And yet, that summer, cinemagoers were catapulted into the digital future. Few appreciated it at the time but with 40 years’ hindsight, Steven Lisberger’s sci-fi adventure Tron was the shape of things to come: in cinema, in real life, and in virtual life. As a piece of entertainment, it is admittedly no classic, but thematically, Tron anticipates issues we are still grappling with today: artificial intelligence, digital identity, privacy, personal data, the dominance of big tech.
The timing is almost uncanny. In late 1979, while developing Tron, Lisberger and his co-writer Bonnie MacBird visited the Palo Alto Research Centre . This was a blue-sky research institute funded by Xerox, which would come to be revered as the birthplace of modern computing. Its innovations included the “graphical user interface” , a simplified form of human-computer interaction via desktop icons and the point-and-click mouse.
Lisberger still had no idea how he was going to make such a movie. “Quite a few established film people thought I was nuts, but I didn’t know enough about how Hollywood works to know that I was attempting the impossible.” At one stage, he met with Marvel Comics supremo Stan Lee, and showed him a small sample of computer animation. “He looked at me like: ‘OK kid, good luck with all that.’ He was not in the least interested.
Tron was disqualified from the best special effects Oscar, since using computers was considered ‘cheating’ “We thought this would start a revolution, but unfortunately it didn’t,” says Wedge. Lasseter immediately tried to get a computer-animated movie off the ground at Disney, first an adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, then The Brave Little Toaster but Disney ultimately fired him. So Lasseter went to work for
Loved Tron 👍👍👍👍👍