Trivia

Peter O'Toole was approached to play Dillinger/Sark, but after reading the script he became very interested in playing Tron.

All the live action that occurred inside the computer was filmed in black and white, and colorized later with photographic and rotoscopic techniques.

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.

HIDDEN MICKEY: In the "solar sailer" sequence, you'll see, for a brief moment, the silhouette of Mickey Mouse on the ground made to look like part of the terrain.

TRON is also a debugging command in the BASIC programming language, meaning "TRace ON." However, Steven Lisberger, has stated in interviews that he took the name from the word "electronic," and did not know about the BASIC command until later.

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 lightcycle, 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.

Composer Wendy Carlos' score for the film was unavailable on CD for many years due to the severe degradation of the original analogue master tapes. By the time of the film's 20th Anniversary, techniques had been developed which allowed the tapes to be temporarily restored to a playable condition for digital re-mastering.

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. Hand-drawn animation was ultimately resumed at Disney at the behest of new creative director John Lasseter, also head of Pixar- ironically a computer animation company.

While computer animation was used in several scenes, the technology did not exist for a shot to contain both live actors and computer animation. Live-action shots were combined with hand-drawn animation. Strong editing, such as with the light cycle chase, created an apparently seamless blend of actors and computer animation.

In this film produced by the Walt Disney Company, a man named Walter started what became a huge company from his garage. In real life Walt Disney did this.

The British rock group Supertramp was to contribute to the movie's soundtrack but was unable to due to previous obligations.

Due to the poor return at the box office, following this film and its predecessor The Black Hole, Disney Studios did not make another live subject film for ten years.

The building featured as "Flynn's" is in reality the historic Hull Building at the Northwest corner of Washington Blvd and Watseka Ave in Culver City, CA. The street sign for Watseka Avenue can be seen when Lora and Alan step inside "Flynn's" to warn him about Dillinger. As of 2010, the location portrayed as "Flynn's" was occupied by a restaurant.

Bruce Boxleitner's character is named Alan Bradley. Allen-Bradley is the brand-name of a line of Factory Automation Equipment manufactured by Rockwell Automation.

According to Hollywood Treasure: Comic Con-Quest, Cindy Morgan traded her Yori costume for a Lexus.

Co-writer Bonnie MacBird first studied computer programming with paper and pencil in the 1960s during junior high school. While attending Stanford she made punch cards for use on a PDP-11 minicomputer at night when students were allowed access, and played a rudimentary version of Pong with lights on the computer's control board. Before joining Steven Lisberger's company, MacBird worked as a mid-level story executive at Universal Studios where she tried unsuccessfully to get their story department to put their records in a database. It was MacBird's suggestion to Lisberger that they get computer pioneer Alan Kay as a consultant on the film they were developing. MacBird sent versions of the script via acoustic coupler to Xerox Palo Alto Research Center where Kay helped her edit them on the company's early version of a personal computer called the Alto. MacBird believes this makes her the first screenwriter to edit a screenplay on a computer, but chose the closest approximation to industry standard Courier font available so the studio would think it was typewritten. The character of Alan Bradley was based in part on Kay, and, along with the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, the lab in the film was based on Kay's lab at Xerox PARC. Kay and MacBird married in 1983.

The portable gaming device that Flynn briefly plays while Alan and Lora are talking to him in his room above the arcade is a Coleco Electronic Quarterback.

In the scene when Sark strikes the programme he is talking with to the floor, the Pac Man "gubbed" sound is used.

In the novelization, the final printout Flynn gets is very different from the one shown in the movie; it is more detailed and complicated, shown as a database-like list, and it shows evidence that Dillinger stole several game programs, not just Space Paranoids. The filmmakers may have originally had this list in the film and decided to simplify it so the audience would have no trouble knowing exactly what the printout says. The shots of the printout - and the readout on Dillingers desk computer - are inserts, and a wider shot of Dillinger sinking into his chair looking at the screen clearly shows a readout identical to the one in the novelization. (See also Goofs)