Trivia

While the film was a commercial failure, the arcade video games based on it proved to be a tremendous hit and actually out-grossed the film.

To inspire the actors, arcade games were placed on the production sets and could be played during downtime. Jeff Bridges apparently was the most adept at the games and found it hard to tear himself away from a game to shoot a scene.

Jeff Bridges produced too much of a bulge in the crotch area in his computer outfit, so he was forced to wear a dance belt to conceal it.

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.

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.

The ENCOM laser bay was real. It was actually the target bay for the twenty-beam SHIVA solid-state laser facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It was used for nuclear fusion research in the late seventies and early eighties, and was capable of delivering up to 28 trillion watts of power on target.

The DVD commentary notes that there is almost no camera movement whatsoever in any of the shots of the electronic world with live-action characters in them. They brought in a camera and tripod with metal batwings attached, and literally nailed the camera to the floor; the camera was so locked off that "it wouldn't move even if hit by a car". The few shots with live-action characters which actually have camera movement (about a dozen shots in all) involve simple graphics or animation, such as one-color backlighting.

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

The "pulsing" flicker in some scenes in the computer world were the accidental result of a mix up during production. Each B&W 65mm frame of the film was printed on 20"x16" Kodalith high contrast film as high contrast positives which were then used to print as high contrast negatives. These positives and negatives were then colorized and used in the film. The Kodalith was produced by Kodak in the necessary size as a special order and the film boxes numbered in order of each batch produced so that there was a consistent film speed if used in order. However, this was misunderstood by the Tron crew and they were used in any random order which resulted in some frames being brighter/darker than others and resulted in the flickers as the film speed varied. Once this was found out, the film was used in order of production to minimize the effect, but in the end the producers actually added in more flickers and "zinger" sounds to represent the computer world glitching as Steven Lisberger described it. However, he digitally removed them from the 2011 Blu-ray release as they were not in his original vision of the film and he believed they detracted from the quality.

Due to the poor return at the box office, following this film and its predecessor The Black Hole (1979), Disney Studios did not make another live subject film for ten years.

In the initial scenes with Flynn at the arcade, he is playing a game he invented called Space Paranoids. The game he is playing bears remarkable resemblance to 3-D graphics game engines, which would not be invented for ten more years.

Those are actual Frisbees that the characters throw around within the game grid.

In total, 569 people worked on the film.

Originally released in the summer of 1982, the abysmal return at the box office caused it to be re-released in February 1983, which produced even worse results.

Jeff Bridges (Kevin Flynn / Clu) and Bruce Boxleitner (Alan Bradley / Tron) are the only actors to appear in both Tron (1982) and TRON: Legacy (2010).

The building featured as "Flynn's" is in reality the historic Hull Building at the Northwest corner of Washington Boulevard and Watseka Avenue in Culver City, California. 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.

Made at a time that the Disney Studios were having financial problems, having had a string of box office losses. It was against this background that the studio started taking some real risks, with films like this, the real life thriller Night Crossing (1982) and the horror movie The Watcher in the Woods (1980). Ultimately none of these films helped the studio's finances but it did pave the way for the creation of Touchstone Pictures two years later which was tasked with being the adult arm of the company and which had an enormous hit with their very first release, Splash (1984).

Although now regarded as a special effects milestone, in truth only about 20 minutes of Tron (1982) consists of its highly influential animation techniques.

When Tron emerges between two walls following RAM's death, they appear to be covered in circuitry but are actually aerial WWII reconnaissance shots of Dresden Germany.

Steven Lisberger and his producing partner Donald Kushner set up their own animation studio to achieve the visual effects that they hoped to depict in the film. They then hawked their test footage around all the main Hollywood studios until Walt Disney agreed to finance the film.

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

Various computer animation firms bid for the opportunity to work on this movie, yielding the four that were ultimately selected: Magi Synthavision of Elmsford, NY; Digital Effects Inc., in New York City; Information International, Inc. (Triple I), in Culver City, CA; and Robert Abel and Associates in Los Angeles. By connecting a television monitor to a telephone wire at Magi in NY, filmmakers on the West Coast were able to immediately view the work and request adjustments that could be completed within the same day. This eliminated the need to ship prints back and forth across the country, saving time and money.

The "User" played by Dan Shor is listed in the credits only as "Popcorn Co-Worker", but information revealed about the possible TRON: Legacy (2010) sequel reveals this character's actual name to be Roy Kleinberg.

The film was a major influence on John Lasseter.

Composer Wendy Carlos was a frequent collaborator of director Stanley Kubrick. She wrote the scores for Kubrick's films A Clockwork Orange (1971) [credited as Walter Carlos] and The Shining (1980).

This was the first film to make extensive use of computer imagery.

Debbie Harry was among the actresses who were screen tested for the role of Lora/Yori.

Yori changed the head cover for a head cover, Cindy Morgan why the change in headpiece in a statement: "The costume was designed by Moebius, and who's going to question Moebius? But I was wearing a printed piece of chamois cloth that had a hard wire around the rim. All day everyday the wardrobe department needed to pull the headpiece tight toward my face. It was glued to my skin with some sort of adhesive. Weeks of this adhesive being pulled on my skin cause blisters. Then the headpiece was glued to the blisters and people needed to pull on the blisters. The day came where I could feel the blisters open up, and I said "that's it I'm wearing a hockey helmet like the guys!" Luckily I was just boarding the Solar Sailor and it seemed to work. I loved working on #Tron! But I could only bleed so much for the love of my work"

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

Bruce Boxleitner (Tron) and Peter Jurasik (Crom) would later star together in another Science Fiction cult favorite: Babylon 5. Additionally, David Warner (Ed Dillinger/Sark/MCP) guest starred in season 1 of that show.

One of the inspirations for the film was Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus.

Some of the popular video games at the time were Ms. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong Jr., Zaxxon, Dig Dug, Pole Position, Q*bert, and fulfilling its own destiny, Tron.

As cited in "The Making of Tron" by Richard Patterson in the August 1982 issue of American Cinematographer, originally, the cyberspace sequences were going to be entirely animated. However, discussions between the film's VFX supervisor, Richard Taylor, and director Steven Lisberger gave birth to the idea of using live-action photography as the basis for backlit animation in the "computer sequences."

Because so few 65mm cameras were available at the time, flaws in the equipment were worked around. The commentators joke about finding sand from Lawrence of Arabia in the equipment and one of the viewfinders was broken, requiring the cameraman to point and shoot without being sure of what was in frame.

As Flynn sits down at Lora's computer terminal to being hacking into Encom, he says, "Like the man says, there's no problems, only solutions." The man he's referring to is John Lennon, who says this in his song "Watching the Wheels".

The look of the costumes was conceptualized by the great French cartoonist Jean "Moebius" Giraud, who consulted on Tron for three months.

While backlighting (which also went by the names "underlighting" and "bipack glow") has a long tradition within 2D animation, the notion of applying the technique to live-action was wholly unique to Tron. Indeed, before he and his team migrated to California, Lisberger's studio created an early concept for a backlit character (named "Tron," for "electronic"). As Lisberger describes in Tron's making-of documentary: "Everybody was doing backlit animation in the '70s it was the disco look. And we thought: what if we had this character that was a neon line? And that was our Tron warrior." The resulting 30-second animation was used to promote both the studio and a series of rock radio stations. "People weren't doing backlit characters. They were using it as an effect to make things glow and pulse and logos. What we did was we tried to do a character that was backlit."

During the films development, Steven Lisberger got to know several pioneering programmers. Bruce Boxleitner's character of Alan (and by extension, that of Tron) was based on the Dynabook creator Alan Kay.

David Warner played Dillinger as well as Sark. He also was the voice of the MCP, which was modulated in post-production.

The laser sequences were shot at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, which housed the largest laser in the world at the time. They shot the scenes in the linear accelerator using mostly practical lighting from available fluorescents, which was a tight fit with the 65mm camera equipment. At the time of the commentary recording, this was the only film allowed to shoot there.

Depending on the lighting levels, the depth of field of the 65mm equipment was sometimes as small as half an inch, causing various workarounds for the shots. In the scene above Flynn's arcade, light stands were used as braces under actors' clothes to keep them in the exact position so they didn't go out of focus. Later in the film, when multiple actors are seen on-screen together in the computer world, they were shot as separate elements and composited together.

The massive security door where Flynn, Alan, and Lora sneak into Encom is a real radiation door at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. Lisberger saw the door during a tour of the facility and rewrote the scene to accommodate it into the film.

The costumes were completely white with black lines on them, designed to have light sources put in them with visual effects. After being shot on 65mm film, a photo-rotoscope machine projected them to print high-contrast positive and negative images. The elements were manipulated separately and later composited back to a final image.

Approximately 75,000 frames were used in the animation and compositing process, which was a huge number for a normal film. However, because the film was produced at Disney, this was not an overwhelming number of frames for its animation department. With all the passes and compositing needed, that number grew to about half a million. In the end, there were 1,100 special effects shots in the film, 900 involving human beings within a digital environment.

The information discs on the back of all programs were actually Frisbees, which used hand-drawn animation for their effects. The production hired Frisbee coach Sam Schatz to train the actors.

Almost every shot in the film that uses human actors against CGI backgrounds is a locked-down shot. This was because there was no way to build the computer-generated background with the proper perspective and depth while the camera moved. In fact, grips had to nail the tripod to the floor for many scenes. Conversely, when a shot was full CGI, it had what Steven Lisberger describes as "a cornucopia of camera movement."

During the Solar Sailer's flight over the virtual landscape, it flies over a "lake" in the shape of Mickey Mouse. This image is bigger and in obvious profile, which was even more obvious than the common "hidden Mickey" found throughout Disney productions and theme parks.

When Sark is hit in the head with Tron's information disc, clock parts were dropped out of his helmet to look like electronic brains. Steven Lisberger claims this is the shot that gave the movie a PG rating. "Any time you have brains spilled, electronic or not," he says.

The live-action cyberspace sequences were shot in Los Angeles, including on sound stages on the Disney lot. In an original two-minute feasibility test, an actor in a gray suit was placed against a white background. At the behest of cinematographer Bruce Logan (who worked on the visual effects of both Star Wars: A New Hope and 2001: A Space Odyssey), a white background just wasn't feasible. As Logan puts it in the 2002 documentary The Making of Tron, there wouldn't be "enough lights in Hollywood" to properly light an all-white set. And so, the all-white void was swapped out for an all-black one. The result: actors in white costumes with black vector lines shot against a pitch-black stage. In the same making-of documentary, Jeff Bridges remembers feeling "bombarded by color" every time he'd exit the soundstage. Even with the void swap, per American Cinematographer, the production was using so much current to bounce light on-set that the City of Burbank supposedly called the studio to complain. One other takeaway from the feasibility test was the realization that they would have to shoot on a large format negative because even a 35mm anamorphic wouldn't be able to handle the demands of compositing. At Logan's behest, they switched to 65mm. The computer segments of the film were shot in black-and-white because, per Logan, this was the most "elegant" way to do it. This footage was then enlarged for blow-ups (~ 20" x 12") and then transferred into large format, continuous tone, high-contrast Kodalith transparencies that only contained opaque and transparent elements. Clear cels were then laid over each sheet and all portions of the figure (except the areas that were going to be exposed) were manually blacked out. Next, the sheets and overlays were placed over a lightbox while an above-mounted camera made passes for different elements: teeth, the whites of eyes, faces, etc. One part of this process would be to expose carefully cut-out segments to light sources to create the impression of a neon glow that was simultaneously tied to both the live-action photography and the CGI elements.

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)

The MCP's original form is shown using an Oliveri typewriter - most likely a model 3, produced from 1902-1907.

In the novelization by Brian Daley, the story ended with Tron and Yuri aboard the Solar Sailer traveling over the System and across the Game Sea as they witness the System ablaze and becoming a free system.