The Dawn Of Tron
The origins of Tron go all the way back to the late 1970s. Steven Lisberger had his own animation studio, Lisberger Films, in Boston. A graduate of the city's School of the Museum of Fine Arts, he was creating animation regularly for networks such as ABC and PBS, but he had his eyes on a much bigger prize.
"When you have an animation studio you try to create your Mickey Mouse," Lisberger says. "It's no secret that animation studios survive by creating characters who are their actors they own, and we were a team of people in Boston who wanted to create a character."
On Lisberger's team were Roger Allers, who went on to direct The Lion King, and John Norton. Norton came up with an idea of a warrior who was made of neon. They called him Tron, but they didn't have a setting for him. Then one night Lisberger went to visit his in-laws, and everyone was crouched around the TV, playing Pong.
"They kept referring to the games, 'Play the game,' and since I had been working on a project called "Animalympics," the idea of games to me meant more than that. It meant Olympic or gladiatorial games," the director said. "Then I thought, 'Well, our warrior should be in a gladiatorial game setting.' From there the whole thing started to snowball." It seems only fitting, then, that a film like Tron was conceived while playing the first video game ever created.
Indeed, video games would play a central role in the film. Tron would be about a young software programmer named Kevin Flynn who is sucked inside a computer world dominated by the evil Master Control Program, or MCP. Flynn must team up with freedom-fighting programs, including a heroic program named Tron, to defeat the MCP, which has enslaved thousands of computer programs and forced them to do battle with one another. But they weren't going compete with guns and lasers, Schwarzenegger-style. They would be put to the test in Olympic-like competitions that resembled sports such as Jai Alai. And programs weren't killed - they were simply "de-rezzed."
Lisberger hated violent films and refused to make one with Tron. "One of the things I'm most proud about in Tron is there are no guns in the movie - it's a killer Frisbee!" he said. "I mean, try to make an action adventure movie without a gun. I dare you."
Lisberger Films were originally going to make Tron themselves. They had just finished Animalympics, a spoof on the Olympic games with animated animal athletes (Billy Crystal, Gilda Radner and Harry Shearer provided the voices). It was going to run in segments during the 1980 Olympics between athletic events, but when America boycotted the games, the project fell apart and Lisberger Films no longer had the financial means to make Tron in-house. They reportedly took Tron to Warner Brothers, MGM and Columbia, who all turned it down, before it wound up at Disney.
Science fiction films that are heavily visual are often a tough sell. When George Lucas tried to set up Star Wars, he had a hard time drumming up any interest because it was completely unintelligible in treatment form. The Wachowski Brothers reportedly had to create extensive graphic novel style storyboards for The Matrix before Warner Brothers really got it. When Lisberger and company went out to sell Tron, they were ready.
"We had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in the project when we went to Disney," he said. "We had it storyboarded, we had designs, we had budgets, we had staff, we had schedules, we had sample reels - I mean, we had everything but money."
