Friday, July 31, 2009

Friday Video: TRON, then and now!


When TRON first came out I was 11. My dad had just bought our first PC, an Apple IIe with two 5.25" floppy disk drives. No mouse, no GUI, no Internet, no web. TRON and WarGames were the first two movies to open my imagination to the networked world, as well as to video gaming, virtual worlds and a plethora of other computer-based concepts.

With the recent release of the trailer for TRON Legacy, I just couldn't pass the opportunity to share my excitement with all of you! Here are three videos. First the TRON Legacy trailer, next a similar lightbike scene from the original TRON, and last but not least, the TRON Legacy Comic Con 2009 promo video.

Enjoy!


TRON Legacy Trailer



TRON Lightbike Scene



TRON Legacy Comic Con 2009

4 comments:

haywire said...

One word:

EPIC!

Pai said...

The thing that's so impressive about the original movie is that they rendered all the CG in it by hand in DOS. No GUIs or handy modeling programs like we have today. It was quite a feat.

Erbo Evans said...

Well, actually, most of the original graphics for the original Tron were rendered with the "Super Foonly F-1," a variant of the DEC PDP-10. It was the fastest PDP-10 ever made, but only one was ever built. It ran at a 10 MHz clock speed with an 18-bit address bus and maybe 4M-words of memory (somewhat over 16 Mb, as it used 36-bit memory words). I'm sure pretty much any PC-type machine from the 386 on up could have run rings around it. And it ran, not DOS, but a variant of the TENEX operating system called "Foonex."

Still, that doesn't take away from the impressive nature of the Tron computer graphics. (There's less computer graphic work in the movie than you might think; only about 15-20 minutes' worth. Most of the rest of the effects were done with hand animation techniques even more labor-intensive than standard cel animation.)

jamenta said...

Yikes. TRON goes so way back, I can't even believe I existed then.

How sci fi has grown since then ...

Still remember all those Star War premiers. The lines, the hype. They weren't just films ... they were historical events! :D