A friend forwarded me this email from Change.org, which urges readers to take action by signing a petition that asks LEGO to advertise all product lines to both boys and girls. This is pretty reasonable — after all, there are girls who love LEGO Star Wars, Harry Potter, City, etc. But man, there is no better way to totally discredit yourself and your position than to base your call-to-arms on totally misleading, spurious information. Let’s take a look at this email, shall we?

Iconic toy brand LEGO recently launched a new line of toys meant just for girls — but two young women, Bailey Shoemaker-Richards and Stephanie Cole, think the products are unfairly “dumbed down” for girls.

I follow you so far. Taken at face value, this seems like a perfectly reasonable criticism to level against the play theme.

The new line is called LadyFigs, and it’s made up of busty, pastel-colored figurines that come with interests like shopping, hair-dressing, and lounging at the beach. The uninspired toys even come with pre-assembled environments — so there is no assembly (or imagination) required.

Wait, what? Okay, hold on — the new line is called “Friends”, the figures are hardly busty, only one of the 28 sets in the line feature a “beach”, and the environments are far from pre-assembled — heck, the flagship set has close to 700 pieces (many of which I want)!

Bailey and Stephanie say they’re frustrated that LEGO is pushing outdated gender roles on girls and cheating them of the opportunity to build and discover. So they took to the internet, blogging about what they call the new “Barbielicious” LEGOs and petitioning the toy company to lose the sexist LadyFigs line and go back to empowering both boys and girls with its original products. Click here to sign Bailey and Stephanie’s petition today.

And now we’re back to reasonable comments. However, the fallacious nature of the preceding paragraph can make even the most logical complaint seem questionable, especially for anyone who knows about LEGO product history (or has done a modicum of research).

LEGO hasn’t always thought its toys were only for boys. In the 1980s, the company was actually celebrated for a major advertising campaign that spotlighted a young girl and her LEGO creation with the tagline “What it is is beautiful.” But since then, LEGO reversed course and decided to market its products only to boys.

This, of course, refers to this ad campaign from the ’80s that was hardly girl-centric but did feature children of both genders playing with LEGO products (and which I don’t remember anyone “celebrating” TLG for). The LEGO Facebook group has been flooded with posts featuring this particular advertisement, despite the fact that a) spamming a Facebook wall to get what you want is almost as ineffective as an internet petition, and b) there are other ads from the campaign that are just as valid but could potentially dilute the petition’s argument.

It should also be noted that the reason LEGO “reversed course” in the mid-2000s to focus on boys was to avoid bankruptcy.

The company claims its research shows girls just don’t appreciate the original LEGO line. But Bailey and Stephanie argue that with LEGO’s renewed emphasis on boys — featuring only boys in its ads and stocking products in the boys’ aisles of toy stores — it’s no wonder young girls wouldn’t think LEGOs were meant for them.

Technically the company claims its research shows girls don’t appreciate modern LEGO lines, and the minifigure in particular. The “original LEGO line” that folks seem to be erroneously nostalgic for hasn’t really existed in a couple of decades.

I do think more of the LEGO commercials could feature girls — it would be really awesome to see a girl-centric “Build Together” spot. But then we’re back to inaccuracies, saying that LEGO products are found in “the boys’ aisles of toy stores”, when anyone who buys LEGO sets knows you find them in the construction toys section.

Bailey and Stephanie’s fight to get LEGO to return to its gender-neutral toys is already making waves, with the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and Time weighing in on the issue. But LEGO is stubbornly holding its ground and told Business Week that the LadyFigs launch is a “strategic” move to “reach the other 50 percent of the world’s children,” as if girls have never been part of LEGO’s focus.

Again with “LadyFigs”. I’m not even sure what to say here. It’s doubtful that LEGO will ever return to fully gender-neutral toys (by which I think they mean “plastic primary colored blocks in a bucket”), what with the success of LEGO Star Wars and the other licensed themes. Girls have historically been part of LEGO’s target audience, but I think they’re being fairly ingenuous by admitting that their recent focus has been solely on boys, and then doing five years of research to try and change that.

Public pressure can prove LEGO wrong. If enough people sign Bailey and Stephanie’s petition, it could convince LEGO that the new LadyFigs are bad business and the company should return its focus to empowering boys AND girls with toys that inspire creativity and innovation.

Tell LEGO to stop selling out girls — sign Bailey and Stephanie’s petition today.

I would love to see LEGO empowering boys AND girls with products that inspire creativity and innovation. But this petition request is a really poor way to go about enacting any kind of significant change. Having a lot of people voice their disapproval is probably a good reaction for LEGO to see, but when the voice is shouting a lot of nonsense, it makes it hard to have any kind of productive discussion. And productive discussions are what get things done.

So bear with us, and we’ll see you on the other side. Thanks!

We spent a few months this year putting these four episodes — Pirates of the Caribbean, Harry Potter, Alien Conquest, and Star Wars — together. More airdates (and some behind-the-scenes) to come!

EDIT: Here are the additional airdates for the week!

Nickelodeon: 7/26 @ 3:27pm, 7/30 @ 8:19am and 2:18pm

NickToons: 7/26 @ 6:40pm, 7/29 @ 2:09pm, 7/31 @ 12:09pm

Matt Armstrong (monsterbrick) has taken the Playback-style animation puppet instructions I made (for the LEGO Animation issue of BrickJournal) and gone in some monstrously wonderful directions with it. I heartily approve!

EDIT: Matt has also added The Mummy, Wolfman, and Gill-man (the Creature From the Black Lagoon) to round out the cast. Sweet!

They did the Monster Mash | Flickr – Photo Sharing!

With the blessing of editor Joe Meno, I was given the opportunity to not only concoct four articles of my own, but also to put on my “Feature Editor” hat and cull together some neat content from a variety of talents in the LEGO film world…

- David Pickett on “How to Animate”

- “Inside MindGame Studios” with Zach Macias

- A look behind the scenes with Spastik Chuwawa

- A review of Shatterpoint Entertainment’s “Jericho: the Promise Fulfilled”

- “Playing Nice with Garrett Barati”

- and more!

Plus there’s instructions for how to build one of my “Playback“-style characters, designed by yours truly.

The issue just came out on March 30th, and is now on sale at fine bookstores everywhere (or through the link below)! You can also catch a free preview of the issue here! Be sure to check it out!

BrickJournal 14 : TwoMorrows Publishing, Celebrating The Art & History Of Comics.

YouTube – Adventures of Max: Space Police

YouTube – Adventures of Max: Power Miners

YouTube – Adventures of Max: Atlantis

YouTube – Adventures of Max: City

YouTube – Adventures of Max: Racers

YouTube – Zack, the LEGO Maniac

YouTube – BUILD!

YouTube – Black Eye Piece

YouTube – LEGO Toy Story – Episode 1: Blast-Off Buzz

YouTube – LEGO Toy Story – Episode 2: Trash Compactor Chaos

YouTube – LEGO Toy Story – Episode 3: Bear On The Lam

We got to check out a bunch of the new lines, including Alien Conquest, Pirates of the Carribean, and some new Ninjago, Kingdoms, and City sets (among a lot of others).

There are a ton of other photos on my Flickr page as well as on the BrickJournal Flickr page. Special thanks to Joe Meno for getting me into the event!

(I’ve got about half of my photos uploaded; hopefully the rest will be up later tonight or early tomorrow.)

Toy Fair 2011, 2/13/11 – a set on Flickr

Travel back with me, if you will: At this time last year, I was a couple months into my work on LEGO Club Show season 1, putting together a heavy metal music video called “BUILD!” with my colleague Matt Witham. As is often the case with the work I do for LEGO, I waited before uploading the video to the Paganomation YouTube account, so as not to take away from the views on the LEGOClubTV channel.

But I was completely unprepared for the response “BUILD!” received after posting it this past Tuesday…

• Make: Online » Build! A stop-motion Lego flick
• The Daily What: Epic LEGO Thing of the Day
• Neatorama: “BUILD!” — A Stop-Motion LEGO Animated Heavy Metal Viking Tale
• Gizmodo: The Most Hardcore Metal Lego Video I’ve Ever Seen
• Death Metal LEGOs :: Blogs :: Awesome of the Day :: Paste
• “BUILD!” — An Awesomely Cool Lego Stop-Motion Short | GeekDad | Wired.com
• Buzzfeed: Heavy LEGO Metal Fantasy [VIDEO]
• BUILD! Lego | Lego Heavy Metal | Geekosystem
• BUILD! by Paganomation! — LOYAL K.N.G.
• ‘Build!’ – epic stop-motion Heavy Metal Lego video » LOLEG.com
• People Are Fu*king Creative With Legos: Check Out This Seriously Awesome Heavy Metal Lego Stop… at Trickfist.com
• Heavy Metal Lego Viking Music Video | Smosh
• Heavy Metal Lego Lumberjack : Stuff I Stole From the Internet
• Lego Goes Heavy Metal – in Metal News ( Metal Underground.com )
• The Escapist : Forums : The News Room : “BUILD!” Is One Of The Craziest Lego Movies You’ll Ever See

Whoa. All I can say is, thanks to everyone for watching, and I’m glad you dug it! Now I just have to top this video…

YouTube – BUILD!

Thanks to his dad Brian for sharing these!

Brace yourself; this is going to be long and nerdy.

Preface (Spoilers to follow)

Let me start by saying this: I am a bit of a movie snob. Though this condition was aggravated by my time in film school, I was already showing symptoms as far back as childhood, when I tried to make sense of things like “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III”. In order for me to really enjoy a film, all aspects of it have to achieve some kind of balance — I need to feel like the movie works as a whole. If the effects are great but the acting really sucks, or the story is great but it’s told in an overly confusing way, then I probably won’t enjoy the film.

I’ll also say that I’m definitely biased towards story and character. I find myself going to the movies more for storytelling than for “pure entertainment”, whatever that means. While many of my contemporaries seem to enjoy films that offer flashy effects and little else, I find these kinds of movies really difficult to sit through (cough cough Transformers cough). But, if a film has a solid story and believable performances, I can easily get past less-than-stellar effects and cinematography (as in something like Alien Nation, perhaps).

Finally, before I get into both Tron and Tron Legacy, I’d like to address a phenomenon I initially became aware of after seeing the Transformers live-action film. I call it the “what did you expect” defense. It plays out thusly:

Me: “Man, ‘Transformers’ was a completely awful movie. I found it really disappointing.”

Person X: “Dude, it’s based on a crappy cartoon from the ’80s, which was based on toys. What did you expect?”

Me: “…A good movie.”

I get this kind of response from people with increasing frequency, and it’s a complete fallacy. If I put down my $12-$19 to see a movie in a theater, I expect the movie to be good. This is not a lot to ask, and I refuse to lower my expectations in order to compensate. I don’t understand why people are content to pay ever-increasing amounts of money to go and sit through drivel together. Great movies can be developed from some of the weirdest ideas; and the source material of a movie, regardless of how lame you might think it is, is never an excuse for making an awful film — end of story. “End of line,” you might say.

About the original Tron

I have been calling Tron my favorite movie ever since I first saw it back in 2002. This was around the time of the 20th anniversary DVD (now out-of-print), which I believe I rented from Blockbuster Video. ’80s graphics and animation, amazingly imaginative design, a cool synthesized score, an interesting, solid story, and an overall unique concept — it’s not difficult to see why I had an immediate connection with this film. I can’t remember what I knew of Tron beforehand, but even though the movie was 20 years old at the time, it kind of blew me away.

In addition to the film itself, the DVD’s 2-hour behind-the-scenes documentary was there to cement my utter fascination with the world of Tron. Here were all these artists and filmmakers reflecting on a movie that basically saw them as pioneers, establishing the design sensibility of the new computer age. They went from being a small commercial animation studio to doing a feature-length film for Disney about computers, in a pre-home-computer age. And they did it without computers, for the most part — even though the CG in the original Tron gives it much of it’s notoriety, only about 20 of the 70 minutes spent inside the computer world is actually computer generated footage. The rest is a combination of live-action, backlit animation, rotoscoping, compositing, and in-camera effects.

At the time it was made, there wasn’t a precedent for a movie like Tron content-wise, nor was there in terms of the production. In many ways, it’s an extremely surreal, arty film (and it unsurprisingly didn’t perform well at the box office). As one of the crew members points out in the documentary, regarding the aforementioned mish-mash of filmmaking techniques (I’m paraphrasing here): “no one had ever made a film like this before, and no one ever will again.” For me, having just applied to film school at the time, that was the most exciting part! I find it just as exciting today.

28 years later

Tron Legacy, on the other hand, came into being in a completely different era. While the first Tron had a respectable but relatively quiet marketing campaign, the media hype blitz for the new movie has been snowballing for years now. You’ve probably read some of the cliché news stories about it — how today, everyone has an iPhone and a computer, and spends all their time texting or on Facebook, blah blah blah; “the world is ready for a new Tron” or some nonsense.

Ironically, with Tron Legacy being a sequel and not a remake, you can’t find the original Tron on DVD at the moment. The 2002 20th anniversary DVD is out of print, and as such, I’ve been lending my copy to friends who wanted to be brought up to speed before seeing the new film. There were rumors of Disney putting out a new DVD and Blu-ray this past fall, in order to catch people up on the story (and cash in on the new film), but… apparently they screened the original Tron over the summer at one of the Disney parks, and people just straight-up mocked it. Understandable, but weird. Maybe the internet generation isn’t as ready for a new Tron as they thought.

In actuality, I think this post-cyberpunk, post-Matrix internet age we live in was probably the biggest hurdle that Tron 2 needed to overcome. We’ve had 28 years of other people imagining and creating worlds inside the computer, as well as seeing the evolution of technology in the real world for ourselves. For Tron 2 to really live up to its predecessor, it kind of had to do the impossible — it had to predict the future again. It didn’t.

Yeah, I’ll just cut get right to the heart of the matter: I found Tron Legacy to be a huge disappointment, one long missed opportunity, and immensely overrated considering the amount of hype surrounding it. I didn’t think it was an awful film, but it was by no means amazing, and it is definitely inferior to the original Tron. I’ll try to explain the specific reasons why.

The Story…

(For clarity purposes, let’s call the 1982 movie “Tron 1″, the 2010 film “Tron 2″, and the program character himself “TRON”.)

I’ve already gotten a lot of guff from folks about the story in Tron 1 “making no sense”, but I’ve never found it to be terribly complex. Maybe I’m just a genius.

In 1979, Kevin Flynn (played by Jeff Bridges) wrote computer games for the Encom Corporation, which were stolen by a co-worker named Ed Dillinger (played by David Warner). Dillinger took credit for the games and got promoted, while Flynn lost his job and ended up running an arcade. Three years later, Flynn sneaks back into Encom with the help of two former co-workers, Alan Bradley (played by Bruce Boxleitner) and Lora Baines (played by Cindy Morgan), to try and find evidence of Dillinger’s thievery.

Dillinger, in the time since Flynn’s departure from Encom, has developed the Master Control Program (MCP) — a villainous, sentient bit of AI software that runs Encom by appropriating programs and data from elsewhere. When Flynn tries to hack into Encom’s server, the MCP uses Encom’s experimental laser to suck him into the system. Inside the computer, Flynn plays video games to survive, and fights off the MCP’s forces with the help of TRON, a security program written by Bradley. Eventually, TRON and Flynn defeat and delete the MCP, and Flynn escapes the computer world, evidence of Dillinger’s theft in tow. Flynn is rehired at Encom and promoted to Dillinger’s position, and the credits roll.

Not the most complex story, but it works, and doesn’t try to be more than it is. More importantly, it is laced with a satisfying amount of humor and whimsy, and the performances (especially Jeff Bridges’) lend an appropriate sense of fun, innocence, and awe to the proceedings.

Tron Legacy is a different story, no pun intended.

It begins in 1989, with Flynn as CEO of Encom. His experiences inside the computer in the first movie have led him to continue development of that computer world from the inside. With the help of TRON and a program Flynn has written called CLU 2.0 (CLU 1.0 appears in Tron 1), Flynn develops the world inside the computer, which he calls the Grid. One night, Flynn relates his development of the Grid to his son Sam, before disappearing entirely.

20 years later, Sam Flynn is an adult, and we are introduced to him as he breaks into Encom to play some sort of prank on the folks currently in charge there, who are apparently doing things with the company that the missing Kevin Flynn wouldn’t approve of. After being jailed for the break-in for approximately 30 seconds, Sam heads home and finds Alan Bradley waiting for him. Alan tells Sam that he received a message from Flynn’s old office at the arcade, and Sam goes to investigate. He finds his dad’s computer, which is still running, and after doing some typing, Sam gets sucked in himself, and his adventures in the computer world ensue.

You’ll notice that, whereas I was able to sum up the plot of Tron 1 in two paragraphs, it takes just as long to describe only the real world preface of Tron 2. I’ll get into some of the plot points of the new film as I continue; if you want the whole plot of the film, you can either go see the movie or read the Wikipedia entry. (If you’re going to see the movie at all, see it in theaters.) But this ties into what I believe to be the biggest problem with Tron 2 — the sheer quantity of story points that are either glossed over, introduced and never touched on again, or wasted.

…it’s a complicated mess.

An elaborate story can often be a good thing — it worked for “Inception” — but not when it means inundating your audience with blatantly expository dialogue, or valuing fan-service references over character development. (It’s neat that Sam’s first line in the computer world is nearly identical to Kevin’s, but it doesn’t really tell us anything about Sam.) Over the course of Tron 2′s running time, we hear about the ISOs, Flynn’s OS, Ed Dillinger Jr. (played for approximately two minutes by an uncredited Cillian Murphy), Rinzler, and other concepts that are introduced for introduction’s sake, or are merely callbacks to Tron 1. Now, setting up too many things in your story is one thing, but it becomes an even bigger mess when you waste the opportunities to explore the ideas you’ve set up.

For example, the movie establishes that CLU 2.0 looks exactly like Kevin Flynn did the last time Sam saw him. This is a really interesting conceit — imagine if Sam thought CLU was his real father for the majority of the movie! But no, 30 seconds after Sam meets him, CLU tells him he’s not his father. Oh, but wait! Maybe now Sam will have to make a journey across the Grid to find his REAL dad, and that journey will mirror his growth as a character! Nope, some chick named Quorra just crashes a car onto the game grid to pick Sam up, and uh, drive him to his dad’s house for dinner. Hey, now Sam’s stealing Flynn’s lightcycle! Only to give it to a homeless program? Uh, okay… onto the bar scene. Hey, maybe this’ll be like the Star Wars cantina, with some really imaginative program characters! Oh, no, everyone just looks like a stock goth-cyberpunk concert attendee. Alright then… Ah, but now we’re introduced to a sneaky showman program named Castor — maybe he’ll pretend to be a friend, but secretly betray our heroes! Oh, looks like he’s already betrayed them, in the same exact scene. And so on.

The complexity of Tron 2′s storyline can be summed up in an interview that the Moviefone blog conducted with the writers of the film, Adam Horowitz and Eddie Kitsis. While a discussion with the writers of a film can help give insight into why certain decisions were made, it calls the quality of your writing into question when that conversation becomes more about asking, “can you please explain this part of the movie to everyone on the internet?” The nature of characters in the computer world and the pseudoscience of the movie should have been explained IN THE MOVIE ITSELF, not after the fact. The original Tron handles this pretty well, I think.

It seems obvious that the screenwriters weren’t trying to just write a good movie; coming from the world of TV writing, they were constructing the first part of a franchise that would cash in on the nostalgia of Comic Con-attending fanboys. While Tron 1 was almost kind of an experimental film on a Disney budget, Tron 2 is a pretty blatant product. And this really betrays the idea of what Tron should be about — an imaginative personification of the inner workings of the computer world. Because, let’s face it…

The Computer World of Tron Legacy is boring

One of the stranger story decisions in Tron 2 was in how the “modern” computer world was set up. In fact, the computer world of Tron 2 takes place in 1989 — because that’s when the computer that Sam gets sucked into was created, and it hasn’t been updated at all since then (even though Kevin Flynn apparently came up with wi-fi in 1985). Essentially, Tron 2 didn’t give us a modern reflection of the Tron world; what we’re seeing is a graphics update of the original film. This is obvious in the way the visuals are presented to us: none of the vehicles, apart from maybe the light shuttle or those light jet winged backpacks, are in any way original. What we do get is shiny new lightcycles, a shiny new solar sailer, a shiny new carrier (Rectifier, whatever), shiny new programs and backgrounds. The disc battle is pretty much the same, too. If the filmmakers weren’t going to use imagination to create some beautiful new artistic renderings of the computer world, why didn’t they just remake Tron 1?

Not only is the computer world stuck in 1989, it’s also a totalitarian depiction of a 1989 computer. We have CLU 2.0 as cyber-Hitler, leading the genocide towards perfection. It makes for a pretty dark and bleak-looking computer world, with all the characters and locales looking slick, but uniform. This is pretty similar to Tron 1′s world under the rule of the MCP — but at the end of that movie, the MCP is destroyed, freedom is restored, and we see how colorful and magnificent the computer world can be. In Tron 2, CLU 2.0 is defeated, and then we immediately exit the computer world — we don’t get to see any of the results of the hard work (if you can call it that) that our heroes put in.

Come to think of it, the same thing happens upon entering the computer world: Tron 1 has Flynn sucked into the computer in a neat way: getting pixellated slowly, and then showing an imaginative pan down into the digital landscape; through the atmosphere, past vector clouds, over the computer world and into the game domain. Tron 2 has Sam get zapped, quickly sucked into the computer, only to instantly end up in the Grid. How creative.

EDIT: Something has occurred to me in the weeks following the writing of this review: nothing about the computer world of “Tron Legacy” has anything to do with computers. Apart from calling the people “programs” and having video game stuff, there’s nothing — no computer terminology, re-imagined inner workings, clever approximations of well-known software, nothing. The I/O tower from the first film is replaced by a relatively generic “portal”, and again, none of the program characters seem to have any specific function. You could have made “the Grid” any sort of alternate fantasy dimension, and it wouldn’t have made a lick of difference.

It didn’t feel like Flynn

Jeff Bridges carries Tron 1 in many ways — he’s a good actor, with a good sense of humor and comedic timing, and his performance is believable. You know what Kevin Flynn’s motivation is and why, and you can sympathize with his situation. Garrett Hedlund takes on that role in Tron 2, but unlike Bridges, he has no personality or charm. We’re not sure why his character does the things he does, apart from the fact that he misses his daddy. Sam Flynn is the same kind of young, one-dimensional main character we’ve seen in so many modern action movies; a combination of Hayden Christiansen’s Anakin Skywalker and Shia LeBeouf’s character in the Transformers films (also a dog-owner named Sam).

Hedlund’s performance isn’t as bad as either of those, but his character has nothing to offer, and makes no attempt to endear himself to the audience. You just get the sense that he’s this whiny, bored rich kid, with no attachment to anyone else. Sam doesn’t seem to develop at all through the film; and at the end, when he’s changed his mind about working at Encom, you’re not really sure why.

Kevin Flynn himself is a little off, too. Academy Award-winner Jeff Bridges basically spends 90% of Tron 2 playing “The Dude” from The Big Lebowski. I can’t really see a good reason for this, apart from fan-service, and it’s an instantaneous change rather than a gradual one. Once again, his performance pretty much carries the film, but Flynn seems almost completely different from his character in Tron 1. When he’s not being a hippie caricature or looking around moodily, Flynn is merely spouting out some utterly complex exposition in order to further the plot.

The one point of the film where he actually DOES feel like Flynn is when he sees Rinzler for the first time, and yells, “TRON! …What have you become?” Naturally, many of my friends have latched onto this line as a microcosm of the film as a whole. But I digress.

My inner Plinkett

Red Letter Media’s movie reviews (NSFW) came into the internet consciousness last year, with their biting dissection of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Since then, they’ve followed it up with reviews of Attack of the Clones, Avatar, and the new Star Trek film. The writers of these reviews are obviously big fans of sci-fi, fantasy, and action movies, and it makes you wonder why more screenwriters don’t ask themselves the kind of questions about the problems that these reviews seem to easily bring up.

Why am I mentioning this? Well, the main character and “creator” of these reviews is a serial killer named Harry Plinkett, and admittedly, I’ve started hearing his voice in my head when I go to see movies. Yeah. In a figurative sense, you understand.

With Tron Legacy, the main thing that kept running through my mind during the movie was the idea that “the audience is expected to accept too many things that we are and are not told” — a criticism that Plinkett levels at many of the story points in Attack of the Clones. As someone who knows the first Tron film inside and out, I can only imagine how confusing certain parts of the new film must be for the uninitiated.

I also found myself asking logical questions about certain parts of the story, and the way it was told. For example:

• The original Tron film had Flynn doing all kinds of things that were impossible for normal programs — driving a Recognizer, bringing Yori back to life, rerouting the Solar Sailer, etc. If Sam is a User, why doesn’t he demonstrate any User powers?
• In the original Tron, Flynn knows how to survive in the game grid — he’s not only a gamer, but he WROTE the games he’s playing. In Tron 2, Sam doesn’t seem to DO much of anything in the real world, so where do his skills on the game grid come from?
• In the scene where Sam fights Rinzler, Sam’s arm gets cut and he bleeds. But isn’t the Sam in the computer world just a computer avatar version of human Sam? Didn’t Tron 1 establish that the physical makeup of his body is still stored outside in the laser housing?
• For that matter, how did Quorra become human? If she gets cut in the real world, do pixels come out? Where did she get human clothes? Where did the physical molecules of her human body come from? I suppose they could have come from Kevin Flynn — since he went into the computer but didn’t come back out, his molecules would still be stored there in the laser, I guess.
• But then how did CLU plan to bring his army into the real world? Would he have to come out first and go get some matter with which to create more program bodies?
• In the original film, each program had a specific function: TRON was for security, YORI ran the laser, DUMONT controlled the input/output tower, RAM was an actuarial program, CROM worked at a Savings & Loan. How come none of the programs in Tron 2 seem to have a purpose, other than to look stylish and cyberpunk-like?
• I guess it could be because CLU repurposed all the programs. But then, HOW does CLU repurpose programs? We don’t see him do it, we’re just told about it. How did he repurpose TRON?
• What’s up with the pig at the dinner table?

And the list goes on to 167. But I’ll stop there, you get the point.

The Star Wars effect

Speaking of Star Wars, it seemed like Tron 2 contained a strange overabundance of Star Wars “references”. Admittedly, Tron 1 has it’s share of similarities — two guys and a girl break into the main headquarters of the evil empire that’s controlling their universe, to set things right and fight for freedom. But I think that’s more because it follows the hero’s journey, rather than seeming to blatantly ripoff certain aspects of other films.

In Tron 2, we have:

• A boring, whiny 20-something main character, who makes bad decisions in order to save a parent (Anakin Skywalker/Sam Flynn)
• A McGuffin (Death Star Plans/Kevin’s Identity Disc)
• A bar scene where a fight takes place (Cantina/End of Line)
• A chase scene involving the main character shooting at the enemy forces from a rotating turret on a ship (Millenium Falcon/that aerial shuttle ship)
• A quirky character who says he can help the main character find the person he’s looking for, only for it to turn out that the quirky character IS that person (Yoda/Castor and Zuse)
• A villain with a red and black color scheme, who’s an amazing fighter because he uses TWO of the weapon that the main character only uses one of (Darth Maul/Rinzler)
• A childlike character with shoulder length black hair and an annoying cackle (Boba Fett/Quorra)
• A wise sage with someone they call their apprentice (Obi-Wan/Kevin Flynn)
• A huge amount of nameless, faceless, stock-looking extras
• A forgettable score
• A clone army (pretty much)

Friend Dan Pinto referred to Tron 2 as “Tron: The Phantom Menace”, and I think that’s a pretty fair comparison. Overall, I guess there was just way too much hype for this movie to ever be anything but disappointing. It put too much of a reliance on name recognition and unconditional geek praise, and again, seems to have been created not as a good movie, but as a straight-up product. I guess I should just be thankful that there was no Jar Jar-equivalent.

Things I actually did like

Again, I didn’t hate the movie. The disc battle was cool, and I thought having an aircraft that left lightcycle-like trails was an interesting concept. A few of the character designs were neat, like Quorra, Castor, and CLU’s main henchman. Castor was a character whose role I thought should have been beefed up, although I know a lot of people found him annoying. I was waiting for him to tag along with Sam and Quorra, a la Ram in the first film, but then he just gets blown up.

The idea of Tron being re-purposed was an interesting one; though like most of the film, I would have liked to have seen it developed further. And there were definitely some parts where I genuinely laughed, and felt like I was having fun — some of the awkward humor with the aforementioned characters — but I just felt like these moments were too few and far between.

End of line…?

Despite the original Tron being my favorite movie, I didn’t think Tron Legacy was completely awful; just immensely disappointing. I don’t see myself watching it or enjoying it with the same frequency as the original, and it certainly doesn’t have the same inspirational qualities that Tron 1 does. As with the Star Wars prequels (and the new Indiana Jones), we need to put an end to the resurrection of fan-favorite franchises just to make a buck on name recognition and merchandise. But that goes without saying. Ironically, maybe we SHOULD stop expecting sequels like these to be good movies.

The original Tron feels like a film made by artists, who somehow fell into making an expensive studio feature. That’s the part I find really exciting, in a Hensonian way. It makes me feel compelled, as a young filmmaker, to work towards making a movie that might be for others what Tron is for me; one that tells a good story in a way that I’d hope to be ground breaking, experimental, and timeless. The original Tron will continue to inspire me in that regard, and I’ll just have to accept Tron Legacy for what it is — not a film that was imaginative, experimental, and failed; but rather, a film that failed to be imaginative and experimental.

Postscript

If you dig the original Tron, and you’re curious about a somewhat more interesting Tron sequel, I recommend the “Tron 2.0″ video game from 2003. It’s got Bruce Boxleitner and Cindy Morgan, new Syd Mead lightcycle designs, and feels more like a modernization and expansion of the Tron computer world than Legacy ever did. See if you can find it on eBay.

Friend and one-time roommate Zach Decktor has put a bunch of cool stuff up on his relatively new blog, “Zachary’s Crackers.”

You may remember Zach from such videos as the “LEGO Castle Ship Building Challenge” episode of “Cool Creations with Flappy.” You can also find his online portfolio here.

Zachary’s Crackers

Two things of note: first, I’d like to give a big thanks to everyone who’s bought a Little Guy or DVD so far! I really appreciate the support.

The second thing is this: unfortunately, the “Little Guys!” instruction cards had an error at the printer, and didn’t come out to the level of quality they should have. But, with Christmas and other holidays coming up, I want to make sure that all Little Guys! make it to their destinations on time.

So, if you’ve ordered a Little Guy, you might get it with one of these lower-quality instruction cards, or with a temporary replacement, and we’ll send out the new cards as soon as they’re in. I apologize for any inconvenience this might cause, and thank you again for your support!

(If you’d like to buy a Little Guy or DVD, you can find them here, as always.)

In case you hadn’t heard, “Little Guys!” merch is now available in the Paganomation Store. Watch as this charming pitchman successfully hawks my products.

YouTube – “Little Guys!™” featured on PVC Shopping Channel