Geek Free Or Die

Tron is one of my favourite nerd movies. You'll see another later in this series, but I liked it when it came out in 1982 because it wasn't afraid to be geeky in terms of a story arc where an operating system is portrayed as an evil overlord enslaving programs -- perhaps a premonitious dig at Windows?

A look at the films
that have left a mark on my life.

It also innovated in a lot of other gloriously geeky ways. Several sequences were rendered with graphics from a supercomputer, making the film one of the first to extensively make use of CGI. Other sequences had to be painstakingly laid out using optical mattes and backlit animation, a process that means a lot of passes through a film printer with a high potential for error.

But when it worked, it worked.



A warning to parents: don't let your kids drive a Recognizer.



Disney made this film as it was trying to segue into more adult-oriented entertainment, away from those wacky myriad movies starring Dean Jones. Their first attempt, The Black Hole showed promise, but turned out to be a dud. Tron performed substantially better, begetting a sequel in 2010.