I am getting so revved up for this motion picture. This is going to be one awesome film and I can’t wait to see it. Okay, you know how Amanda Talar was so excited about meeting Candace Bushnell? Multiply that by about six and you’ll know what I’m talking about.
There were several events at the recent San Diego Comic Con involving TRON: Legacy, the sequel to the 1982 Disney cyber-fantasy film. Fans were sent on a scavenger hunt around the Comic Con, where they eventually received special movie-related prizes and goodies.
Well, I couldn’t get to San Diego, and I didn’t think it would have been worth it for me to squeeze in with 50,000 people in a 20,000-capacity facility.
What I did find, however, were several new online games devoted to TRON: Legacy, as well as a brand new movie trailer.
First off, here’s the trailer, and take note – you are actually seeing Jeff Bridges recreating his role as Kevin Flynn – with digital technology that actually de-ages Bridges. Take a look. It’s pretty smooth.
This is definitely getting better and better.
With that in mind, let me alert you to two new online TRON: Legacy websites. From the people involved in the flynnlives.com project, they’ve created a faux Japanese website for the multinational ENCOM corporation (for those who haven’t seen TRON, ENCOM is the electronics company Flynn worked for in the original film). The website, encomgames.jp, will take you to the playable demo game of Space Paranoids – and, as a bonus, it will take you to the game “Circuit Cycles.”
Yes, we get to play a variation of the light cycles game.
In Circuit Cycles, you must direct your light cycle to connect a series of dots – then, you must use another light cycle to connect a second series of dots, without crossing the light trail of the first light cycle. It’s easy at first, but it takes some serious brain power to get past all 32 levels. But if you do pass all 32 levels, and you log in with your flynnlives.com account, you get a special prize in the mail – a series of postcards featuring 1980’s art from ENCOM’s video games like Vice Squad, Kraz-Bot, Space Paranoids and Circuit Cycles. Way way cool.
Not to be outdone, Disney has created a game on its official TRON website that allows you to navigate a light cycle through the virtual computer world of TRON, including visiting several sites pertinent to the film. You can customize your character and your light cycle – and any energy orbs you find on your journey can be redeemed for computer wallpaper or special themed downloads. And you get to hear snippets of the movie soundtrack, as created by Daft Punk. Yes, I wish Wendy Carlos was part of the soundtrack, but Daft Punk’s soundtrack is pretty awesome as it is.
Let’s see… December 2010… man oh man I can’t wait that long…
Chuck The Writer 
First, I am really looking forward to this movie as well. I did see the original in the theater and loved it.
However, I always wonder about movies like this (The A-Team, Beverly Hillbillies, Speed Racer, whatever). Who exactly is the target audience? I can’t imagine that it’s fogeys. I would guess that most younger people have never heard of the antecedents, so what specifically would prompt them to go see these movies as opposed to the studios repackaging them with a new title and marketing them as new?
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BL –
I think the target audience may have both grown up watching TRON in the theaters, or they saw it on TV in one of Disney’s movie repackaging deals (I know I’ve seen TRON on Turner Classic Movies a couple of times). It’s the same feeling you get when you watch a film like The Iron Giant. You may not have seen it in the theater upon its first release, but over time you’ve seen it either on video or on TV, and it becomes part of your appreciated movie watching experience.
The repackaging of vintage TV shows as big-budget movies is so hit-and-miss. It works sometimes (the Fugitive) and it flops most other times (did anybody know they did a big-budget film of McHale’s Navy? They did… and both people walked out of the theater).
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> take note – you are actually seeing Jeff Bridges recreating
> his role as Kevin Flynn
Hmm nope, I can’t let a Tron fan (?) say that 🙂 This is a CGI face of course, but the reconstructed character here is not Flynn, it’s CLU 2. CLU 1 was derezzed at the beginning of Tron (after raiding that high-clearance memory), and Flynn wrote a new one in Tron Legacy. Seeems CLU2 turned a bit rogue (you know, the usual virtual son against real son).
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S –
At the beginning of the movie trailer, they show Jeff Bridges with the CGI face, talking to his son in the bedroom. So they’ve done it twice – once to show a 1980’s version of Jeff Bridges, and once for the CLU 2.0. Still, that’s a pretty impressive special effects gimmick. Can you imagine if Joan Rivers got ahold of that?
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> they show Jeff Bridges with the CGI face, talking to his son
> in the bedroom.
Oh right right, sorry, was looking at the photo above. And it’s not like I didn’t watch all the trailers about 53 times 🙂
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