Director/writer Steven Lisberger came from an animation background and resorts to old-school tools and simple animation to enhance the live action shooting and computer effects. The film groundbreaking in its day for visualizing computing culture in an era before home computers, point-and-click operating systems, and cyberspace, and for using rudimentary computer animation to create the computer imagery… or at least most of it. Cindy Morgan and Barnard Hughes co-star as fellow video rebels and David Warner does villain duty again as the corporate shark and his cyber alter ego. Jeff Bridges makes for a fun human drop-out turned cyber-warrior and Bruce Boxleitner is stalwart as the good guy program Tron and nerdish as his human user/creator. Take away the zippy motorcycles and the ethereal sailship and it’s a downright gloomy purgatory where ghostly B&W figures in incandescent suits wander a dungeon-like maze that periodically surges and cackles with electrical pulses-surely not what Disney thought they were getting into with the original video game adventure. The digital world is envisioned as a video game and the Master Control Program super-villain is 2001‘s HAL by way of Roman Emperor Nero, an all-powerful computer program with a God complex and a love of terminal video games. And that’s before you get to the story of the shaggy computer programmer and video-game geek (Jeff Bridges) who returns to the corporation that hijacked his program and gets literally transported into the virtual world. Which is to say it takes inspiration from the imagery of arcade games of the era and then creates its own conceptual world out of the cues.ĭecades later, after The Matrix films, the CGI revolution, and videogame technology as sophisticated as the most expensive Hollywood blockbusters, Tron is a quaint product of its time. Jeff Bridges reprises his role from “Tron” as a talented video game programmer Garrett Hedlund plays his son.Tron (1982) is the first videogame movie. “It’s very focused on a father-son story,” Mr. Bailey and his studio colleagues are working to hammer home the message that “Tron: Legacy” is more than a chase through a virtual world. The Disney XD cable channel will present an animated mini-series in the fall (followed by a regular series, to be announced). The monorail at Walt Disney World got a “Tron: Legacy” makeover. With the core audience on board the online game now has about 4.5 million active users Disney is turning its attention to the people who make the difference between a hit and a blockbuster: mothers, children and nontechnophiles. On the convention floor, Disney gave people a peek at the coming merchandising storm: talking action figures with digitally projected faces, iPod accessories, Adidas sneakers inspired by “Tron: Legacy,” and clothing.
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Last week, the studio built an even more elaborate walk-through experience that recreated sets from the movie and attracted over 7,000 visitors over three days. A second “Tron: Legacy” trailer appeared with “Alice in Wonderland” in March. In July 2009 at Comic-Con, Disney introduced a walk-through experience (lots of vintage arcade games) and a Twitter-enabled scavenger hunt through the streets of downtown San Diego. Over the next year, Disney released more video, introduced an ambitious online game and fed bloggers a steady drip of news. Disney unveiled a “Tron: Legacy” teaser trailer at Comic-Con in July 2008. The studio first decided to “activate” core fans, Mr. But so did the marketing muscle that Fox put behind it. 1 show of the 2009-10 season was no accident. That the comedic musical “Glee” was the No. Television, too, is seeing a new model emerge. It is not just the movie business that is experimenting with a longer selling cycle. A studio does not want to release a behemoth like that without a megawatt campaign. Special effects movies like “Tron: Legacy” can easily cost more than $350 million to develop, produce and market. In a post-“Avatar” world, the goal at the multiplex is to make movies feel like must-attend events longer campaigns can help achieve that.Īt the same time, the risk for motion picture studios is bigger than ever. Lead time also makes a big difference when it comes to breaking through the advertising clutter and competing entertainment options. One variant is a controlled burn: carefully doling out bits of information over months and years. 1 tool for promoting movies television commercials studios are trying to create Internet brush fires on behalf of their coming releases.