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This article is dedicated to the Trivia in TRON and facts about the movie, its cast and crew, and just about every thing else involved with the movie.

Random trivia, facts and continuities about...[]

The Programs[]

Tron[]

Overused tron shot

Repeated Tron close-up.

  • There are three close-up shots of Tron that are exactly the same, with the exception of differences in the background and the fact that one of the shots is played in reverse. These shots appear chronologically in TRON at 1:04:06, 1:19:52, and 1:20:15.
  • Tron mysteriously disappears in thin air at time-mark 1:25:17.

MCP[]

  • At time-mark 1:23:50, The MCP's forehead is missing.

Sark[]

Yori[]

  • Yori usually wears a skullcap, but for reasons unknown, she wears a regular male helmet instead while on the Solar Sailer.

Sark's Lieutenant[]

Neckdetail

Sark's Lieutenant has neck circuitry.

The Production[]

  • During the ENCOM exterior shooting (where the giant door was), there had been radioactive spillage near the shoot. Cindy Morgan even stepped in a contaminated area and had to have her shoes decontaminated.

The original circuitry colors[]

Yellowspinningguard

A guard with yellow circuitry. This image was from test animation shown to Disney executives to convince them that the backlight animation will work.

Spinningguard

The same guard as above but with regular red circuitry. This is from Tron.

The original plan was for the circuit lines of the "good" programs to glow yellow, while the "bad" programs would have blue circuits. During the production process, this was changed to good programs appearing as blue and evil ones appearing as red. Some of the original coloring remains in the finished film, mostly in tank programs (Clu has yellow lines on his light suit, and all of Sark's tank commanders are pale green). Flynn too takes on this greenish tint after he crashes the recognizer and gets knocked out; when he gets up, he returns to the normal blue.

When asked about the color change on the Movies and Stuff podcast Steven Lisberger said:

...we went back and forth on the color scheme several times. And again, it was very tough because we could not do sample artwork of the final look of the film...I think we felt that we weren't that interested in yellow. It was pretty much always blue versus red. And we felt that even though red was more emotional, the blue was easier to look at and easier to be with. So we decided to stay with blue characters.

Some traces of the original color scheme, along with other changes from early versions of the script, can be seen in the novelization by Brian Daley: for example, Ram's light cycle in the book is green, but in the movie it rezzes up as red.

The Animation[]

  • At the time, computers could generate static images, but could not automatically put them into motion. Thus, the coordinates for each image, such as a light cycle, had to be entered for each individual frame. It took 600 coordinates to get 4 seconds of film. Each of these coordinates was entered into the computer by hand by the filmmakers.
  • Many Disney animators refused to work on this movie because they feared that computers would put them out of business. In fact, 22 years later Disney closed its hand-drawn animation studio in favor of CGI animation.
Cartoonbg

Traditional animation appears for the background of some shots in the movie.

  • Despite the use of CGI throughout the movie, there is some traditional animation in the movie, most noticeably the Gridbugs that briefly appear near the end of the movie. Other instances include the moving background when Flynn is flying the recognizer and the parts of the destroyed bridge during the light cycle chase.

The reason why traditional animation was used instead of CGI for backgrounds was because the technology didn't exist yet to matte live-action footage onto CGI animation.

  • Triple-I created many complex shots for Tron and one of them was the scene of Sark's Carrier derezzing. According to Richard Taylor on Tron 20th Anniversary DVD's audio commentary, Triple-I didn't have the capability to create vector outlines (unlike MAGI), so when Sark's Carrier derezzed into vector outlines, each line had to be modeled into a solid object, which was very pain-staking.
  • The face choreography for the MCP was mostly done by Triple-I's Bill Dungan, Larry Malone, Malcom McMillan and Art Durinsky and features some of the earliest CGI human-like facial animation in history, which was quite a major feat in 1982.
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