The Legacy of TRON: Light Freaking Cycles

From Olivia Wilde to Daft Punk, to a Crazy Heart-era Jeff Bridges sharing the screen with a facsimile of his c. 1985 self, TRON: Legacy offers an embarrassment of riches for devotees of the original TRON movie. Only one of these, though, appeals directly to the giddy 11-year-old fan lingering in each of us.

The light cycle.

Released in 1982, TRON tells the story of a video game designer who, for assorted nefarious reasons, is scanned into a computer and pitted against the digital minions of the Master Control Program, or MCP. (Remember, this was nearly 30 years ago, before most people had any awareness of the internet. The notion of interacting with others virtually, somewhere within a machine, might have seemed a bit preposterous.)

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