Today it is a science fiction classic, but in its day ‘Tron’ did not win the Oscar for special effects for “cheating”

Today, ‘Tron’ is considered a classic without any buts: just turned 40, no one disputes his visionary role or his pioneering use of special effects By computer. Even his argument, in which a programmer enters the guts of a computer, is obvious and almost daily after the success of proposals such as ‘Matrix‘, but at the time, no one had done anything like it.

It was this pioneering condition that played against her a bit and turned Disney’s bet into a failure that only raised fifty million dollars (a blow of such caliber that the Midway arcade game that was inspired by its plot reached raise more money). Its aesthetics and its argument were difficult to assimilate by the public of the time.

And not only because of the public: the industry itself refused to recognize the innovative character of the film. Visually overwhelming (despite its technical clumsiness, mesmerizing aesthetic today), the Film Academy did not even deign to nominate it for the category of Best Special Effects. The reason? Doing effects with the help of the computer was considered to be “cheating”. His competitors that year were three classic hits of the caliber of ‘ET the Extraterrestrial’ (which won), ‘Poltergeist’ and ‘Blade Runner’, but ‘Tron’ would have deserved to be there.

It’s funny that ‘Tron’ was seen as cheating, because creating its effects was anything but easy. He required the competition of four leading computer graphics companies of the time, and only to produce a little less than twenty minutes of computer images. To get an idea of ​​the rudimentary methods that were available, the computers that were used had about 2 MB of memory and only 330 MB of storage, and the iconic black backgrounds of the film were originally going to be white, as in ‘THX 1138’, but the computers could not generate them and they had to opt for black scenarios.

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Today it is a science fiction classic, but in its day ‘Tron’ did not win the Oscar for special effects for “cheating”