Trailer
Plot summary
Kevin Flynn once wrote games for ENCOM and now runs an arcade. He keeps hacking the company's system with a program named CLU, hunting proof that senior executive Ed Dillinger passed off his games as his own, and the Master Control Program keeps blocking him. Inside ENCOM, programmer Alan Bradley and engineer Lora Baines find the MCP has cut off their access to company projects. Lora, Alan and Flynn meet at the arcade and agree to break in and activate Tron, a security program Alan wrote to counter the MCP. At a laboratory terminal Flynn confronts the MCP, which reduces him to data and beams him into the digital world it rules, where programs wear the likeness of the people who made them and are forced to compete in games.
Cast
- Tony Stephanoas Peter / Sark's Lieutenant
- Craig Chudyas Warrior #1
- Sam Schatzas Expert Disc Warrior
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about TRON (1982)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Bonnie MacBird wrote the first drafts and based the character Alan Bradley on computer scientist Alan Kay, whom she later married. She first imagined Kevin Flynn as a comic figure and suggested Robin Williams for the role.
- The computers of 1982 could not animate, so every frame was made one at a time, and a single frame of the Solar Sailer gliding through metal canyons could take six hours. There was no way to print the images digitally either, so a film camera was aimed at a computer screen to photograph each frame.
- Kodak made the Kodalith sheets specially, in numbered boxes meant to be used in order, which the crew did not realize, so the glowing circuit lines flicker where batches changed. The team covered it with "zinger" sounds suggesting the computer world was malfunctioning, and Steven Lisberger had the flicker digitally corrected for the 2011 Blu-ray.
- The script first made good programs yellow and evil ones blue, and the scheme was switched mid-production to blue for good and red for evil. Shots finished under the old rules survive: Clu has yellow circuit lines while all of Sark's tank commanders are blue.
- Wendy Carlos scored the film on a Moog and a Crumar GDS synthesizer, but Disney insisted on hiring the London Philharmonic Orchestra because it feared she would not finish in time. Journey supplied two tracks, "1990's Theme" and "Only Solutions", after Supertramp pulled out.
- For all its groundbreaking imagery Tron was not even nominated for the visual effects Oscar. Steven Lisberger believed voters thought the production had "cheated by using computers"; its only nominations were for costume design and sound.
- Several of the film's computer animators, lead animator Chris Wedge among them, left to found Blue Sky Studios in 1987 after their own studio closed.
