![]() ![]() It had tried to jump on the post-" Star Wars" sci-fi bandwagon with " The Black Hole," a visionary live-action movie (and the studio's first-ever PG-rated release) that nonetheless was a costly failure at the box office. In 1980, Disney was struggling, with a series of flops and an animation studio that seemed to have lost direction since Walt's death more than a decade earlier. No studio, however, would bite, until Team Lisberger offered the project to Disney.ģ. Lisberger and his partners spent $300,000 putting together a package meant to attract the interest of investors and Hollywood studios, a package that included a script, storyboarded scenes for the entire film, and an effects demo reel. "Tron" was the brainchild of animator Steven Lisberger, conceived in the mid-1970s when he first saw the early video game "Pong." He grasped that the computer technology that moved the primitive rackets and ball of that game could be used for animation, which led him to conceive of the story's video arcade game-inspired plot.Ģ. ![]() Hook up your handset modem and floppy disk drive, grab your video arcade quarters, and travel back in time to learn the "Tron" truth.ġ. Still, as familiar as "Tron" and its world seem to us today, there's a lot you may not know about the movie, from how its still-astonishing effects were created to the shocking reason it was snubbed at the Oscars. Oh, and besides being the launch point of digital filmmaking, it also told a geeky-cool story about a programmer sucked into his own video game, a tale that became a franchise that included a sequel, an animated TV series, and several video games.ĭreamed up before everyone had PCs, smartphones, or connections to the internet, "Tron's" vision of humans literally swallowed by their own technology seems eerily prescient. ![]() In the long term, of course, "Tron" not only led Disney to become a studio known for more than just reassuring family entertainment, but it also led to a revolution in computer-generated imagery that would redefine how movies are made. And in every respect, that gamble was a colossal failure. Thirty-five years ago this week (on July 9, 1982), Disney's release of " Tron" was a bold gamble, an experiment in new storytelling technology and a bid to reinvent the then-adrift studio. ![]()
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