with Jared Leto playing a character called Ares. Apparently Disney “killed” the third film when they acquired Star Wars and Marvel. Now it appears to be back on track. So after this movie you should check out the animated series “Tron:Uprising” that happens between “Tron” & “Tron: Legacy”. Then there’s a short called “Tron: The Next Day” that I believe is a bonus feature on “Tron: Legacy” dvd/Blu-ray. So watch order is “Tron”, “Tron: Uprising”, “Tron: Legacy” and “Tron: The Next Day”.

[@changsangma1915]

I believe the events in the game Tron Evolution happens just before Tron Legacy event.

[@bidwell13]

@@changsangma1915 “Tron: Evolution” is a video game that was released just before “Tron:Legacy”. The game premises is supposed to lead into “Tron:Legacy”. I never played it so not sure what it’s like for the storyline. “Tron: Uprising” shows what happened in the Grid between “Tron” & “Tron:Legacy”. The new one “Tron: Ares” from what I’ve read so far seems to be about a programs journey from digital to the real world. None of the characters from the previous movies have been announced as being in it.

[@Caitorade]

It is a great step in the evolution of live action + CGI, however, it wasn’t the first film because at least Westworld had it too. It is definitely a revolutionary movie and obviously has way more digital animation than the films that came before, or even immediately after it 🙂🙂

[@doc0815martens]

Normally I find your comments quite good, but after your comment at the end I think the young lady on the left has no idea what she's talking about, because obviously she doesn't know standard films and series, nor computer games of the early 80s. That Star Wars was exceptional and still is today is not even up for discussion, but that's exactly what Tron was at the time and both are definitely not the usual average of the early 80s. Both were groundbreaking and far ahead of their time, especially in terms of animation, special effects and CGI.

[@delpierochilipeppers]

Without this pièce of art, No Matrix.

[@peterschmidt4348]

Please watch "Short Circuit" (1986). You will love it.

[@shaunstudios163]

Tron Legacy is such a Top Disney movie it was way ahead of its time with the effects

[@jowbloe3673]

The 3D effects in the movie were so underwhelming and barely noticeable it seemed a complete waste of money and technology to film it in 3D.

[@shaunstudios163]

@@jowbloe3673 They wait crazy overboard with everything

[@LordRaiden42]

Not Tron: Legacy. Only TRON (1982)

[@shaunstudios163]

@@LordRaiden42 but when we get to Tron Legacy

[@thearduousalchemist2804]

totally agree with the effects, not to mention the soundtrack with Daft Punk.

[@SBKiDoodles]

"Why doesn't this thing go faster?" Well, they are in a computer from 1982

[@porgyt7177]

I remember playing the TRON video game in the arcade back in 1982 (I was 12)! It was difficult and seemed super high tech, for the time.

[@linusromey561]

Most people miss the core premise of the story, which we still wrestle with today. This is summarized in the encounter between Dillinger and Dumont where Dumont states "user requests are what computers are for." and Dillinger retorts with "Doing our business is what computers are for." It's a question of who has control of, and access to, information: people/users, or governments/businesses? This was the difference in philosophy between Microsoft and Apple throughout the evolution and social adoption of consumer electronics. This question is even more relevant in the world of the internet. Also, not only did the actors not understand what they were doing and just followed directions as to the action, they also had no idea what the dialog meant. In 1982 computers terminology did not exist in general social vocabulary. Personal computers, and the associated vocabulary, were not a thing until the Apple Macintosh was introduced to the public in 1984.

[@RetroRobotRadio]

There was a TV series called Automan that was inspired by this movie. In it a police program comes to the real world thanks to his programmer and helps him fight crime.

[@dcanmore]

I remember his car turned corners at 90º.

[@TheMrPeteChannel]

I think the same visual people who did tron worker on Automan. The name of that show inspired the Simpson's character Otto Mann. That & the Ottoman Empire.

[@thunderstruck5484]

Arcades were so much fu in the 70s80s , thanks y’all

[@somthingbrutal]

we wished computer game graphics looked this good when the movie came out

[@warrenjohn]

Loved your reactions! This blew my nine year old mind when it first came out! Another point of reference which you all may miss is that 1982 was around the time that home computers were just starting to invade the consumer market. Hence the whole concept was very timely. 👍

[@neilbiggs1353]

I love how both ahead of its time and OF its time that this film is! I do wonder how many people in 84 would have got the joke that the bit can only respond in yes or no! As a Babylon 5 fan, it's also quite funny seeing Peter Jurasik (the accountancy program at the start) and Bruce Boxleitner (Alan/Tron) who were major stars in that series

[@LordRaiden42]

Oh yeah, now I know where the Babylon 5 character looked familiar from. Thx for that reminder.

[@jmourao]

I just checked and David Warner (MCP / Sark / Dillinger) was also a Babylon 5 guest star. 😄

[@neilbiggs1353]

@@jmourao In an episode many people try to forget...

[@lloyddobler2227]

Thanks for giving this movie a chance. Keep in mind, the computer animation that was shown in this movie was state-of-the-art at that time and was a mind-blowing experience for those of us that saw it when it came out. You definitely have to watch the second one. I think you'll be very pleased with the aesthetic of it much more since it's newer. There are some really nice call-backs to the original and let's not forget Daft Punk - END OF LINE

[@John_Locke_108]

Cannot wait to watch this reaction. This movie got me into computers as a kid back in the 80's.

[@mcgee227]

You can't compare this to star wars. Stare wars used no CGI. This was the first movie to experiment with what could be done with CGI. That was the point, to use mainly CGI effects of the time.

[@cardboard092]

This movie is extremly underrated imo. It's very charming and a classic and I can't wait to see your reaction to Tron Legacy. Legacy is one of my favorite movies :)

[@Xardion55]

_"Combatant 3 vs. Rinzler."_

[@mycroft16]

Legacy had absolutely no business going as hard as it did. Phenomenally well handled in keeping true to the feel of the original while updating it in ways that made sense for how computers have become.

[@lukeallan6527]

The light cycle sequence itself took hundreds of hours of painstaking hand written programming. Line by line pixels by pixels. Took all the computing power they had at the time just too make this as good as it was. At the time this was groundbreaking visual programming.

[@chrisbate9956]

It was originally filmed in black and white and the animators had to paint all the glowing lines in by hand. Something like that and the use of negative sheets were also part of the effects. This was why all the Chinese is at the end in the credits - it was the poor souls who had to paint the glowing effects in, frame by frame. I grew up in the 80's and regularly used to mong out to this after we recorded it onto a video tape from a television broadcast. I was well spun out. Even today the scenery still does it to me.

[@rekarts7704]

This was our version of Avatar. Back in the day this was cutting edge. The graphics were hand painted. They WHOLE movie had to be shipped to Taiwan for each frame of the movie to be individually painted. The actors were on a all black set and the circuitry on the uniform had to be written on in black sharpie. Back in the day you were so popular if you had a 3.5" floppy disk with a 1MB capacity. Think about how our revolutionary movies will look to your kids kids.

[@GamerSpartanFire]

Fun Fact not sure if anyone else has said but Bit is called "Bit" due to a computer Bit being the most basic unit of information on a computer, which is either a 0 or 1 or as the movie shows us "Yes" or "No" I would defo say that this movie combined with my father teaching my computers back in 97 onwards at the age of 3 is what gave me such a fascination in computers overall :D Thanks Dad :) and Tron hehe On a side note the Tron movies did get some games 1982 - Tron 1982 - Discs of Tron 1982 - Deadly Discs 1982 - Adventures of Tron 1982 - Solar Sailer 2003 - Tron 2.0 2010 - Space Paranoids 2010 - Tron Evolution 2010 - Tron Evolution: Battle Grids 2011 - Tron: Legacy (pinball) 2016 - Tron RUN/r 2023 - Tron: Identity

[@ghost7524]

Yep, The Bit did stand out and was so funny😁 It was doing its job. I'm glad that it wasn't a qubit, it would've really tripped people out😄

[@bigsarge8795]

I was a teenager in the 1980s. This was like the epitome of 80s technology. It was so cool

[@AutoPilate]

There was a great first person shooter that came out in 2003 called Tron 2.0, but it’s not considered canon, especially after Tron: Legacy came out. Still super fun to play, though. And the computer world looks “visually fuzzy” because each frame was painted by hand.

[@ScarriorIII]

22:18 I just realized the program Flynn kills is Londo Mollari from Babylon 5.

[@RustyDust101]

Tron was absolutely groundbreaking. It was way beyond what anyone expected.

[@flynngames4703]

It was interesting to hear what people now think of this movie. The movie visuals actually weren't common for the times. It was the first of its kind. first time on this channel. Was fun. Would be interesting to see what you think of Tron Legacy

[@eightbitmonkey]

Tron in 1982, The Last Starfighter in 1984 and Young Sherlock Holmes in 1985 they're the grandfathers of CGI in films today. What would take a modern studio hours to make today would take weeks if not months. Remember this is the age of Pac-Man and Atari the NES was still three years away and what's CGI is that like Stop Motion my 12' year olds self was pondering.

[@lungfulldrummer8921]

Young Sherlock hold up pretty well.

[@eightbitmonkey]

@@lungfulldrummer8921 It does I remember seeing it in a drive-in not sure if those exist anymore.

[@lungfulldrummer8921]

@@eightbitmonkey it gets regular TV play over here in the UK.

[@cstephen98]

Two other Disney movies from that time period that were ahead of their time and didn't do well were, 'The Black Hoke' and "The Black Caudren". Disney had a number of "darker" films in that era that, because they weren't traditional Disney family Fair were rejected (probably leading them to create touchstone pictures). Something Wicked This Way Comes and The Watcher in the Woods were also from that era.

[@RedLP5000S]

"Nightshade and Dark....., Dark and Nightshade."

[@floppsymoppsy5969]

My favorite world (not the best, but my favorite) in Kingdom Hearts 2 is defently Tron. I love how they incorporated into Kingdom Hearts lore. ❤

[@wolfofthewest8019]

The Tron video games were awesome, total arcade classics. There were several of them, a light cycle game and a disc attack game where you fought the MCP. You guys really cannot comprehend how mind-blowing this movie was. You guys grew up in a world with the internet, this movie came out the same year the term "cyberpunk" was coined. Terms like "virtual reality" didn't even exist yet. The Nintendo didn't exist yet. We were playing Pong on our Atari 2600s. The story is weak, the effects are kind of janky, but the ideas in this movie were absolutely revolutionary. Every story that is set inside a virtual reality owes something to Tron.

[@Terandula]

What is really fascinating about the cgi back then is, that they had no visual aid. There was no cg editing software back then. It was all made in code.

[@garyburley1960]

There were no 3d computers when this was made. They had to write a 3d program and they couldn't see what the result looked like because it was programmed in. Most of the graphics were hand painted over the wire frame, frame by frame. This was a hand painted computer movie. Gladiators in a digital realm fighting rogue AI. home computers didn't evolve til 1993. and AI was just a sci fi concept. this film was harder to make than Star Wars. the janky look was deliberate, they wanted you to know it was a computer realm. there was no desire to make the realms look real. This was more mind-blowing than all the films up to then and the idea preceded Star Wars. Star Wars only green lit all these new sci fi movies. the 70s was a hotbed of airbrush and sci fi art, novels, comics and the start of manga. Star Wars itself was appropriated from many sci fi sources, it was known for its theft of other ideas, although George Lucas was a big fan of these other sources and did acknowledge them when the film became a blockbuster

[@ZS-dr7bi]

Tron Legacy is also a must watch now guys

[@TahiriVeila13ABY]

Tron Legacy, the sequel from 2010 is criminally underrated. One of the coolest scores of recent memory, and an equally brilliant aesthetic. 82's Tron was an incredibly bold, wildly original movie that inspired countless programmers in varying fields.

[@steved1135]

Wicked. Saw this in theatre when I was 11. I was shook. It was like something from my comic books had come to life. No doubt the cause of my interest in computers and Sci Fi that continues to this day. Amazing...

[@kenpullig1652]

Tron was a groundbreaking movie it its day for many reasons. Disney (back when they knew how to make movies) took a big risk with the experimental style and techniques for Tron. Do watch the Making Of... to learn more about the methods for visual effects. You're right to take this movie with logic and brain turned off. Just take it it. On a nightmare note, I was working at a comic convention when the organizers put a TV with a Tron advertising loop right by our table. Three days, twelve hours a day, the same Tron video ad played non-stop. It was about 45 seconds long, so imagine how many times I heard it. Arrrgggghhhh!!! Fun reaction from all.

[@mikebrown7799]

Nice to see you guys and my favorite White Noise Reactor, Stella!🙂This was very big when it came out 40 years ago. This was before personal computers and the Internet. The Tron Arcade Game Machine was quite popular and was released in 1982 also. Nice reactions to the original Tron, Kids!!!🎬👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽

[@KERRYPIKE]

Tron is a great movie.

[@mycroft16]

No, those are not practical lights. That tech BARELY existed for Tron Legacy more recently. This movie... they HAND DREW that in on the film negatives. Frame. By. Frame. Remember, computers were still extremely new and mysterious to people at this time. Presenting the programs as sort of digital representations of the user that created them is brilliant for keeping track of who is who and what between the two worlds. I can't WAIT for you to watch the next one. It manages to stay extremely faithful to the feel of this one, but updates it in some extremely amazing ways

[@AbsoluteApril]

not drugs... aww some of your comments broke my heart. Such a movie ahead of it's time and with such unique styling and visuals, esp at that time.

[@Daehawk]

What was really cool is back then when the movie came out there was a Tron arcade machine. It was semi 3d holographic in ways with mirrors and such. Lots of fun. I actually knew a guy in the 90s that programmed it.

[@greenfalcon11]

The Tron arcade game is still my favorite of all time. Wish I could still find one to play.

[@shawbros]

The Tron arcade cabinet was beautiful.

[@martinholt8168]

As primitive as these CGI effects are now, they blew everyone's mind back when I was in high school.

[@nicktechnubyte1184]

Still better than most of the effects you see these days!

[@martinholt8168]

@@nicktechnubyte1184 Well, one does have to grade on a curve. Given the state of computer technology in the '80's, it was bloody brilliant.

[@FeaturingRob]

Basically, filming was like this. - In the video game world, everything was in black and white. Sets (such as there were), costumes, black velvet draping backgrounds, and black electrician's tape to make the circuits on white costumes. - After filming, the film stock was reversed (white became black, black became white), and each film frame was blown up, so each frame could be individually hand painted. Different elements were taken out, for special attention and painted (like the eyes, teeth in a smile, etc.). - Once the painting was done, the film was rotoscoped, compositing the elements layer upon layer, like an animated cell. Because there were problems in the companies handling the painting, and the shipping (a lot of the work was sent to Korea and/or Japan for the painting), and sometimes the frames would have odd "flares" of light...these were passed off as energy within the system the characters were in. - Basically, it became a live-action/animated film in a very real sense...and no other film has done it since. Bruce Boxleitner (Tron/Alan Bradley) and Peter Jurasik (Crom, the compound interest program that fights Flynn) would later work together in the television series 'Babylon 5' in the 1990s for over 4 years. Boxleitner would play Captain John Sheridan, CO of Babylon 5, and Jurasik would play Ambassador Londo Mollari of the Centauri Republic. Both men recently voiced the characters in a soon-to-be-released animated film, 'Babylon 5 - The Road Home'. Dan Shor (Ram) was Billy the Kid in 'Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure'. Dillinger, played by David Warner, also voiced Master Control Program. He excelled at villains...Lovejoy in 'Titanic', Dr. John Leslie Stevenson (aka Jack the Ripper) in 'Time After Time', and Evil Genius in 'Time Bandits' were some of my favorites. He passed away a year or so ago.

[@alansimonson8558]

When I was a kid in the 80s, I could not wait for this film to come out. I was 11 and was really into computers and writing programs (TRS-80, VIC-20, and C-64 mainly). Being the first movie to fully take advantage of computers for graphics, and Tron’s user was Alan, my name! When I finally got to see the movie when it came out in theatres, I was in love. It inspired me, and I grew up to be a software engineer and computer scientist. In a few large systems I worked on for the DoD, I named their boot software MCP. 😅

[@fredgrimley8883]

No, I wasn't high when I saw this in the theatres or the many times I rewatched it on videodisc. BTW, this was a theatrical box office failure, but gained a massive cult following in video. Also, y'all missed the credits music soundtrack, with Journey's "Only Solutions". If you ever wanted a song that represented the 80s, that's it. It's right after the Wendy Carlos finale, which has a great melancholic synth feel.

[@jarls5890]

54:00 Wrong. I saw this when it premiered at the cinemas in the 80s. It created much of the style we today think of as "retro wave", "synth wave" and so forth. It was a look that had never been seen before. And the 90s was still a long, long way off into the future. And even if computers were used in creating some of the effects we see - a lot was actually had drawn + analog photography trickery.

[@Martman5150]

My father's first computer was a Xerox, because my uncle worked for Xerox. It had 8 inch floppy drives and no hard drive. The programming language was called BASIC.

[@shag139]

Did it save a program on a cassette tape?

[@Martman5150]

No, it saved to the 8 inch floppy. I wrote a program and my dad was a dick and hacked it right away.

[@shag139]

@@Martman5150 Duh, sorry. I had a radio shack color computer. 4K of RAM. 4K not Meg. To save programs you hooked up a tape recorder and save to a cassette tape.

[@CodeMonkey76]

This movie really relied on the early computer technology and how it was all foreign to the general public. It basically just asked 'what if "programs" were like sentient things inside your computer - they had jobs/tasks to do and you (the user) could give them directions on what you wanted them to do for you'. That type of imagination kind of falls apart when your technology knowledge opens your eyes to what is actually happening.

[@rideon6140]

Get ready for virtual agents.

[@kirk1968]

This was great! I was 14 when this came out, the perfect target audience who was heavily into videogames and home computers, which were finally becoming mainstream. It's fun to see your reactions decades later, and how you understood it immediately! Seemed like many didn't quite understand its concepts at first, but at least the hand-programmed CGI was entertaining. The movie was truly a labor of love by those who made it, and they foretold the internet and AI. "WarGames" followed it up with more AI causing trouble (with nukes!). A great time to be a teenager.

[@mojav26]

I thought that Tron from 1982 was more exciting than Tron Legacy!

[@omega311888]

this movie was ahead of its time. young people these days are so inundated with CGI that they cant appreciate how astounding this movie was for its time.thanks for giving it a view! Oh and the jai alai looking thing is called a cesta. :)

[@Corn_Pone_Flicks]

Take a moment to appreciate the fact that when the animators were creating these scenes, they couldn't see what they were doing. We're used to seeing 3D programs where you model objects and can spin around them and see them from multiple angles, and they had nothing of the sort. All the animation and object design was based solely on coordinates. They didn't see what the shots looked like until after they were fully rendered. By the way, Sark's cruiser was designed by the artist Syd Mead, who also designed the spaceship Sulaco from Aliens, in case the design looked familiar. And yes, the CG looks dated, but technically everything looks dated to SOME time. Everything has early stages that have to occur so we can move forward to the level of tech we have now. Tron Legacy, incidentally, is absolutely a sequel to this film, not a reboot. It's also absolutely gorgeous, and a much more interesting film.

[@michaelsk77]

Tron is one of the first movies ever to use computer graphics.

[@nimbusco8956]

I wonder how many video game developers of the following 10-20 years were inspired by this movie. I saw this movie in the theater at the age of 12 or so. I didn’t grow up to be a world class video game developer, but one of my classmates did. I don’t know what he thought of Tron, but it was one of the few popular culture phenomena of that era that stood out with its vision of a computer generated world. In the real world of the movie, the games are similar to the arcade video games of the period, but the computer world is where the actual “world building” happens (as was noted in the commentary). And that seems (along with Star Wars, I’d say) to have heavily influenced future games.

[@ischmidt]

I was a huge fan of this movie growing up (we literally wore out the VHS tape) and I'll have been programming AAA games for 29 years as of November 1st. It's wild that from this to the first Toy Story was 13 years, and Toy Story was not long after I started out on the Super Nintendo. Technology's been absolutely wild since then, and I'm happy to have been able to keep up.

[@DesScorp]

You've got to do the Tron sequel soon while this one is fresh in your memory. It's really a different movie altogether, while honoring the first, and gets a little deeper into some of the philosophical aspects of computing. Religion, politics, there as aspects that are more deeply covered in the sequel. And the cast is outstanding. There's one more Disney movie you'll want to do from this period as well: the Black Hole. It came out the same summer as Star Trek: the Motion Picture (THAT would be a great movie for you guys to do! Talk about deep concepts.), and it suffered as ST:TMP kind of sucked up all the oxygen in the room at the time. But the Black Hole is really dark at times for a Disney Movie, and along with Tron, the only real Sci-Fi movies that Disney did.

[@fllthdcrb]

Yeah, it's dated, but it's _unabashedly_ dated, and that's what I like about it. The makers had to have known that graphics would rapidly advance, but they weren't ashamed to put what they had on display, as it's an artistic expression of the idea of a computer world. And if you think about it, it was quite a risk, as it must have taken a huge amount of time and money to create such animations with the technology of 1982.

[@EugenioHertz]

ill never forget jeff bridges saying GREETINGS PROGRAMS and the city shown next with all the lights.

[@folcotook3049]

One of my favorite early-80s movies from my childhood (yes, 80s kid here). Used to be one of my favorite VHS rentals. This was back when it was also common to rent a VCR. Note - You used to have to go to a physical, brick-and-mortar store to rent a movie on VHS. Note 2 - A VHS was a specific format of an analog tape cartridge which stored audio-visual data magnetically and was played back with a VCR. Note 3 - A VCR was a Video Cassette Recorder which was a device used to record and play VHS tapes. Note 4 - No, I was never high when watching this movie and I still really enjoyed it. #ObnoxiouslyOld 😉

[@DigitalJediMaster]

Some folks are confused that Tron: Legacy is an actual sequel. Not a technical sequel. Not a reboot, soft or otherwise. But a DIRECT sequel to the original. It's was even originally promoted as TR2N. But some folks who never saw the original were apparently confused by the flashbacks, not understanding that they were taking place between the two movies.

[@terpcj]

While there were other bits and bobs of CG in early films and shorts (SIGGRAPH at the time showed some really cool stuff), Tron and The Last Starfighter are really the gateways to what we have now (IMO, TLS is the better example...mostly). I was writing raster graphics programs for work at the time (space industry), and this stuff was cool to see out in the wild. With our weak-ass computers (yeah, we knew) and limited algorithms (and imagination, to be fair -- you can only railroad when it's time to railroad), anyone who worked with graphics was just itching for the future to get here so we could do some really fun stuff. Not that there wasn't fun to be had... the Tron arcade game did get a whole lot of my quarters.

[@Talban]

All those glowey effects on the suits of each person were hand painted on each frame of film. It was a soul-crushing amount of work.

[@perytas]

Yes!!! I loved this movie. We went to theaters to see it when it came out, and it just blew us all away. I learned BASIC to code games because if this movie. I really want to see you guys' reaction to the sequel. While you're at it, you should also check out The Last Starfighter as well. Absolutely iconic, though I think it's underrated a lot too.

[@shag139]

Loved the TRON video game at the arcade.

[@evemiller2637]

Fun fact: it was filmed in a black room and then all the lighted stuff was hand painted in. Other fun fact: also for all us kids when we would play video games after watching this movie we would apologize to the cpu for killing them…lol

[@gryphon9507]

Highest end computer graphics of the early eighties.

[@dmore]

Quite simply one of the most important movies ever made. A technical masterpiece I love to watch it and imagine the aww and satisfaction the teams working on it must have felt seeing it come together. As Arthur C Clarke once said "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic", and I'd have loved to have felt the magic they felt.

[@MartinBeerbom]

The laser lab was a real laser lab at Lawrence Livermore National labs. The Big Door was also at LLN. It was a loading dock access to the target area of a particle accelerator and needed to be that thick for radiation shielding purposes. While filming, Cindy Morgan accidentally stepped into some radioactive spill and had to be decontaminated. Also, the cubicles were real cubicles at Walt Disney's IT department, but they were expanded by matte painting.

[@botz77]

The problem with the original Tron is that it does not look good in HD. It looks much cooler on an old screen with the scanlines or projected. Laserdisc is probably one of the best ways to watch it.

[@cynthiaschultheis1660]

SEE "WARGAMES" FOR ANOTHER COMPUTER FILM!!!!👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍

[@batbrick3949]

So glad you watched this before watching Tron: Legacy. I remember watching this as a 7 year old when it was first released. It seemed very cool then, but that was through a 7 year old’s lens. Today, even the script and pacing seem dated. The sequel is much, much better in every way.