'Tron: Legacy' Director Explains the Tron World 384
An anonymous reader writes "We only had to wait 28 years for the second installment of 'Tron' — the sequel, 'Tron: Legacy,' comes out on Friday. It is expected to have less awesomely bad '80s graphics and more awesomely awesome millennial CGI. In advance of the opening, Discover has an interview with director Joe Kosinski in which he talks about reinventing the light cycle, and explains that the Tron world resembles the Galapagos Islands, where everything evolved in isolation."
From the director's commentary on the DVD (Score:2, Informative)
A tremendous amount of the original Tron "graphics" were actually done the old-fashioned way: multiple passes with filters on the cameras, hand-drawn art, and fancy non-computer special-effects tricks.
There were also a lot of computer graphics in the movie, but not nearly as much as modern viewers seem to think.
This is probably because we are so accustomed to everything being done by computer enhancements, especially things that look computer-y, that we just assume anything similar was done on a computer.
In the case of Tron, much of it was not.
Fun fact: the name "Tron" was not derived from the old "Trace On" command, but from the word "electron."
80s graphics were state of the art (Score:3, Informative)
Those 80s graphics were state of the art in 1980 when the movie started production. It sounds like AC has no idea what the fuck he is talking about. See the "Making of Tron" to understand all the complex work involved.
Re:"awesomely bad 80s graphics" (Score:4, Informative)
Those "awesomely bad 80s graphics" were awesomely good back in, you know, the 80s. I have no doubt that in another 30 years or so, the graphics in Tron Legacy will be just as laughable. And from everything I hear, the original Tron script will read like Shakespeare compared to the new one... Actually, I didn't find the original script too bad. It's certainly not great, but it held up a lot better than I expected it to when I saw it again a couple years ago.
BTW, there's already been a Tron sequel, just in video game form. Tron 2.0 [wikipedia.org] came out in 2003 and was created as being a direct sequel to the original. It even had much of the original cast doing voice work, and Wendy Carlos doing the soundtrack. Find a copy and play it. It's a decent FPS, and it's very much in the spirit of the original movie. I hope there's at least some mention of the events of Tron 2.0 in Tron Legacy.
Re:"awesomely bad 80s graphics" (Score:5, Informative)
TRON (yes the name is kinda hokey
TRON [wikipedia.org] is a debugging command in the BASIC programming language. It is an abbreviation of TRace ON. It is used primarily for debugging line-numbered BASIC GOTO and GOSUB statements. In text-mode environments such as the TRS-80 or MS-DOS/IBM PC-DOS, it would print the current line number which was being executed, on-screen. In a windowed environment, when the TRON command had been executed, a window would indicate the line number being executed at that instant. This command's opposite is TROFF, or TRace OFF, used to turn off command tracing.[1]