It asks whether Lego is about centrally-designed, glued-together Lord Business adult world, or about a creative world for kids.

Seen in this light, the most direct modern analogue of Tron is not Tron: Legacy, but The Lego Movie. So on another level, Tron is basically about young computer hobbyists versus a gigantic corporate central computer. Contrast this with hobbyist computing, a world of individual creativity, individual control, decentralised, colourful, fun. Which is to say, many teenagers’ nightmare world. It’s a centralized, corporate, conformist, colourless world. In that era, the corporate computing world, the adult world, is full of men (almost entirely men) in identical blue suits, selling big mainframe computers to do stunningly boring things (mostly financial things). The second element of 80s culture is the very stark distinction between corporate computing and home computing. This is not a new concept, it’s just Alice down the rabbit hole, but in a new context. So on one level, that’s really all that Tron is about, the simple question of what it would be like to be inside a videogame. These spaceships you fly around, do they have a crew? What’s their life like? What do they do when you’re not playing the game? So at a certain point it becomes natural to wonder what it is really like inside the game. If you go to the arcade enough, you become very familiar with the games, and when playing them you kind of disappear into the game. Imagine the daily routine, where adults rush you to go to school, and then you sit in a desk in a row being lectured at by adults in school for hours, but afterschool, you get to go to the local arcade and for an hour or so you’re flying a spaceship, shooting lasers. Tron, as a 1982 movie, hits on exactly this arcade escape moment in culture. In the 80s this would manifest in classical ways such as the escape into books, particularly science fiction and fantasy, either at home or by escaping to the library, but also in new ways, such as playing Dungeons & Dragons and in going to the arcade to play videogames (and eventually playing videogames at home, once home computers became more widely available).

There is a history of young men, particularly of an intellectual bent, finding ways to escape the reality of their constrained lives. The first is video arcade and videogame culture. (Young male because that’s the reality of the culture at the time.) I won’t discuss Tron: Legacy because I found it an odd pseudoreligious mishmash.įor the FT discussion of Tron, I think there were some interesting ideas, in particular Tron as a retelling of The Wizard of Oz, but I think that they missed two key elements of 80s culture, in particular 80s young male videogamer / computer user culture. The Financial Times Alphachat podcast had a go at reviewing Tron and Tron: Legacy.

Tron legacy full movie library