You shouldn't have come back, Flynn.

Hey, hey, hey, it's the big master control program everybody's been talking about.

Sit right there. Make yourself comfortable. Remember the time we used to spend playing chess together? That isn't gonna do you any good, Flynn.

I'm afraid.

Stop.

Now how are you gonna run the university if you can't even answer a few unsolvable problems? Huh? Come on, big fella, let's see what you got.

I'd like to go against you and see what you're made of. I'm warning you.

You want game?

Javi, we've been transported! We've been transported onto the grid!

It's interesting how the folks who created Tron the program, I mean, within the movie, invented basically the Star Trek transporter before anybody else did. And their only use for it is to send you into the game grid. It's kind of amazing, isn't it?

It's a remarkable confluence of innovations that sparked this plot. Yeah, yeah, it's striking.

Encom computing invented both space paranoids and the disintegration transportation ray. It's amazing!

I just choose to believe that Encom is just a vast, multi-dimensional conglomerate with a lot of different technical divisions doing a lot of freaky, crazy things and that maybe their game division is just a little side hustle from their main military industrial contracting work.

And I'd like to point out, as we both know, that doesn't Encom also make TIE fighters and X-Wing fighters in the Star Wars universe? There's that Encom. I get them mixed up. I don't know.

Close spiritual cousin.

Yeah, a little bit too close for comfort, isn't it, Paul?

A little.

And on that note, I'd like to say I'm Javier Grillo-Marxuach.

And I'm Paul Alvarado-Dykstra.

And this is... So much ground to cover with this movie, isn't there? Just so much.

Absolutely, absolutely. This was a unique experience of all the films that we're discovering through this journey together. I was struck and startled by the amount of nostalgia that this film particularly gave me in depths and dimensions that the other ones have not quite reached.

Well, I want to go on record as saying that normally you and I have some bit about our theme and how much we love it. So I would be remiss if I didn't mention that our theme, which is, while epic, clearly done in synthesizers, would not exist but put the work of the composer of the score of this film, Wendy Carlos.

Absolutely.

Tie it back in. That's what I do.

Nicely done. And again, one of many just incredible, ground-breaking achievements and just stand-out elements that came together to make this ground-breaking film. It's pretty remarkable. But yeah, Wendy Carlos' score right out of the gate is dazzling.

Is that the scene for All Synth Music to come? Let's talk about the plot here. The plot of this movie is that there is this man named Flynn. He is the greatest computer programmer of his era, which in this case is probably around 1981. He has created a video game called Space Paranoids, which is this alternate universe's version of Space Invaders, the greatest, most popular video game of all time, except that his code was stolen by a rival programmer Ed Dillinger. Ed Dillinger used the fame and fortune of this game to rise to the top ranks of the NCOM Corporation, which is basically Microsoft or the Tron universe. Flynn has been muscled out of the corporation and has been hacking, trying to get into the files to find the evidence that his code was stolen, so that he can restore himself to his rightful place. What Flynn knows is that the way that he interfaces with the computer basically indicates an entire human world with people who represent programs and all of that stuff inside of the computer world. One of the programs slash people in the world is Tron, who is the avatar of Alan Bradley, one of the star programmers at NCOM. Alan Bradley is creating a program called Tron, that is a program that is like a police program that makes sure nothing illegal happens in the matrix. The problem is that Dillinger's contribution to this is the Master Control Program, which is a megalomaniacal dictatorial authoritarian program that has basically taken over all of the systems that... I mean, the Internet didn't exist back then, so you have to assume it's some sort of distributed computing network. I mean, the Internet sort of existed, I guess, because of DARPA, but it's like basically Master Control is routed to every system in the world, and it's slowly absorbing programs and taking over their functions. It's basically like the Borg, but with a much nastier disposition. When Flynn tries to hack into the Income Corporation data banks with the help of Alan Bradley, aka Tron, and they both have dated, and Alan is currently dating, and Flynn once dated Laurie, who is apparently a laser tech slash programmer in the Income Corporation. Flynn gets digitized into the Matrix, and he has to team up with Tron to destroy the master control program and restore freedom to the quote system unquote. End of line. Does that sound like a reasonable recap of this movie's plot?

This film does not suffer from an underabundance of plot.

Weirdly, it does, it doesn't suffer from an underabundance of shit to explain.

True, true. And it is an interesting exhibition of exposition opportunities that arise and are kind of as deftly skated through as possible to paint the vivid picture of this world that the film constructs. And we'd be remiss if we didn't mention it as Steven Lisberger, who wrote and directed this film. And one of the things that struck me about it, rewatching it, and I hadn't seen this in a very long time, and I just have to say, it looks spectacular on Disney Plus. The transfer looks and sounds is beautiful, just stunning. It's amazing. And if you haven't revisited this film, I'm excited for you to do so. It is this interesting, almost counterpoint to Blade Runner, as far as a sci-fi film. But I found it striking in terms of it is sort of this visionary, techno-religious fantasy.

Yes, it is.

There are all these religious undertones and parallels woven through it in the world building that are really interesting to me.

The idea that the programs inside of the system view their users as gods is sort of a unique little grace note slash plot point in this film. I mean, it's obviously, like everything in this film, not developed in any way that's dramatically satisfying. But it certainly is the crux of why the users, the relationship... I think it's really interesting, actually. I'm in agreement with you. It's a really fascinating...

Yeah, there's so many big ideas that you feel could be explored in any number of different directions that this film had to choose from. And it's almost like there's just too much. But it's all tantalizing. But the particular dimension that in the grid, in the world of these programs, it is blasphemy to believe in the user, in the existence of the users. And there's this whole underground, burgeoning rebellion of infidels who are clinging to the idea that they're these beings beyond the grid that are their creator.

Or if we say fiddles.

There you go. There you go. But yeah, before we venture too much farther, I believe we have the duty to ring the bell.

Yes, I think because we're going to get into the plot of this movie. Oh, yes.

Do you remember where you saw this film? Because of all the films this summer, I vividly remember this one, where I saw it.

Oh, because I have a theory, producer Brad, about where we might have seen it together. But it may be wrong because my memory does falter a little bit.

It's wrong. I can tell you.

Maybe I did not see it with you, producer Brad. I'm terrified by that prospect.

Well, I saw it with Paul at the wayside. This was pre high school. High school, I saw all movies with you.

Another Paul.

Well, when producer Brad says that he saw it with Paul, he does not mean Paul-Alvar Leiter-Dijkstra, who was at that time growing up peaceful in Texas. He means our mutual friend Paul Allman.

Right. Paul Allman. Now, the wayside theater has an interesting history. When it opened in 1968, it was the largest indoor theater in the country. In 1984, two years after Tron opened, the wayside was split into two screens, much like many big theaters in the 80s. It closed in 1989, but it was announced that it would reopen as a brew and view theater called the Wayside Cinema and Drafthouse. This didn't happen, but what did happen was it was converted into a Whirly Ball Amusement Center. Do you know what Whirly Ball is?

Only very vaguely.

It's like high-lier basketball on bumper cars.

Whoa. I did not even vaguely know what it was.

So Paul, where did you see this movie?

I am pretty sure I saw this at the... I think the Twin Cinema in McAllen on Atlanta in the southernmost extremes of Texas. I do vividly remember that I think of all the movies this summer, this was the one I was most excited to see. That just really captured my full imagination and burgeoning interest in computers through the Apple II.

More so than even Wrath of Khan, really?

I think so. So Wrath of Khan really elevated my Star Trek fandom to new heights, but I didn't have the same degree of anticipation because I didn't know how great Star Trek II was going to be.

Interesting.

But drawn just from every glimpse, everything, it just that captivated me just conceptually. And that was one that I remember was just fervently fixated on.

All right. Well, let's get on it then. So Paul, I think it's time to ring the bell. Let's do it. So, Paul.

Yes.

On begins, first of all, with a beautiful shot of the logo that resolves into a city scape by Robert Abel and Associates. Yes. By the way, before we start talking about this movie, this movie as weird and retro as it looks, it is a vision of the future, sort of, that to me has always stayed fresh because it's so kind of clean and of itself. You know?

Yeah, there are elements and layers of it that are startlingly prophetic, particularly right now in terms of AI. And yeah, it's very interesting just how this film kind of acquires newer and newer depths and dimensions as our world continues to evolve and kind of catch up with some parts of it, but also surpass many other parts of it.

Oh, so much of it is completely, you know, look, I was talking specifically about the visual design of this movie, which was partially conceived by Jean-Mobius Giraud and Syd Mead. But I think what's really interesting is this movie predates cyberspace. William Gibson wouldn't publish Neuromancer until 1984. So the term cyberspace didn't exist until two years after this movie was made. And the majority of this movie takes place inside of a computer, but it's actually inside the internet because it's inside of a distributed consumer computing system that is worldwide. Because the master control program can absorb programs from the Pentagon and the Kremlin and all this stuff. But it's sort of a document of like 1970s hacker culture in its own way, which is amazing.

Yeah. I think that it is maybe infinitely underappreciated how visionary that concept was to unleash on film in 1982, where there was no mass understanding or existence of internet. This was such a bold stroke of conceptually.

I mean, producer Brad and I were probably learning computing on pet computers, on Commodore pet computers, which were like a one sort of hunk of metal with a CRT monitor you coded on basic. I don't think I'd gotten my first computer then, which would have been a Commodore Vic 20 that you hooked up to your television as a monitor. And I remember at the time, I thought, well, I was going to learn how to do video games and stuff. And of course, I didn't understand coding or even the most basic ideas of game design. But that was my fantasy. And also the thing I was going to say about this movie, Paul, is that like when you look at the visual design of this movie, it's like you look at William Gibson and William Gibson's stroke of genius was to make sort of punk rock, you know, and that kind of street aesthetic with the computing universe. As visionary as this movie is and as amazing as the futurism of the view of what it looks like inside of the computing world is, it's also so goddamn dorky. I mean, it's just so dorky. It doesn't have like, it's not The Matrix. It's not William Gibson. It is a dorkalicious like extravaganza of tights and dance belts and frisbees and BMX armor passing for futuristic armor. I mean, it's kind of amazing also just what a dorky movie it is, right?

I was going to say deliciously dorky, but you topped me with dorkalicious. I just, that is exactly what it is and I freaking love it. It makes no sense and you can kind of, you know, just how they were figuring all these things out. They had no frame of reference. There was nothing to build on top of. They just had to kind of piece this together and figure out because nothing like this had ever been expressed or visualized. And it's just such a fascinating design document on so many different levels.

Yes, it is.

Yeah, I have such affection for her.

I think also it's a testament to William Gibson's genius, like I said, that he kind of, his big stroke of genius was to mix punk rock with hacker culture, you know, whereas like this movie is so clearly made by people who are into hacker culture, but we're more of a kind of whole earth catalog aesthetic. You know, this feels like what Steve Wozniak thought cyberspace would be like. And actually, I mean, and Bernarda Hughes' character is Wozniak. He's literally the guy in the nubby sweater who helped create Encom in his garage. And that's a reference in the movie.

Yeah. Well, and also the founding of HP as well. So we're welcomed by, again, the startling title logo and this journey into what would later be called cyberspace, but here is called the grid. And then we open on the arcade of our dreams, which is Flynn's arcade. Flynn, who has been exiled from Encom, is now left to be running an arcade with games that were basically stolen from him. And that's the only way he can benefit from them.

But by the way, he lives the best life that you and I dreamt of as kids, which is that when the movie starts, he's hacking into the Encom system from his loft on top of the arcade. So he's literally 29 years old and lives on a loft on top of an arcade where like his bed and his desk are all in the same place. It's the fucking coolest life ever. And he has windows that look out into the arcade from his loft. So how awesome is it?

Yes, it is one of the many great sets and designs. I love this space, the sense of space, what it tells us about his character. And immediately it's for our generation. It's still boundlessly seductive. It's like, I want that place to exist. I want to live there and go there. The whole opening of this film is interesting and a little disorienting. And I can see how they put a lot of speed bumps in front of audiences and particularly critics to just find their bearings, because very quickly we're then immediately transported into the Tron game into a light cycle race, which is one of the, again...

Well, he's in a tank. He's in the tank, right? It's not the light cycles at the beginning. He's in a Tron tank.

Oh, no. This is before Flynn goes in the grip.

Oh, that's right. No, no, you're totally right. It's the SART.

Yes, we're introduced to SART. I'm going to issue a caveat to our listeners, because I may not be fully engaged in all my programming this morning, because I made the questionable choice of after watching Tron last night, I could not help myself...

Boking a lot of weed?

Well, almost. Immediately after finishing Tron, I thought, you know what? I kind of want to watch just the beginning of Tron Legacy.

Oh, why? Why?

And I ended up watching all of Tron Legacy after watching Tron last night, which was quite a journey.

Look, I not only despise and loathe Tron Legacy, I just want to point out, here's why Tron, the first Tron, is a visionary motion picture and Tron Legacy is not. Tron presages the existence of a distributed worldwide computing system in which programs act as individual agents, much as the internet functions. Tron Legacy is literally about a hard drive. The entirety of Tron Legacy takes place in a fucking hard drive in the ruin of Flynn's arcade. The movie has no goddamn stakes. It's the battle for the hard drive. And at least the first one indicates that the master control program can hack into the Kremlin or something, you know, and really damage some stuff. Tron Legacy is about, is Flynn's son going to survive the great war for the hard drive? Literally, the whole problem of Tron Legacy could have been solved if somebody stepped on the hard drive. Just putting that out there.

My only response to that is, but daft punk. But anyway, we are given a sweeping, during tour de force introduction to the grid, to the light cycles, and to SART., one of three roles played by the great David Warner, who we also heard.

The great David Warner.

In the opening voicing master control program, we find SART conferring with the MCP., much like Vader confers with the Emperor, which I found very similar. And yeah, we are introduced to one of the, probably really the big stakes of the film, the threat of the MCP., is that the MCP wants more challenge in its life. It isn't content to be dealing with corporate programs and improving efficiency of various industries and whatnot. It feels like it can make things more efficient for the military, for all sorts of other, the Pentagon, it wants access to it. It has aspirations of granture that are immediately threatening.

And the way that this is expressed is that the MCP absorbs programs from other systems, mostly accounting programs.

Seems to have a predilection for those.

It really, well, I think accounting programs are the low-hanging fruit of the cyber world, because part of this conversation is that Sark says, I'm tired of these accounting cream puffs you're throwing at me, because the programs it absorbs gets into a gladiatorial arena. AKA the game grid, where Sark and his minions fight the accounting programs to the death, and that's how these programs are eliminated.

And speaking of, the very first such accounting program who we see conscripted into this program is played by the great Peter Jurassic.

Londo Molari from Babylon 5.

One of my favorite characters and character actors of all time. And not only that, he is playing a character named Chrom. Chrom!

Who those who saw our previous episode on Conan the Barbarian will know is the iron god of the Sumerians.

I had totally not connected those dots before, and it delighted me to no end discovering that.

Not only am I going to refer to this character as Londo for the rest of this, because that's how big a geek I am. The thing else I remember from this time is, remember when this movie came out, the Rubik's Cube was the big fad, right? And Peter Jurassic was the spokesman for a little-known Rubik's Cube competitor known as Pyraminx, which was a pyramid-shaped Rubik's Cube competitor, and he was the star of the advertisement, and he played sort of a guy who had a nervous breakdown while monologuing about Pyraminx. And it's the first time that I remember seeing Peter Jurassic, and then I saw him in Tron, and like literally he was seared in my mind. And when Babylon 5 came up, I'm like, it's the Pyraminx guy. I don't know. Go figure.

Wow.

Those are the circles that my mind takes.

I need to race to YouTube imminently to find that.

Yes.

Wando is thrust into a cell next to Ram, played by Dan Shore, who is a much more laconic, kind of accepting of his fate program.

Also an accounting program, but a much mellow one.

Yes. Yes. Who will later rapsodic about his day job.

The users. His faith in the users, yeah. Oh, his day job is an accounting program, yeah. Yes.

It's beautiful. But he poses the question. And again, one of our first of many very efficient exposition dumps of asking a key question.

And by very efficient, you mean clunky and poorly written. But yes, indeed.

And we may have this question that he poses. Yes.

Let's hear it. I think this is our next our first clip.

You believe in the users? Yeah, sure. If I don't have a user, then who wrote me? That's what you're doing here.

Master control program has been snapping up all us programs who believe.

If he thinks you're useful, he takes over all your functions so he gets bigger.

And if he can't use you, he sends you down here to the game grid to get the bits blasted out.

You know, one of the things I love about the way that Peter Jurassic plays Chrome is that he's like, he's kind of like the East Coast Urban program. He's like, who does he think he is? What are we doing over here?

Hey, he was just, you know, doing his thing.

I was just counting for some numbers and shit. And over here, suddenly I'm in the program. What?

And then these evil, fascistic, sark minions take him out of his pencil pushing job and now he's got a fight on the grid? This is garbage. Why is he? Yeah. What did he ever do to deserve that?

By the way, I want to say one of the interesting things about this, I want to point it out now so that I don't get stuck on this later, but it may seem like we're going slow on the plot of this movie. By the time we get to Act 2, there's nothing to talk about it. Literally just like it's just it is such a morass and such a doldrummer.

I'm so tempted to take that back.

One of the things I find interesting is people talk about this movie as a CGI movie, and there are indeed a lot of sequences in this movie like the light cycles and the tanks and the recognizers that are computer generated. The majority of this movie or the stuff inside of the grid was actually shot in black and white in film and then rotoscoped. All of the glowing, all of that stuff, literally they shot it in very grainy black and white. They printed out every frame and using basically pencils drew in all of the glow. So this movie began its life as an animated movie that Steven Lisberger wanted to make. But in a weird way, a lot of the stuff that looks so high tech in this is really people putting frame blow ups of it on animation stands and filling in the blanks in a black and white movie with glow paint, which I find endlessly fascinating.

Yeah. Yeah. And then composites of the two to blend them into a cohesive world. It's a singular achievement, and it is such a unique work of art. Yes. Spanning the very cutting edge, bleeding edge of what was technically possible and had never been seen on screen to this degree.

When you look at the credits, Harrison Ellenshaw is one of the associate producers on the film. And Harrison Ellenshaw was the son of, I believe, Peter Ellenshaw, who was one of the great old school, old timey matte painters. You know, this is the guy who did matte paintings for everything from bed knobs and broomsticks to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea all the way to the black hole. And his son, again, sort of inherited the mantle. So you're literally talking about the old timey-est of, you know, like literally we paint backgrounds on glass and put them in front of the camera to make it look like there's a castle there.

Yeah.

The old timey-est of techniques with CGI.

Yes.

And by the way, I think the biggest talking point about the CGI in this movie is none of it was made by ILM, which had already taken the crown of doing the first full CGI sequence in Wrath of Khan. But it's like a weird detour in time where ILM doesn't have its fingers in any of the effects work in this movie. And it's quite innovative.

Yeah. And in this one film, you see this mix, this bland of almost the entire history of cinematic technique. Again, going back to the very primordial roots of animation that are deployed to them, this startling new that still holds up, I think, remarkably well, a very early CG animation that is augmented, I think, by just some brilliantly efficient and elegant geometric designs that lean into the limitations of the technology. It's such an incredible thing to hold to this day.

I want to point out, to get back in the plot, in the scene, by the way, that we're in this jail cell with Tron and Londo and Ram, we see one of the really nice flourishes that you see all through this movie, which is that they use computing language to sort of refer to human functions.

Yes, yes.

Leading to our third clip of the day, which, producer Brad, could you roll this? I love this.

It's murder out there. You can't even travel around your own microcircuits without permission from Master Control Program. I mean, sending me down here to play games, who does he calculate he is?

Who do you calculate you are? Bitfucker. I wish this movie had been ours so we could have things like Bitfucker. And sadly, they don't have that. But if I were doing a Tron sequel, it would be a lot more guttery than this.

Yeah, and I think that sort of reveals one of the dilemmas of this film, just from a commercial and a real world marketplace standpoint. It's just that who is the audience for this film in 1982? And it's a Disney movie. And so, yeah, it's got to kind of be for the kids, but it's also for the techno-savvy. And it's kind of mixing a lot of these different things that I feel like I was one of a very small sliver of the audience that this all worked for.

I can tell you in two words who the audience for this movie is. Ready? Steven Lisberger. We cut from this sequence into the first time we meet Flynn. He's at his computer, and he is talking to his program Clue.

I just got to say, to one of my favorite title cards of all time.

Yes, indeed. And the title card reads?

Meanwhile, in the real world.

In the real world.

And that is superimposed over Flynn at his hacking station computer.

One of the interesting things in this movie is that instead of showing us a graphical user interface, people just sort of talk into their computer, and then that becomes sort of the user talking in real time with their program, which is what we see in...

Well, they kind of narrate what they're typing.

Yes, indeed.

To make it more dramatically interesting for us, the viewer.

Yes, but by the way, I mean, people were using text interfaces. There was no really, other than some work that was being done in Xerox Labs that was later sort of used by Apple, there were no graphical user interfaces. So the movie predates that.

It's all a terminal...

So Flynn is talking to his program Clue, who's also played by Jeff Bridges, right?

Yes, who's essentially his avatar on the grid or in the grid.

And Clue is in one of these digital tanks going through the system trying to find the missing information. So he's literally in an armored war vehicle going through the grid, trying to find it, because Clue is a kind of hacker program. And this is what the interface sounds like.

Clue.

Yes, sir.

Clue, we don't have much time left to find that file. This is top priority. Yes, sir, I know, sir. This isn't just correcting my bank statement or phone bill problem again. This is a must. I understand, sir. Now, I wrote you. Yes, sir. I taught you everything I know about the system. Thank you, sir, but I'm not sure that...

No buts, Clue.

That's for users. Now, you're the best program that's ever been written. You're dogged and relentless.

Remember?

Let me at him. That's the spirit. Now, keep that...

Now I love how Jeff Bridges plays Clue. You like me reading robot books to my kid.

I have to say, Jeff Bridges clearly having the time of his life in this movie. He is having so much fun. And I don't know that there's been any actor that has enjoyed acting opposite himself that I can recall.

Look, Jeff Bridges is a great actor. We all know this, but as a young man, he was a great actor, sometimes not doing work in movies that required great acting, but he's so committed and he sells everything he has to do in this movie. And I love how his character is really like... I imagine now when you write a movie like The Social Network, which is a very serious take on computing and all that stuff, Jeff Bridges was doing great acting in a movie about cyberspace playing.

He sort of...

I mean, Flynn is kind of somebody writing Steve Jobs or Steve Wozniak or one of those hippie hacker characters at that time, before those guys were real personalities, but it's really the way that today when you pitch something and you're like, hey, this character's like Elon Musk, and he played that guy. And in a weird way, that hippie hacker character kind of presages the dude, because you hear him like, man, and all that. He's very hippie-ish, and I love that about his affect and all that. It's pretty great.

And I think that this is one of those seminal portrayals in terms of constructing a cultural iconography of how we perceive those types of people. It not quite glamorizes them, but it makes them cooler than a lot of them really are. No offense to my gaming programmer brethren. But I think it's this aspirational portrayal of this technologist, this programmer, this nerd, but who's also just super cool and rebellious and earnest and fun and vivacious and charming. And that is a departure from a lot of classical earlier period, 50s, 60s, even 70s tropes of the nerd of the computer programmer.

Or 80s tropes like the guy at Megaforce who was, you know, Professor Eggshell, and he was a nerd, and he wore a lab coat and had big glasses and was socially awkward, you know?

Yes.

Well, even in this film, you have those tropes. The other two wear big glasses, and only in the lab do they put those glasses on.

I want to point to when Clu is killed by the systems recognizers, which are these really cool sort of giant sentinel starships, in order to differentiate Jeff Bridges' portrayal of a human being from a computer avatar, not only does he give us this voice, we also get the worst death scream of any character in film history. Producer Brad, let's hear clip number six.

If any sound ever had a chance of displacing the Wilhelm Scream, this was it. And I feel like this is an important fork in the road in our cinematic history, because there's an argument to be made, that that scream should have taken the path to immortality.

Of the Wilhelm?

Yes. And that we should be just hearing that incessantly in film after film. And I feel we have somehow been robbed.

Paul, I feel now that you've become the MCP of being anti-Wilhelm Scream, and I am the infidel loyalist of the Wilhelm, because I am a Wilhelm Scream, not apologist, not I'm one of the Wilhelm faithful.

I love me some Wilhelm, but I'm just saying right here, Jeff Bridges gives it a run for its money.

He really does. No, you're absolutely right.

I salute him from afar. There's another moment and highlight of this film, and I don't know that we have that, but I might have it on my phone of the beloved character who was introduced in this scene.

That is the bit, and the bit is a floating cube that says yes or no to everything, because it's a bit, it only has two. I love that you have a bit app on your phone. You literally just goes yes or no when you push it. You know, Paul, I would yell, nerd, but let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Plot-wise, now the movie takes us to, we're back in the real world and we meet Alan Bradley, who works in the greatest cubicle farm ever. It's one of the best effects in this movie. The cubicle farm, go ahead.

I'm so sorry.

We got to get, dude, we're like an hour into the podcast. I know, I know, we got to get going.

But there are two momentous design elements that we get before that. First, we get Dillinger in the N-Com Glow Chopper.

Yes.

Which is just glorious. Why the chopper glows and has like glowings? No one knows, it's never explained, it doesn't matter, it's just cool.

It's the best stuff.

It's just cool and when you see it, you're like, oh, I want that. Then we also get his desk, which is this gorgeous, expansive touchscreen and then Dillinger's first interaction with the MCP.

Yes. I have a personal note about the desk, but let's hear the clip. Yeah. Why is he disappointed? Because Clue got so far into the grid and Dillinger was not able to stop it until much later than the MCP was happy with. Yeah. So the MCP clearly is unhappy with Dillinger not being able to catch Flynn.

Yes. So now they have to impose a shutdown of all level seven.

Of all level seven.

Six or 30 access or something, which is going to mess up everybody's work on these advanced programs. And that segues to then the gloriously dorktacular Bruce Box Lightner.

The world shuddered at the stakes presented in this film, that all level seven access was shut down. I mean, this is really on par with Tarkin destroying Alderaan. Yeah. In terms of, yeah, no, it's really, I mean, literally the audience. I mean, look, the ticket was priced for the whole seat, but the audience only needed the edge, okay? Yeah.

But then, yeah, then we get to-

No, no, no. Now I get to digress, Paul, because you want to get in with the plot, but I got a note about the desk. So in 1998, I went to work on this TV show called Charmed, which was the original, not the remake though, because that's how old I am. And the production designer of Charmed was a guy named Dean Mintzner, who was the production designer of Tron. Yes, a lot of the visual futurism was done by Mobius and by Syd Mead, but a lot of the design of this movie that you see is Dean Mintzner, right? And he actually designed and built the desk. And somewhere, without knowing that he'd been the production designer of Tron, I mentioned the desk in apropos of something on Charmed, God knows how, and he told me that he had actually built this desk. And what he explained to me was that the desk, the floor that Dillinger's office is in, is four feet off the ground because they had to put an old-timey, you remember like how digital, not digital, like analog video projectors where these things had where the size of like, I mean, they were literally humongous sort of boxes with three lenses, a red, a cyan, and green lens coming out of it. They had to build Dillinger's desk four feet off the ground, so they could stick a projector, the size of a massive television basically underneath, to project on top of the black slab. And all of his interactions with the MCP had to be pre-choreographed because they were all on videotape.

Right.

So anyway, that was my... Yeah, it's glorious.

Thank you, thank you. It's one of my favorite design elements. It has an elegant simplicity in terms of an interface and also sophistication, but again, that is covering up this very archaic, funky, analog complexity to execute it on film. And I just, I love stuff like that.

It presages touch screens.

Yeah.

So the seventh level shutdown has been put in and Alan Bradley, who works in the greatest cubicle... There's a matte composite where the cubicle farm seems to go on forever, which is hilarious.

There's orwellian expanse of cubicles. It's glorious.

And he is working on Tron, which is a watchdog program. Sadly, he has a confrontation with Dillinger because he tells Dillinger that Tron would be something that would watchdog the MCP. Dillinger is not happy about this, but he can't tip his hand that the MCP is doing all of this shady bullshit. So then, Alan Bradley, who wears the greatest glasses in history, they're huge, they look like brains, his glasses from the Thunderbirds, goes to talk to his girlfriend, Laurie.

By pushing the greatest elevator button ever, which is labeled Laser Bay 2.

Oh, yes, yes. Now, we don't talk about Laser Bay 1. That's like Bruno, you know?

Go there, and that is passed over for the button for Laser Bay 2.

Indeed.

I'm delighted with that. Then we meet our two additional characters, our obligatory real science scientists, Laura, played by Cindy Morgan. Laura, of course, being the not female lead, but only real other female character in the whole film, is not even granted the dignity of a last name, as far as I can tell. She is woefully underwritten and underserved, which is a tragedy because Cindy Morgan is by all accounts, awesome in how little we get to experience her. Then there's a wonderful exchange with her and then the mentor, Yoda, Wozniak, figure, Dr. Gibbs played by the wonderful Bernard Hughes.

The wonderful Bernard Hughes. Now, not to mention that his first name is Walt, which what could that possibly mean in a Disney movie?

But also we are segued from sets that have been built for the film to the glorious practical location that it is the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

The thing I can say about this, and I did not hear this from Dean Mintzner, we didn't have this conversation, but somebody told me a story that apparently the team went to look at the laser lab, asked how much that lab cost in the real world, and then used that it would have cost them more in movie world to make it out of styrofoam than what it cost to make an actual laser lab. So there you go. Now, Alan is so frustrated that he says that he wishes that the laser could transport him to Hawaii, and then we get another one of these great nerd joke lines, which are supposed to be real knee-slappers, but they land with a thud, but they're delightful nonetheless. Producer Brad, could you play the clip?

Beautiful. Hi, Alan.

You two having fun disintegrating things down here?

Not disintegrating, Alan. Digitizing. A laser dismapels the molecular structure of the object, and molecules remain suspended in the laser beam. Then, when the computer plays out the model like the molecules, fall back into place, and voila. Great.

Can it send me to Hawaii?

Yeah, but you gotta purchase your program 30 days in advance.

Hilarious. So, now we know what the laser does, right? And we know that Cindy Morgan's or Lori's terminal just happens to be right in front of the laser, which is not a good place to put a terminal, but whatevs.

Seems like a pretty, I don't know how OSHA let that happen. That just seems like a gross safety oversight to just...

Really? Yeah, dude. Not put your terminal in front of the human disintegration laser. Just don't do it.

Not that it's being used for weapon, but we do see it gloriously digitized in orange.

And then Bernard Hughes delivers one of the great prophetic lines of this movie. It is, producer Brad, can you regale us with that?

I had Tron almost ready when Dillinger cut everyone with Group 7 access out of the system. I tell you, ever since he got that master control program, systems got more bugs than a bait store.

Gotta expect some static. After all, computers are just machines. Machines, they can't think.

Some programs will be thinking soon.

Won't that be grand? Computers and the programs will start thinking and the people will stop.

Wow, indeed.

Wow, indeed.

And here we are.

And it all came true. And the thing I find funny about this movie is that we're supposed to care about these abstractions, you know, it's like, darn, they shut access, what are we gonna darn, you know, and the only real human thing here is Flynn is the aggrieved party. He was stolen from. And where this plot piece takes us to is that Bruce Boxleitner and Sydney Morgan, Alan and Laurie go to see Flynn because Dillinger is on to him.

Yes.

That's why he shut down the system. And this is where we kind of get a little bit of the human element of this movie, which is that Flynn genuinely has a human problem here. Of course, we see a little bit of the jealousy between Alan Bradley and Flynn. And also we see that Alan Bradley, you know, the stolid altruistic computer programmer, is really offended that Flynn is living this hippie lifestyle on top of an arcade. Can we get a clip of the next clip, Producer Brad?

The best programmer Incom ever saw when he winds up playing Space Cowboy in some back rule.

You know, both Alan and Tron are real tight asses, aren't they? I mean, it's like, it's hilarious that it's almost like the hero of this movie, the guy the movie is named after, is kind of an insufferable twat. I mean, he's so like, ah, the best Space Cowboy ever. I'm better than you, Berserk.

I'm better, better, better, better.

He's such a like Dudley Do-Right, Dirk Squarejaw. And he wears the big glasses. It's kind of like it's really Steve Jobs versus Bill Gates, isn't it?

Yes, yes.

With Jeff Bridges as Steve Jobs, the kind of hippie, and Box Lightner as the Microsoft, you know?

And of the human characters we've been introduced to so far, it's only Flynn and Dillinger who do not wear glasses. So, the scientists, the programmers, they're shown very purposely wearing glasses to codify their station.

If you wanted to know just the functional difference between Flynn and Tron, right? It literally is that if you look at those old Justin Long, Steve Kojman... What was the guy's name?

John Kojman.

John Kojman. I'm a Mac. I'm a PC. That's their character in a nutshell.

Yes.

If I were remaking this movie, that's who I would cast in these roles, you know?

It's a direct lineage.

So, this is the moment when Flynn finally presents his issue and kind of what's at the crux of this movie.

Dillinger presents Ankom with fine video games. He's invented. The slime didn't even change the names, man.

He gets a big fat promotion and thus begins his meteoric rise to...

What is he now?

Executive VP?

Senior exec.

There's so much Lebowski in that reading.

Right?

Didn't even change the lines, man. Like that is the dude.

Slime didn't even change the names, man. This is the birth of the dude, isn't it?

He's the proto-dude. Instead of having his rug stolen that tied the room together, this younger incarnation had his intellectual property, his life's work, his art stolen. Space paranoid. It tied the grid together, man.

It tied the grid together, man. Because, man, somewhere there is the proof.

So, of course, our trio then hatches a heist.

Yes.

So, they're going to break into MCOM and get the evidence, the missing file that somehow will prove that Dillinger stole the games and then he can be deposed and Flynn can be restored to glory. Anyway, it's all just kind of hand-wavy a little bit. And then they get in the MCOM van. I think they're driving around this wide van. And then they go to the gloriously grand back entrance to MCOM.

So Flynn has, of course, he has kind of like in Terminator 2, kind of like John Connor in Terminator 2, he's created a swipe card that he's programmed so he can get in. And it's funny because a box like this, where'd you get that? And Flynn's like, I made it. You want one? So then the back door opens and it is, I don't know if this is a design element for the movie or if this was in the location, but the door is not only humongous as a gate, it is like 20 feet thick. Yes. And it sort of pivots open. It's like sort of like half of a round cheese slice that pivots. And it leads to Flynn saying the following line.

Now that is a big door.

Which is weirdly the funniest line in the movie, but it's just, I don't know why. Maybe it's just because the movie is so flat up until.

It's funnier in context because there is this suspenseful, I don't know really, but sort of tedious stretch of this enormous, massively thick, like nuclear vault sized expanse of a door that just keeps sliding open and open and open. It's thicker and thicker. And it's just the joy on the location manager's face. When they found this door and clearly just wrote this around this found location, probably there at Lawrence Livermore.

I think one of the problems with this movie, and look, this is really fun and all that, I really liked it. But the thing that I think is, and I don't think, and I honestly think it's in the writing and the direction. And, you know, look, I don't want to slam Steven Lisberger as a director too much. I think this is somebody who clearly had a vision. I think the vision exceeded his grasp. But I also think that the limitations of, I look, I think his limitations as a writer, but also the limitations of what they were able to do. But I feel like the movie just sort of, even from this moment on, even the more exciting sequences, you know, the soundtrack sort of burbles along. Bur-duh-bur-duh-bur-duh-bring, bur-duh-bur-duh-bur-duh-bring, you know, and things happen. And the movie just sort of has this kind of like monotone pace that just one thing happens and other thing happens and other thing. And especially in the second act of the movie, it just becomes like, there's interesting stuff on screen, but it's very disjointed and tedious, you know? And I think that's sort of for me, like, why have a really hard time? Like, I love the visual design of this movie. I have so much nostalgia for it, but it's a tough sit for me as an adult.

Javi, Javi, you have not tried to sit through The Secret of Nymph. Let me just address briefly, because this is an interesting summer of 1982. This is Disney trying to break new ground in live action films. Which they previously tried to, about as much lack of success in The Black Hole three years prior. And meanwhile, Don Bluth is trying to challenge Disney's hegemony in animated features. This is a film that we have chosen to not do an episode on.

I feel like The Secret of Nymph is like the Maris. You know Maris in Frasier where she's Niles' wife. They talk about her endlessly, but you never meet her. I feel like that's what The Secret of Nymph is to this podcast, you know. It's the Maris of this.

Maybe to you and Brad. But I felt in the interest of completion and responsibility of the audience that I should investigate The Secret of Nymph just in case it was something that we maybe should all experience and share as we did, I think, rightly with Grease 2.

Yes, indeed.

The Secret of Nymph, I made it about 30 minutes into it, and I just couldn't go any further. It is this ocean of tedium sprinkled with spasms of nightmare fuel. And we do not need to do an episode of that film, but I just feel like in comparison to other discursions, that's not even a word, Tron is masterful in its storytelling.

And Tron is a Wachowski Brothers movie, it's a John Wick movie compared to The Secret of Nymph.

And I know a lot of people hold Secret of Nymph dear to their heart. I am so happy for those of you for whom that is true, but oh boy.

Enough about Maris. I want to play our 13th clip, and I want to point out that of 20 clips we have for this movie, literally it stops after clip 16, right, which is about 40 minutes into the movie. We only have three clips in the movie because that's how unremarkable the rest of this film gets, even though there's so much cool shit in it. I know you object to this, Paul, but the numbers speak for themselves, my friend.

I feel like that is purely an expression of the demands of the exposition, which this film is understandably front loaded with, but then soars into the third act.

We'll do the second act as a kind of speed round. You can go through the plot points because I can't remember half of them.

Oh, I'm ready.

There is a scene between Dillinger and Walt where they talk about the main ethical problem of this film, and that is clip 13, before we digitize Jeff Bridges into the grid, which, by the way, our audience is probably waiting with about as much bated breath as we are because holy crap, there's a lot of exposition. Let's hear clip 13, producer Brad.

That MCP, that's half our problem right there.

The MCP is the most efficient way of handling what we do.

I can't sit here and worry about every little user request that comes in. User requests are what computers are for.

Doing our business is what computers are for.

Wow. We wouldn't want computers to do our business, wouldn't we?

So first of all, what a delight seeing David Warner and Barnard Hughes go at it in this scene. It's a really cool scene, as clunky as much of the dialogue is, that veers into Ted Talk territory as a lot of the film does. Because this film has a lot of things it wants to talk about, a lot of big ideas, and you either are on board with that dimension of this film, or you are not. I love it. I just think it's tremendous. But it is at the cost, certainly, of some-

Oh, of human drama and interest? Yeah, it really is at the cost of that.

But also, like, soon after, we see Flynn and Laura race through this vintage mainframe room, and I'm just like, oh, look at those mainframes.

That is pretty cool. But that's the thing about this movie is that, look, I think that you are much more forgiving of its narrative and dramatic faults than I am, which is not- And I think it's funny how much of a defender of it you are, whereas I'm just trashing it all over the place. One of the best moments in my cinematic going, I got to see a 70-millimeter remaster of this movie at the El Capitan Theater with a live Q&A with Box Leitner, Cindy Morgan, and Lisberger, and it was glorious.

I hate you so much right now.

But I want to say, one of the highlights of my life, because David Warner was, he was Billy Zane's evil right-hand man in Titanic. He was the evil genius in Time Bandits, which is one of the movies I love most of all films ever. And he was Sark. And I mean, he literally is the kind of uber villain in so many things. Oh, my God, Chancellor Gowron in Star Trek 6, Gal Madred in the two-part epic Chains of Command. One of the greatest dramatic performances of all Star Trek. And Sinjin, Sinjin Underpants in Star Trek 5. Well, what was that character's name? It was something like Sinjin Underpants, right? He was the Earth viceroy to Paradise Planet.

Yes. I've made a horrible and egregious error. He did not play Chancellor Gawron. He played Chancellor Gorkon. Gawron appeared later in Deep Space Nine. Yes.

And also, by the way, just because Nicholas Meyer couldn't like step on the neck of his Cold War allegory more, like Gorkon, Gorbachev, holy crap. Literally, he wrote that movie with ham covered anvils strapped to his hands, didn't he? So one of the worst experiences of my professional career was a show I worked on in the late 90s. But the highlight of that show was that David Warner played the handler character for a group of operatives. You know, he was the guy who gave them their missions. And not only did I get to shake hands with David Warner, I know for a fact that at least one line of dialogue that I wrote got through the scrum on that show. So the fact that anything that I ever wrote got to be spoken by that actor who I just worship. I mean, literally, you know, so many great genre performances, so many great, like, dramatic performances, and just the sweetest, most gracious man. I mean, he was so kind to me. I shook his hand. I told him how much I loved Evil Genius. And it's just a total highlight of my life. And I just fucking love the guy. And he's not with us anymore. But God, I wish that he would just be immortal and just play villains in sci-fi movies forever. What a blessing.

I'm so glad you shared that. And I'm so happy you had that experience. Best price list.

So returning to Tron. So they heist into the building. Jeff Bridges has the exchange we heard at the beginning of the podcast. He gets digitized, sent into the game grid, right? Where he meets Ram and Javier.

Yeah, and it's great. It's this stunning sequence of him dematerialized and then the whole psychedelic journey, transposition going through the Stargate in 2001 into the grid. It is glorious.

I think that entrance into the grid scene is just for me one of the things about this movie where you realize as primitive as the technology was and all the design of it is so good, and so unique, that it just still holds up to this day because it's sparse, but it doesn't feel sparse because they didn't have the budget or the time to make it more busy. It feels that way by design. And I look at this movie and I'm like, this holds up, you know, and I love it. Now, Flynn, Tron, and Ram are put together in the game grid, right? So, this is where we get an introduction to the gladiatorial arena, and Sark greets us with the following speech. Greetings.

The Master Control Program has chosen you.

Thank you.

Continue to profess a belief in the users will receive the standard, substandard training, which will result in your eventual elimination. Those of you who renounce this superstitious and hysterical belief... Of the MCP.

So now we know the stakes. You go, you gladiate, and if you win, you get to become a Warrior Elite of the MCP, and if you don't, you get the rest. And Flynn gets put in his first game, which is our first sort of video game tie-in, because-

Well, I just have to say one thing. So up until this point, Tron, particular character, the hero, has been described, has been talked about, has been glimpsed, but it's only now here in this stretch that we really see Tron in action through Flynn's eyes. And it's just a great moment.

So there's two games that we see them play. One of them is the light cycle game, where the light cycles are on a grid, and they have a light trail, and you try to run the other light cycles into the wall that your light cycle creates. And then there's Disks of Tron, by the way, both of which were video games for the Intellivision gaming system. A tie-in with Mattel, and also part of the arcade game, because there was a coin up arcade Tron game. So the Disks of Tron game is high ally. You're standing on basically a bunch of concentric circles. Your enemy is on another sort of floating set of concentric circles. You throw the ball at each other. If you don't catch the ball, and it hits one of the circles, the circle vanishes, creating a void that you can fall into and die. So you don't want to fall off of your circle, right? So Tron is fighting several of the MCPs Warrior Elite on a bunch of these circles, and he de-resses all of them, and Flynn says.

Who's that guy?

That's Tron. He fights for the users.

Yeah.

He fights for the users. In this game, Tron is actually fighting with his disk, right? Because all of your programming is in a disk that hooks up to your back. It looks like a frisbee, and that is your identity disk, which is basically neither a floppy disk nor a hard disk. It's sort of just a disk disk, which is kind of a nice and nice.

Yeah, it's a disk that serves as both kind of like Captain America's shield, as both an offensive and defensive weapon, but yet also contains all of your personal information and data, which makes it really seem reckless to be throwing that thing around at people all the time. I don't know, again, very interesting design choice, but whatever, it's efficient in its consolidation.

And Flynn learns the hard way that these games mean business when he is put in a disks game against Chrome, Peter Jurassic, aka Londo Malari of Babylon 5, the Centauri ambassador. Now, Londo's a little bit aggro in this game, right? Like Londo's got some attitude.

Surprisingly, it seems a little arrogant and kind of feels like he's going to wipe the floor with this newbie who just showed up on the grid. And that seals his fate.

But the thing is, Jeff Bridges doesn't realize that these games are deadly. So he beats them and then he doesn't want to kill him. And then Sark basically derests his crom to show Jeff Bridges that these games are lethal. And from there, Ram, Tron, and Flynn are put in the light cycle grid together to fight the warrior elite, which leads to what I think is the best sequence of this movie. I don't know, Paul, do you agree? Do you disagree?

What do you think? I want to make mention of one thing. I know we've got to keep moving and I just could live in the whole Flynn-Crom highlight match.

Please keep going.

But we also get the moment where Flynn and Ram have this little sidebar conversation. And Ram is just waxing rhapsody about his former life as an actuarial program for an insurance company.

There's something really rewarding about helping people. And when you think of the payments as an annuity, the cost is really quite negligible.

It's so hilarious to me. I love these little digressions that are so weird and like, who is this for?

But it's funny because you never think of accountants as like the good, accountant characters in movies are like always the stuck up kind of like pent up characters. And Ram is such a like just such a dewy eyed moon calf. He just kind of loves being being an accounting program. He loves helping people, you know, and he's actually a very likable character in the movie. And he's sort of very balletic and sort of free flowing, very wavy gravy in his movements. You know, he's kind of like, yeah, like the little brother, you know.

But it's a great moment. And then after we have the matches, when we've seen Tron in action for the first time and Tron's a badass, Flynn then finally meets Tron and recognizes Tron, mistakes him for Alan, because it's essentially his avatar on the grid. Well, not just Alan, but Alan One, who Tron is aware of and knows as his user, which again also just ties into the whole techno-religious dimension of faith that these programs or some of these programs have and that Sark and the MCP are trying to suppress.

And you get the sense that Clue and Tron as programs, because they are personally aware of the identity of their users, are sort of like blessed in a certain way, and they are the ones who fight for the users because they have this personal knowledge of the people who control them.

That incarnation of Clue is dead, and it seems like Flynn maybe had multiple Clues that just met similar fates that he had been deploying. But yeah, then we get to the great light cycle scene, and it is...

The great light cycle match.

It's still awesome to this day. It's so, so badass.

My note on this was they've zhuzhed up the light cycles endlessly for Tron Legacy and for the video games and the animated game and all that. I don't think they've ever beaten this beautiful, simple design that they have. These sort of eggy but sleek light cycles. One of the things I disliked about Tron Legacy is that they zhuzhed everything up. Everything was turned up to 11, and it's fine, whatever. Again, the greatness of this movie is in its simplicity. It is limited by the resources of the programs and the graphics they had, but they achieved beauty in that. Whereas you look at Tron Legacy and it's sort of like they had everything, and they did a bunch of stuff with it, but none of it really sticks because they just have everything. And I feel like the art of this movie of working within these limitations is just phenomenal.

I will say I do think that there is some value and quality in some of the design work in Tron Legacy, but it's a different thing. It is not playing in the same sandbox, and so it is not forced to have to create within constraints that I think led to some true design genius in Tron that is absolutely remarkable.

Yeah, I think there's also something primal about the design here in that it is the first time they did this. Everything that comes after it is gerging this up, but the light cycles, honestly, for me, it's the best sequence in the film. I love it, and it's the most tense sequence in the film because literally they're trying to run people into the light walls, but Flynn manages to crash one of the enemy light cycles into the outer perimeter of the arena, thus creating an escape.

A crack in the wall.

Yeah, so Flynn, Tron, and Ram get out, and they escape, and now they're out in the system, and they know that there's an IO tower they have to get to, right? Well, they don't know yet. They get out into the system, and they're within sight of the IO tower, which because there has been a System 7 shutdown, is the only way to get to talk to the users, and we know from the exposition earlier that Alan is sitting by his terminal waiting to talk to Tron. So if they can get to the IO tower, right, they can get instructions on how to destroy the master control program. I think that's the plot of the movie, because that part is glossed over enormously, but that seems to be the plot of the movie now. Again, you know, the interesting thing about this movie is because it really is video game plotting. It is what I call guy in the thing with the place plotting, which is that you have to get to the guy who has the thing so you can get to the place. You know?

Yeah. It's a quest. And much of this film is as much fantasy adventure as sci-fi.

Now, there's a really funny little sequence here as our characters are recovering from the exertion of the light cycle escape and escaping from the tanks and recognizers that they find a pool of its water. This is the oasis in the desert scene.

Glowing blue water.

The water represents being able to get power without having your power regulated by the MCP. They drink the water and they get high on it, which is really funny. Tron, you don't see it, but because of the power he receives from the water, he's able to hear Alan Wan's call, which is a really cool little moment in the movie. But then they get back in their light cycles. They have a horrible encounter with the MCP's tanks. Tron and Flynn and Ram are actually divided. Flynn and Ram wind up in the wreckage of a recognizer. And Ram is clearly mortally wounded. But Flynn is able to bring the recognizer back to life using his user power. And as Ram finally dies, he dies realizing that he's in the presence of a user. And this is where you get the religious rapture of a program witnessing a living. Ram realizes that his faith was true all along, and he dies looking in the face of a living God, which is, I mean, it's interesting because the actors play it so earnestly. And as acting goes so well, but it's a tough one to render, isn't it, Paul?

So I love this so much. It's so great.

Yeah, it's great.

Prior to his death exclamation, he asks Flynn, are you a user? And then he implores him to help Tron. But yes, seeing the setup, I'm all about setups and payoffs. I just I'm a sucker for it. But the setup of all the religious dimensions of this movie and that this is a movie about faith. And this is the moment where Ram's faith is rewarded. And he dies in religious rapture, facing a God that validates his belief that he is harbored and held onto and fought for and died for. And he dies at peace. And it's a beautiful moment. Could it be a better moment? Could it be grander, deeper, richer, better executed? What couldn't be?

It doesn't matter. The actors give it their all. And you can see that and it works, right?

I love the idea behind it, the meaning behind it. It's dimensions like this that really keep me connected to this film and make me want to defend it because I just have deep affection for it.

No, no, I'm completely with you. I think it's one of the things that makes this movie interesting is that it sort of has that techno-spiritualistic bent of early hack, like whole earth catalog, early hacker culture. What sort of morphs into Burning Man culture really now? I mean, Burning Man was more of a techno hacker thing. So I think you're really seeing like a seminal moment in that. So after this death, we cut back to Tron, and Tron has gone into kind of a computer city. There's a sort of city in the middle of the system where, you know, we have all sorts of weird programs for walking around, and he goes to see Yori, who is the avatar of Lori. And Lori is, is it Laura? Or I thought they called her.

I think it's, well, they may also nickname her Lori, but I think she's listed as Laura. But, you know, who knows whatever. Yes, I don't know.

The character is still saying, like, you know, she is literally the anti-Beckdell test void of 80s cinema personified. And it's sad because, you know, Cindy Morgan's fun and she's certainly adorable in the movie. And I will tell you this, the one thing that I do appreciate is that they're all wearing tights. OK, mercifully, there were dance belts in this movie, which I really appreciate. I have that on firsthand because Bruce Box-Lightner mentioned it in that Q&A I talked about. They wore dance belts, so there's no embarrassing bulges as in Megaforce. Thank you. And, you know, Cindy Morgan is a shapely young lady. So, you know, in the tights, she looks perhaps a little bit more sexualized, but not egregiously, which I really appreciate. And when you see her earlier in the movie, she is like in a tweed jacket and glasses and she's nerded up, which actually makes her even more adorable. They really resisted the impulse to sex her up until the very last shot of the movie where they teased her hair and put her in an Angora sweater for no goddamn reason. But anyway, so Yori is working on the solar sailor simulation, right? Yes. Which is a beautiful design flourish. And oh, the solar sailor is gorgeous. The solar sailor is like a giant sort of butterfly wing attached to this lengthy sort of tubular open air cockpit. And it goes through the electrical waves of the grid. And Tron is going to use the solar sailor to get to the IO tower, right? I think that's the plot of this movie. Again, this is the part of the movie where I feel it's very doldrum. It's just sort of like, wow.

And we're intercutting between parallel journeys that are converging the destination. So we're intercutting between Tron, and now he's met up with Yori, enlisting her. Actually, he has to break her out of a spell, essentially, because she is under the kind of thumb of Sark.

Everyone in this city is sort of a zombie computer worker. This part of the movie really reminded me of, which is sort of a weird pull, but I think you'll see it, if not agree with it, really reminds me of THX 1138.

Very much so.

It's sort of like they're all zombies, they're all kind of working, doing the master control programs, bidding, they're all kind of drugged up. And then Tron sees Yori and he touches her, and she kind of lights up, and she sort of breaks her spell. And there is a deleted scene here that we did not see. I don't know if it was ever filmed. I think it was filmed, but not finished, where they go to Yori's quote, apartment unquote, and she sort of butterflies out in a kind of like feminine version of rebirth. And I guess what would have been their version of a sex scene, I don't fucking know. It's in the novel, but it's not in the movie. But I believe that they mentioned somewhere in some of the literature that was actually shot and cut out. So I'll have to look at my Tron 20th anniversary DVD to see if it was actually included there.

The mind boggles.

Now, meanwhile, Flynn is flying the Recognizer across the digital wasteland, and Ram has died.

As best he can. And this is, I think, some successful comedy in that, on the one hand, Flynn has discovered his user power that is unique among, doesn't exist among the programs, that gives him some influence and power over items and elements that exist in the grid. And so he has reconstructed this record of this recognizer, this janky, kind of jeloppy recognizer. And he is trying to figure out how to fly it stably. And it's funny. It's not working well. He's running into things and says it's played for comedy, and it's pretty good.

And briefly, he is joined by...

Bit!

Who appears and then disappears from the movie. But Bit to me is like the boo-boo. Do you remember Clash of the Titans?

Remember Boo-Bo? You have no idea how much I love Boo-Bo. How much I crave ownership of my own Boo-Bo replica that has escaped my clutches repeatedly in my life and vexes me to no end. One thing that I do not own, that I have wanted...

Surely somebody has manufactured that replica ball.

Yes, yes! And I have come close. I actually... Mike Mignola, I believe, this is a total digression, he somehow, for some reason, was sitting on a horde of vooboats that somehow had, through a dark horse license or something, I don't even know, but at one point I discovered that my creator of Hellboy, I worked on the Hellboy movie, whatever, blah, blah, and he apparently had boxes and boxes of something that he was getting rid of. And I was like, I looked like one up. No, I didn't. I should have been more assertive, clearly. But yeah, there have been multiple, just bizarre scenarios in my life where I've become so close to getting a Bubo, and I just haven't gotten one. And I don't know why.

Is Bubo the mechanical owl?

Yes, the mechanical owl, yes. And I think this is the influence of Star Wars, is that every movie needed an R2. Yes. Because BIT shows up. Well, I think we have a clip of BIT here, Producer Brad. Brad? Hold it right there!

Is that all you can say? Well, anything else?

Positive and negative, huh?

You're a bit.

Well, where's your program? Isn't he gonna miss you?

I'm your program.

I have another mouth to feed.

Oh. So, I just, speaking personally, you know how I said previously, I think there needs to be a mega force ballet. I feel there needs to be a stage production of Flynn and Bit. That's just an extended black play, just a conversation between Flynn and Bit. I would be first in line to see that. I love this so much.

Paul, I think that the world of experimental theater really lost something when you chose to go into the world of film production and geek culture. I feel like it really was their loss. So, we get the sense that Bit is Clu's Bit, and that's why he's attaching to Flynn.

Right, because Bit escaped when Clu in Act 1 was deresed and defeated, but yeah, Bit managed to escape.

Not that the film in any way bothers to lay that out for us in any meaningful way, and then Bit completely vanishes after the sequence. We don't see Bit again.

Sadly so. Although, in a just public service announcement, and you referenced this earlier to those of our listeners who have iOS devices, you can go on the App Store, and you can find a Bit app. If you just search Tron Bit, you will find it.

What does this have to do, Paul?

It is a virtualization of Bit on your phone, and you can spin it around with your finger on the screen, and it is very soothing. Then if you tap it, it's like a magic gate ball that only does two things. It will say yes or no, and I'm going to get this tape wrong, but this has been in the App Store since 2016, thanks to developer named Anders Hulvmuller.

Now, Paul, do you get 20 percent of sales of this app, or is this just a public service?

It is free, and it has given me no end of delight.

Let's go from that existential dilemma to just the plot of the movie. Flynn winds up in the computer city after he crashes the recognizer.

It's a great crash sequence, by the way.

There's a lot of what Tron calls useless data pushers, so obsolete programs laying around. Flynn is walking around the city, and he winds up having a weird... I assume this is what became the computer nymphs in Tron Legacy, but there's this weird hooker program that he exchanges a very odd exchange of looks with.

Yeah, that's definitely a choice in that one shot.

I imagine that program was like Leisure Suit Larry program, that just got exiled to the computer city.

Yeah, we had glimpses of other denizens of this digital city.

There's one that has like fuses sticking out of its head, like a kind of compass rose, and this is kind of a clock.

Yeah, it kind of taunts us with these other story threads or spinoffs or whatever that we could go explore that are fascinating to imagine, but we know we got to stay on track, we got to get to the IO tower.

But not that the movie is particularly in a hurry to get there, by the way, Paul, but it would verbally go to these.

This is a stretch that I will fully admit meanders somewhat. There's some cool moments, like where Flynn is to infiltrate the city. He takes out a guard and lays hands on him and then absorbs. The warps have red energy lighting on them.

It's an interesting variation I put on the Stormtrooper costume, which is that he does X a villain out and then the heroes are blue, the villains have red glow, so he touches the villain and he becomes a red glow, so he's able to infiltrate the solar sailor. He follows the villains to the solar sailor. I don't know why, but that's what he does. Tron actually thinking he's a villain knocks him off the solar sailor, so Flynn is actually grabbing on to the edge of the solar sailor. Now, the best part, so Tron is fighting Sarx Denizens, so that they can sail the solar sailor away. He knocks Flynn off and Flynn is cliffhanging. There's a scene in Austin Powers, the one with Michael Caine, where Michael Caine is beating up some henchmen and there's one henchmen left, and he tells the henchmen, do you know how many henchmen I've killed in my career as a spy? The henchman was like, yeah, and Michael Caine goes, great, so just lie down.

Save yourself the trouble.

Because otherwise, I'm just going to kill you. The same thing happens in this. Tron kicks the shit out of about four henchmen, and the last henchman is in the top of the solar sailor, and he just looks at Tron and goes, and he jumps off the solar sailor to his death, presumably, rather than be killed by Tron.

It's fun. This movie has fun. I like it when this movie has fun. But we have egregiously skipped over one of the most momentous. Oh, God.

Oh, God.

Not only in this film, but in this podcast, which is that Tron and Yori make it to the Io Tower, and they find Barnard Hughes' avatar. No, no.

They take the solar sailor to the Io Tower.

No, no, no. They take the solar sailor to the... That's when they take the solar sailor to the MCP.

Oh, fuck it, Doc. Okay. This is momentous in this podcast. I agree. Would you like to explain why?

So the guardian of the Io Tower is named Dumont.

But do you know why he's named Dumont?

Well, he's named Dumont after the failed television network from the 1950s, I would imagine.

Well, prior to that, Dumont created... not created, he was one of the main manufacturers of cathode ray tubes. He made TVs and then he created a network so people would buy his TVs.

Yes, yes. So Captain Video, with the first televised science fiction show, was in fact on the Dumont network. Captain Video, Master of the Video Rangers, I think we all know what that is, right?

Not to be confused with DuPont.

The manufacturer of napalm.

Another thing that may escape our listeners' awareness, because we refer to him with almost religious fervor as Producer Brad. But Producer Brad is alter ego, is Brad Dumont.

Yes, Bradley Dumont is Brad's real name. And ever since Tron, I referred to him many, many times in the following inflection, shall we?

I'm waiting.

No, the inflection is the soundbite.

Dumont!

For much of the 80s, whenever I saw Producer Brad, I would say, Dumont!

I would say it hasn't ended, Javi. I think you did it last week.

So, the great thing about Dumont is that he lives in a kind of circular altar, and he is encased in what I can only describe as digital armadillo armor. He's literally like his head comes out of this hole, and his hands are sort of like... And he looks kind of like a big digital armadillo, doesn't he?

He reminds me of, or what reminds me of him. And you'll appreciate this as someone who's worked with the great Jim Henson company. A pilot in Farscape.

Yeah, absolutely. I am there with you 100%. So, they get to the IO Tower, and while Flynn and Yori sort of hold off Sark's thugs, Tron is able to get into the IO Tower, and he communicates with Alan Wan, gets the program that will destroy the Master Control Program, and we get our Death Star Trench instructions, which is that the Master Control Program, its base looks like an hourglass, and if you can fly the disc into the narrowest part of the hourglass, the Master Control Program will be destroyed. And while this is going on, Sark's thugs are coming at us. Dumont is able to sort of create a shield, but they break through it. Flynn and Tron and Yori escape. Dumont is captured by Sark and tortured horribly, much in the same way that Dillinger sort of browbeats Walt. And then we get to the... And then we get to the Solar Sailor? No.

Yeah. So, Yori and Tron board the Solar Sailor after Sark breaks in to the Io Tower with this large-acrobed battery-gram thing, and then takes Dumont, then Sark's carrier is pursuing them. Flynn... Then we have the scene that you regaled us with where then they're attacked, but Flynn is infiltrated at Sark's minions and is mistaken for one of them and almost trick-killed, but then he joins them and reveals... The other big moment is that... And I kind of wish here dramatically that it was instead that Tron and Jory figured it out, but Flynn then finally just reveals to them that he is actually a user. He is not a program.

Leading to the best religious allegory of the entire film. Tron says, You're a user, so everything you do must be according to a great plan, and Flynn goes, Exactly. We're just figuring it out just like you are, dude. I'm so sorry. God is dumb and we're blundering around. Sorry.

It's great. It's funny. It's great. It's kind of deep in its own way.

Yep.

While also being fun, but yeah, it ties so many things together and it's like giving them this revelation. Then, you know, when the organizers deployed after them, we get this really weird little tease of grid bugs, which I guess was just a shot they had animated, but then it's never paid off. It's a setup with no pay off.

You see these weird little monsters coming up from the grid, these weird little bug robots, and you hear in voiceover Yuri saying, oh no, this is going to be hard. If those grid bugs gets us, we're in trouble. And then we never see them again. And it's just like literally, I think it must have been something they did as a test and they never had the plot for it, but they just kind of stuck it in anyway, you know, I think.

Yeah, and it probably cost a lot of money, so they had to use that shot anyway.

Probably.

Did the bugs make it into the video game?

I don't think they did. I don't remember them being in the video game at all.

I think they may have. I believe that in one of the levels and one of the things that you did have to fight grid bugs. I could be retroactively hallucinating. Then we enter, you know, Juman's tortured. Then there's this moment where Flynn has to use his user power to form a beam junction because there's a surge on the beam they're riding that's sent by the MCP that's threatening to have to bypass. But then, you know, there's this long chase between the carrier and the lightsail. It takes too long.

Lengthy. There's a lengthy chase.

The carrier then intercepts them. And there's actually, when we actually get to this point, it's pretty cool. There's a great reveal through this canyon where the lightsail passes in foreground and then in background we see glimpses of the carrier is caught up to them, is about to intercept. It then collides.

They vaguely approximate thrilling action filmmaking here. Vaguely.

It's almost like a Star Trek II sort of ships, a sea battle. But then the carrier rams them, collides with it, destroys them, and then Tron is presumed to be dead.

Yes.

Finally, we get to the moment where Sark meets Flynn, and Sark knows that Flynn is a user, but cannot let this on.

But then Sark makes the usual rookie villain mistake. So the carrier is taking old programs like Dumont to be absorbed into the Master Control Program, the program that MCP has found useful. And as the carrier goes to the barrier to the Master Control Program, it's going to automatically de-res for some reason. So instead of killing Flynn, and Yuri, Sark says, the carrier is going to de-res incredibly powerful godlike user who can make stuff happen that I don't even understand here. So I'm just going to leave you to die.

Yeah, that's going to work.

Classic Bond villain mistake, right? So the carrier de-res is, of course, Flynn and Yuri manage to escape. And at the same time, parallel action, Tron has survived. He's making it to the Master Control Program. So Flynn and Yuri are flying over the Master Control Program. Tron arrives there.

He fights Sark.

And then we get the great woman where he kills Sark. But then the Master Control Program in his desperation gives Sark all his power and Sark becomes Godzilla Sark.

I was going to say, it's so cool and it's kind of out of the blue. And it is freaky. I remember being freaked out as a kid because Sark is defeated. And it's a little graphic in a digital way in terms of like the damage that Tron inflicts on Sark. And like he's got a crack in his skull and it's like sparking and all this stuff. And he falls and his eyes are black.

And his eyes turn black.

And he infuses Sark with his power, resurrecting him as Zombie Kaiju Sark. Yes. It's like, whoa, whoa, this is like, where did this come from?

Tron hits him on the head with his disc and Sark's eyes dematerialize. And there's like yellow sparks coming out of his eyes. So he becomes giant black-eyed Kaiju Sark.

And then we're intercutting because Flynn and Yori, who still believe in Tron to be dead, kiss.

Yes.

As they're escaping.

Flynn can't hold back.

He just can't help himself. And this is apparently a new experience that is not part of the program's programming. Who would have thunk it? They then jump into the MCP kind of arena space. They see Tron is alive. Oops. And then they, through teamwork, they give Tron his shot, which I will just say the whole architecture and design of the sequence and the NPC and the spot that Tron has to hit with his disc will be echoed uncannily, I believe, by the second Death Star destruction in Return of the Jedi. Did you not find that from a striking design parallel?

Yes. It's that kind of hourglass shape. You have to hit the middle of it. Absolutely. So the MCP is throwing up these barriers. Tron has to break the barriers down with his frisbee. Flynn realizes that if he jumps into the Master Control Program's IO beam, he can himself as a user basically weaken the MCP, distract it. He jumps into the beam after kissing Yori, because Yori's like, you'll die. He's like, I'm a user. Fuck that shit. And then the barriers around the MCP, one of them vanishes. Tron throws the disc in and like the Death Star, blows the thing up.

As Flynn ascends.

Yes, as Flynn ascends back into the real world.

Yeah, and Kaiju's arc falls, the MCP explodes.

Then Yori kisses Tron victoriously, and Tron's like, what was that? Where'd you learn that? What's that about?

And then the grid is freed, and in a sequence that reminded me of what would come later, is the beacons are lit in the Lord of the Rings.

Where the fires of Rohan?

Yes, every tower is lighting up, they declare, and peace and wonder and equality and liberty and everything.

And suddenly every user in the world can access the system, and the system is literally that whole earth catalog archetype of what the internet should have been, which is just a free open source. Everybody gets in there and codes their own thing, digital utopia. How did that work out for us?

Everything is fine, everything is great with that. And then Flynn is rematerialized into the real world by the laser. Who knows how, it's never explained. We'd only been shown that the laser dematerializes.

And then? Actually, because the app, they show it how they do it. I think Alan bites it. Flynn has been looking for the proof that Dillinger took his stuff. And next to him, a dot matrix printer prints out the sentence, program name Space Paranoids created by Flynn, annexed in by Dillinger, end of line. The dot matrix print out of destiny is printed out for him. It's literally those three lines. How is that going to hold up in court? I don't even know.

It's just something somebody could have typed. I don't really understand how that is a smoking gun. Easily forgable piece of evidence. That is the thing we've been on a quest for the entire movie.

The dot matrix print out of fate.

But the soothing dulcet tones of a vintage 82 dot matrix printer, a few things wore my heart more, Javi. It's beautiful. He's got the evidence. Then we have a quick epilogue where we flash forward. Flynn now has the N-Com Chopper.

We're in the helipad. The glowing N-Com Chopper comes in. In a very ADR-ed line, Alan Bradley says, It's official! Here comes the boss! Now dressed in a very hip suit, not a button-down, three-piece suit like all the bad guys were in this movie, because back then the three-piece suit was still the standard business attire. Flynn comes out in a double-breasted Miami Vice-looking blue suit out of the helicopter.

Everyone is looking fashionably affluent.

Laura is in Angora. Alan Bradley still looks like a geek. How do you know that Flynn is the boss now? He turns to the Chopper pilot and goes, I'll be back in an hour! Come back to pick me up in an hour!

So instead of the helicopter just staying there, waiting for him, the helicopter flies off for no better reason, only to fly back. And then we pan to the cityscape and time lapse. Night falls on the city, which then again, of course, evokes the vision of the grid.

And the beautiful Wendy Carlos, slightly languid, burbling score that is still gorgeous, even though the movie is very languidly paced and the score kind of shows that comes on. And then we hear the tie-in Journey song, which now we hear Only Solutions is the main single, which sadly did not really do that well, as far as I understand, in the arcade. And then there's another song called 1990s theme, you know, because of the future. Is that the one they play at the end of the movie or do they play only solutions? I can't tell.

I don't recall. I don't know that it matters. All I know was the Journey song.

Yeah, it may be the least remarkable Journey song ever. And Journey had so many bangers and this one just did not. They did not get it there. So anyway, let's wrap up. Lasting cultural impact. That's all we've talked about, right?

It's Tron lives. And in so many ways.

It does.

And not just in a light cycle ride at Disneyland, Shanghai, or somewhere that I really want to ride that looks really cool, although I hear is painfully short. I think it's only like a minute or a minute and a half long ride. It's apparently ridiculously short, but it looks super cool and badass. There was also a really cool one season series called Tron Uprising. The Polygon Pictures animated.

Which apparently is better than Tron Legacy, and it's actually a really good animated series of its own self.

It's really good. Elijah Wood voices the lead. Lance Henderson voices the antagonist. It's a lot of fun. It's a really cool stylized series. It's on Disney Plus. If you're a Tron fan, I would recommend it. The first episode is very confusing from the outset, but settle in. Settle in. It's worth it. It's a lot of fun.

I don't doubt it.

There is a third Tron film in the works.

Oh, goody.

But it's not the intended sequel that Kaczynski wanted to make after Tron Legacy.

This movie is being made, isn't it? Like, it's actually in production now, isn't it?

It is being made. It is regrettably anchored by Jared Leto. I don't know why Disney thinks we want a sequel that's not connected to Tron Legacy with stuff that was set up at the end of that film.

What I find interesting about this movie is that look, Gen X, our generation, loved their pop culture. And our love of that pop culture, at least, for it to be rebooted constantly. But this movie really does not. Its performance, I don't know exactly why so much ancillary material and sequels have been in this movie. It was not particularly successful, and it's not beloved by as many as I think they think it is. So, producer Brad, how did this movie do at the box office?

Well, Tron opened at number three the week of July 9th, 1982.

Behind?

ET was number one and Rocky III was number two. It earned in its first week 7.3 million. For the year, it was the 26th highest grossing film behind films like Taps, Sharky's Machine, Tootsie, and Young Doctors in Love. And then for all time, Tron ranks 3,158, and it's behind films like The Jazz Singer with Neil Diamond, Flash Gordon, Joe Dirt, and Spy Hard.

Well, Flash Gordon, I mean, come on, if we were doing summer of 1980, we'd do a five-hour episode about Flash Gordon, that movie's the greatest film ever made.

I think we need to do that at some point.

From the director of Get Carter. What?

Anyway, we'll jump into the time machine and hop around for some special episodes.

Look, as much as there is to bag on in this movie, it is a wonderful artifact. I certainly love it for so many reasons. So few of it is the plot and the dialogue and the characters, but I do love it. I don't know, Paul, what would be your last word on Tron?

As with a handful of movies that I love, in no rational universe should this movie exist. The fact that it got made at all and that succeeded in the levels that it did, technically, creatively, for all its flaws and clunkiness and its reach exceeding its grasp, I think it's just an incredible achievement with such verve and earnestness and vision. Just the sheer, unadulterated, bold vision that this film has that I don't think can be exaggerated for how striking it was ahead of its time in 1982 and what it forecast. And it's just charming. I just love this movie.

It's one of those weird things where Disney was so desperate to get in the sci-fi video game thing and to score something like a Star Wars, you know? And somehow they latched on to this as the thing that was going to do it and it's an odd, odd little artifact, but it is rather meaningful culturally in terms of sci-fi culture. And yeah, I think you're absolutely right.

There's a quote from Steve Lisberger where he said that while working on it, an old timer at Disney came up to him and said, this film feels dangerous, feels cutting edge, and it feels like Walt is still here.

Yeah. Oh, wow. Well, you know, I can't think of a better thing that you could be told than that if you're making a movie at Disney, right?

Well, this comes after The Black Hole. Yes.

Oh, yes. But you know, everything, I think of the world as before The Black Hole and after The Black Hole. That's kind of how I see culture. Hey, producer Brad, what are our options for next week?

Next week is going to be Friday, July 16th, 1982. And there are three movies opening, but it looks like we're exiting the blockbuster phase of the summer.

Oh, no.

Oh, no.

We have Six Pack, directed by Daniel Petrie, starring Kenny Rogers, Diane Lane, Aaron Gray, and Anthony Michael Hall.

What the hell is that?

Kenny Rogers is a race car driver who adopts six orphans.

Wow. Do you get a knife to slit your veins when you go see that movie? Is that part of the price of admission? Holy crap.

Are these human orphans? I'm just searching for some genre dimension that I can latch on.

It's just something. Something. Give me something I can latch on to. What else, Brad?

Next up, Woody Allen's A Midsummer Night Sex Comedy with Woody Allen, Mia Farrow, and Jose Ferrer.

Nope. Nope. Jose Ferrer, Pride of Puerto Rico. I love the guy, but I ain't doing a Woody Allen movie. Sorry.

And the third and final is Young Doctors in Love, Gary Marshall's first feature film, and it's starring Michael McKean, Sean Young. But listen to this cast that's also in the film. Crystal Bernard, Ted McGinley, Saul Rubinick, Harry Dean Stanton, Pamela Reid, Taylor Negron, Dabney Coleman, Michael Richards, Hector Elizondo, and Demi Moore is also in it, but uncredited.

Wow. My understanding is that this was Gary Marshall trying to do for soap operas, like for General Hospital, what Airplane did for disaster movies.

Right. I think one of the reviews of it says there's a doctor who's afraid of blood in the movie.

Yes. Paul, I mean, I don't know what to do here. I say we do Young Doctors in Love. I mean, why not?

Did we have to have to?

Because I say this as someone who just endured half an hour of The Secret of Man.

Michael McKean's in it.

That's a good point.

Is this a good point? So full disclosure, I've never seen this movie. I have just bare awareness of this existence. I have no interest in this movie whatsoever.

Then let's do it. Then let's go. Let's make it happen. This might be where we break through into real greatness and can I make a suggestion? Yes, please.

Another movie that opened before the summer, which we haven't really discussed, is The Road Warrior.

We're doing The Road Warrior. Yep. That's it. Road Warrior. Okay, good. Thank you, producer Brad. It turns out that at the third run theater, they are still playing Road Warrior.

What are the odds?

Producer Brad to the rescue. All right. So on that note, we will see you next week in line at The Multiplex. End of line.