Adam on Tron

“As Tron evolved, it became more of an oddball project. “We were a threat to the animation department. We were a threat to the special effects department. We were a threat to conventional live-action,” Lisberger says. Star Wars made a kind of sense, with its knights and princesses. But combine the avant-garde production design of Tron (and multiple outside contractors doing CG) with what turned into a very religious script about living “programs” trying to commune with godlike “users” in the real world? In the actual real world, hardly anyone had ever touched a computer. You can see how that story would seem strange.”

“The film would never come close to an Oscar, but that doesn’t make it unimportant. Nobody talks about cyberspace anymore—sci-fi writer William Gibson had just coined the term when Tron came out. But that’s what the movie gave shape to—a “consensual hallucination,” as Gibson wrote, “bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void.” Though Gibson says he had an entirely different look in mind. “An issue of Omni magazine that contained one of my earliest cyberspace stories also contained a preview of Tron,” he says. “If Disney was into that stuff, I thought, I wasn’t even remotely ahead of the curve.””