October 3, 2006
Main Screen Turn Tron
Prompted in part by Adam Cadre’s second article on Tron, and in part because I wanted to illutrate where Rez comes from, I recently saw Tron again. Adam has already said many interesting things about the movie and our current cultural moment in his lavishly illustrated post, but I thought of a few comments to make:
- Tron is almost entirely black with some blue and red lines. The red and blue lines glow brilliantly, making the black even blacker. Tron may have the largest share of cinematic darkness ever. The Maltese Falcon and Lost Highway look like “It’s a Small World” compared to Tron.
- Many of the scenes in Tron include fairly detailed things surrounded by very spare things with no detail. The lightcycles on a grid are one examples; much less detailed backgrounds behind people with normal faces wearing detailed circuit-armor are another.
- If you turn the movie volume down, you can hear how the images in Tron match up in an uncanny way with the Pink Floyd album Dark Side of the Moon.
- Tron in some ways recorded and in other ways established what the inside of a computer – if this place could accomodate little people – would look like, circa 1982. I suggest that in 1958, the inside of a computer looked something like this, while today, in 2006, the inside of a computer looks something like this.
- “Nor Tron!” is a palindrome.
- Computers have become less cool since Tron. Actually, everything has become less cool since Tron.
- It seems likeTron 2 is not going to be made, but Bladerunner vs. Tron is still a possibility.
October 3rd, 2006 at 5:00 am
Dude! if this post isn’t major DAB (dissertation avoidance behavior), I don’t know what is.
October 3rd, 2006 at 10:25 am
Actually, they made Tron 2.0, but it wasn’t a movie, it was a game. And that wasn’t the last appearance of Tron, Disney put him back in the screen once again in the game “Kingdom Hearts 2” made in association with Square-enix, which was a very strange experience, since you switch back and forth from a Final Fantasy themed world, to pop-art neon-overdozed old-school-arcade-music-themed flashy Tron world.