Tron - Brian Daley

This is one of two movies from the early '80s that made me fall in love with computers (the other one being War Games, starring Matthew Broderick -  I recently acquired the book for that one - expect a review of it soon). That was over thirty years ago, and I'm still in love with information technology!

This movie was groundbreaking, being the first big production to extensively use computer generated 3D animation, in an age where home computers were an expensive hobby and 640K was all the memory you'd ever need. Looking back at the movie today, the graphics are very primitive, and you can also really tell how the actors have evolved over the years, especially Jeff Bridges.

The book (ISBN 0 450 05550 7 - UK £1.50) is a nice read, 186 pages describing well what happens, with a lot of insight into character background and moods. The novel also contains a colour photo section in the middle, with publicity shots from the film. The book was written by the late Brian Daley, who also penned a series of novels about Han Solo's adventures in the late '70s (As a sidenote, there was a robot in theses novels called Bollux in the US versions that had to be changed to Zollux in the UK ones, for obvious reasons), and with James Luceno, under the pseudonym Jack McKinney, wrote several Robotech novels.

The rear cover of the book doesn't reveal the true story, mentioning that the story is about Flynn helping free an imprisoned TRON, instead of Flynn trying to recover proof that Dillinger stole his programs and ridding the world of the menace of the Master Control Program.

Reading the book again after the fantastic graphics and effects of Tron Legacy, it's easy to imagine what it would look like with today's technology and visuals... The books suffer less from the evolution of technology than the film itself, which looks dated and is in need of a remake... or perhaps Disney could take the raw footage and "re-Tronify" the electronic-world parts (If someone managed to do it with Ripley from Aliens, then with a big budget, it should be possible).

There are a couple of discrepancies from the film... One of them quite significant to the plot: in the movie, the proof that Dillinger stole Flynn's programs was buried by the Master Control Program to secure it. In the book, the last thing Flynn did before getting fired was bury the proof somewhere inside the system so that Dillinger and the MCP couldn't find and erase it. I guess it's a toss-up which one would make more sense.

Even with these, I give it a 9/10 for being and enjoyable read and because it does a good job of portraying the atmosphere of the film.

It's a shame I don't have a book for Tron Legacy.