Very, very cool. I just picked up the Tron Special Edition DVD during lunch today, and got to watch some of it after I got home. I jumped around a bit in the film itself just to take a look at it, then bounced over to the second disc for all the special features and watched the ‘Making of Tron’ documentary. Turns out that Disney’s DVD department has done their usual stellar job, and the documentary is a full 90 minutes long! Much better than the 15-minute fluff piece that seems to be the norm for so many studios. I didn’t get through any more of the special features tonight, but I plan to soon.
Oh, and possibly one of the coolest things about this disc — right at the end of the documentary (around the 1:23:00 mark or so), there are a few quick glimpses at concept art for a possible Tron 2.0! There’s also a very cryptic teaser when you load the disc that ends with this web address — www.tronkillerapp.com. I’m not sure if it’s early promotion for Tron 2.0 or not, but it’s a very interesting site…will be fun to see where this goes in the future.
In any case, if you’re at all of the age to have been as entranced by Tron as I was, this set is a definite must-buy.
Having been just old enough to be the perfect age to be entranced by Tron when it came out, and since then becoming very interested in both computers and computer animation, being able to see all the major people behind the film reminisce about what it took to bring it to the screen was fascinating. They managed to get just about all the key people, from writer/director Steven Lisberger to actors Jeff Bridges (Kevin Flynn/Clu) and Bruce Boxleitner (Alan Bradley/Tron) to some of the artists and designers for the film to contribute, and it’s amazing to hear them talk about what it was like to work on a film that was so cutting edge at the time it was made.
Having been somewhat fascinated by computer graphics and animation for years now, the contrast between what could be done in 1980/81 and what can be done now is incredible. Being able to walk up to my movie collection and be able to trace much of the evolution of computer animation from Tron up through modern efforts such as Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, Shrek, and the Toy Story series, it’s a blast to see how far we’ve come in just 20 years.
I can remember playing with my friends on the playground at school after Tron came out. The four-square grids became our game grids, and we’d do battle with volley balls, hurling them at each other, knowing that if the ball touched one of the squares that square would disappear and we’d plummet to be de-rezzed. Racing around the playground like we were in our lightcycles — I think I even had one of the lightcycle toys at one point with the zip-cord that would send it racing across the floor.
Too, too cool. Fun stuff.
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