Why Tron (1982)?

[Blu-Dog]

Originally Posted by bruce_pullen

Why is it important? Is it still relevant? Or a Jay Leno joke?

It was groundbreaking.

Personal computers were rare, and barely understood by the populace. They were mystery machines, and anything that took you "inside" one was very interesting to people.

This was the age of the Atari, and the Commodore, the Texas Instruments TI-64, and the Radio Shack TRS-80. IBM had just introduced the PC. No one had a clue who Bill Gates was.

In the middle of this, Tron was released. It had non-standard animation (the equivalent of Pixar today, at lease in tone) and wasn't anything like what people had seen before. It had brilliant production design, and though the story was improbable, it's no more fantastic than the Star Wars series.

If you haven't seen it, or haven't seen it recently, it's worth a look for the design of the movie alone. As a story, it's clear that the film makers had no clue how to move it along; but as eye candy, and in visual concept, it was something very, very different than anything that had come before, at least as a commercial venture.