Film Studies 2159A/B Lecture 10: Film Lecture 10
28 Jun 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Screening 10; Lecture 10
Tuesday, March 20, 2018 2:05 PM
Screening: TRON
• Tron puts blood into the little creatures on the video screen
• Tron makes Star Wars look like a primer of make believe
Hybridity
• Look how technology is portrayed
○Dystopic
Lecture
Bronze/Dark Era
• Bronze/Dark Era 1970 – 1988
○Period characterized by a decline in critical and commercial successes after Walt Disney’s death
(1966).
Selling Tron
•Tron used nostalgic settings, familiar plots and traditional techniques along with new, “edgy” characters
and CGI effects
Product Placement/ "User Power"
• Recycling Footage and characters from earlier films and embedding earlier Disney characters into films
was frequent not only during war-time production, but also in the 1960s and beyond for financial reasons.
Recycling footage and characters also creates more “Disney magic” for fans who try to decipher a vast
world of intertextual references and “Easter eggs” embedded in each film
Midway Games
• PAC-MAN was licensed for distribution in the United States by Midway Games in 1980.
• TRON was also a coin-operated arcade video-game manufactured and distributed by Bally Midway in
1982 [video-game based on an earlier script of the film].
• According to some reports, Tron the video-game made $45,000,000 by 1983
• According to the New York Times, 800 arcade cabinets were sold in 1982
Users/Operators
• Hand of the user on the joy stick of the video game console can be likened to the “lightning hand” of the
animator that introduces some of the Laugh-O-Gram shorts.
• In Tron the human “user” is also the creative programmer, an Ersatz “director” and creator of
entertainment.
Selling Tron/ "User Power"
•As Telotte argues, the studio when making Tron tried to maximize viewers and reach both traditional
audiences and the new joy stick generation by speaking in conventional and new ways: “See the movie.
Play the game.”
•Spectators are users, like Flynn … instead of the “lightning hand” of the animator inserted into the
“Laugh-O’Gram”, here happy hands on joy sticks frame this hybrid screen entertainment…
Commercial Tie-Ins
•“See the movie. Play the game!” Video games allow users to playfully “control” technology
• Commercial tie-ins for the film included not only video games and glow in the dark yo-yos with “video
action”, but also Tron action figures and light cycles made by TOMY of Japan.
Simulating Reality
• Intellivision video-game advertisement stresses how computer animation could become more “life-like”
• Stresses smoother and “more life-like movement” as well as “more realism”…. “real players” and “ real
thing”
• Like the aesthetic play of the multiplane camera
Users/Operators vs. Machine "Mimesis"
• Disney Research, an international network of research labs to "push the scientific and technological
forefront of innovation" is currently working on what it calls a "hybrid hydrostatic transmission and
human-safe haptic telepresence robot." It can do things like play a xylophone, thread string through the
eye of a needle and play catch with a balloon.
Disney Robotics
• The robot essentially mimics the moves of its puppet master, an operator viewing everything through the
eyes (i.e. cameras) of the robot.
• •"The operator is visually immersed in the robot's physical workspace," the researchers wrote in a
technical paper for the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
Disney and Sci-Fi
•Tron said to be the “first computerized movie”, a “love-letter written to the electronic age” was Disney’s
second big-budget sci-fi film
• •Already in the 1950s, with Disney’s transition to the new medium of TV the studio began to tackle sci-fi
themes.
• •Eyes in Outer Space (1959) partially funded by the US Department of Defense was a “Science Factual
Presentation” with Sci-Fi interests: technological surveillance (“3 Robot Satellites train their sensitive
television eyes on all parts of the earth”) and the need to constantly screen and monitor data to gain
mastery over nature (“subdue the rain” etc.). The film argues “in the foreseeable future, we will conquer
more than violent storms. We will turn the destructive elements of today into new sources of power,
shaping the land on which we live. All mankind will benefit. Arid wastelands will be made green and
fertile and vast frozen areas will become productive. To this end, man-made satellites will probe the
secrets of the skies. They will be our eyes in outer space.”
Disney "Troops" Occupy Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
•Tron was the first film to be shot in the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory funded by the
Department of Energy; the multi-storey ENCOM laser bay was the target area for the largest laser in the
United States at the time, the SHIVA solid-state multi-beamed laser.
• The Department of Energy records about the filming at the Lawrence Livermore National Library note:
“Already the presence of the Disney troops was vaccinating this serious business of scientific
research with fun and good will. Disney films always let Good conquer Evil. Abundant magic helps
not just the heroes and heroines but the villain as well. The world is always a better place by the
end.”
• “The Walt Disney people were dead serious about creating make believe while working in the midst of
laser beams and the real electronic computer technology upon which modern man is betting his survival.
Perhaps truth is humankind’s sense of humor and make believe is our salvation.”
Futuristic Adventure Motion Picture
• To differentiate his picture from his first big-budget sci-fi flick/financial failure (Black Hole) and instead
build on his previous successes (making “adventure” films or “True-Life Adventures”), Tron was
advertised as a “Futuristic Adventure Motion Picture”. Like Song of the South and Perri, Reluctant
Dragon and Fantasia, it combined live-action film with “animation” (here computer-generated
animation)
Tron/Box-Office Returns
• Disney Studio was trying to compete with Stars Wars (1977), which grossed $460,998,807 during its
domestic release
•Black Hole, according to Telotte, grossed 25.4 million during its domestic release.
•Tron hurt Disney stock and only performed marginally better than Black Hole. It went over-budget and
made only 33 million at the time of its domestic release (production cost was 17-20 million).
Tron
• Film foregrounds the theme of how to “hold,” “harness” and control technology and how to imagine
“alternate realities” (some of the film’s binary codes: real world vs. virtual world/physical world vs.
simulated world/inside vs. outside the “grid” – users/hackers vs. corporate slackers). Fear of AI/artificial
intelligence, but technology is abetted by/created by weak individuals… what is the AI discourse in the
film?
Threat of Technology
• The film also poses the question: Could we be swallowed up/consumed by the digital or our own
computer or what would it mean to be controlled/animated/used by our own technological devices?
• •The theme of media technology, programming, the proliferation of screens, and media consumption
returns in Wall-E, another Disney film about technology, industry and consumers. [See: Hermuth, “Life,
Love, and Programming: The Culture and Politics of WALL-E and Pixar Computer Animation”]
• Fear of IMMERSION …
○Someone is sucked into a digital realm and has to battle it out with computer programs (anticipating
themes that unfold in the Matrix trilogy).
Corporate High-Finance Game
• Some reviews even highlighted how the 31-yr old director Lisberger complained that he felt he had
become trapped in a corporate high-finance game or “hype machine” after hearing about the 4.8 million
the film made the first weekend of its release and then hearing about stock investors who disliked the film.
He said he wanted the film “to be discovered by film audiences first, not Wall Street.”
• But Lisberger, the young director of the film still praised the film and stated with Tron “Disney is now
coming of age.” The studio is “attracting an audience they never got before. They are on the cutting edge
of technology.” (Dale Pollock, “Trapped in the Hype Machine: Lisberger,” Los Angeles Times, July 13
1982)
Lisberger
• objected to what he saw as a B-theater run for Tron
• objected to the marketing and distribution of the film, in particular the lack of newspaper and television
advertising before the movie’s release
"Will the Real Disney Now Stand Up?"
•Tron was released the same weekend as the animated feature The Secret of NIHM. Many animators such as
Don Bluth who had left the Disney studio in a walk out (14 animators left in 1979, frustrated with the
executives who didn’t support their work after Walt’s death in 1966) were the masterminds behind NIHM.
It was their first animated feature. The Disney studio suffered after Bluth left. Many newspapers saw the
premiere of both films as a critical duel between old and new Disney animators… (“Duel of Two
Disneys,” Washington Post, July 10, 1982)
Critical Receptions
• Film received numerous awards (Saturn Award at the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror,
Best Costumes and Best Special Visual Effects at the BAFTA Awards) and was nominated for two
Oscars for Best Sound and Best Costume Design and also nominated for the Young Artists Award for
Best Family Feature - Animated, Musical or Fantasy.
• Some reviews, however, were mixed and pointed to shortcomings in the screenplay
Weak Story … "Frailty of Script"
• "Disney’s love-letter to an electronic age” … struck an evil bargain: dazzling special effects were bought
at the price of “character, subtlety, a well-told story, clearly understood action and humor”. -Speaks to
joystick generation, but not to non-gamers
• No humor –”what seems most extraordinary for a Disney film is that in all this world of glowing newness
opportunities for humor are overlooked again and again.” “at its core it is dead cold”
• Computer world is confusing… “whole game becomes confusing before it is even played out”
• Users inside the computer look like “characters only a necrophilliac could love” (Sheila Benson, “High-
Tech Tron,” Los Angeles Times, July 9 1982)
Tron's Weaknesses/Strengths
• Discuss Kerman’s critique of the film. How does she describe the film’s weaknesses? Kerman, pgs 195-
197
○Consistent virtual world and confusion that is caused when you enter the computer
○Tron failed to create a consistent virtual world
○Geographically confusing
○Confusing and erratic
○Weak writing
○No consistency in virtual world
○No binary distinction as to who is a programmer and who is a user
○Stronger contrast between virtual and real world
○Frisbee is tacky and cheap
○Didn’t fully take advantage of special effects
○Stole too much of Star Wars
○Unsuccessful hybrid of real world and fantasy
• David Steritt in The Christian Science Monitor (July 15 1982) says of the “razzle-dazzle entertainment” –
“When you look beneath the action and technique, though, the epic is less impressive. At its best
moments, it has a philosophical touch, as electronic circuits ponder the meaning of existence and debate
