Less Than a Collection of Ideas

In the build up to Tron: Legacy, director Joseph Kosinski was tasked with creating a couple of bookend films to advertise the film and then illustrate where it could lead in the future. Disney, to their credit, was all in on Tron and they assumed that between the sequel, the games, the shorts, and the television series, Tron: Uprising, they had their next big franchise on their hands. With hindsight, of course, it’s pretty obvious that Disney put their cart before their horse. While the film wasn’t that bad, it also didn’t garner the kind of acclaim, or Box Office, Disney wanted, and soon after its release the franchise went dormant again, with talk of a third Tron film (a TR3N, if you will) getting backburnered again and again for years.

Still, it is interesting to go back and look at these little curiosities and see just what Disney was hoping to build for their one-time, future franchise. So let’s look at those two short films that book end the movie to see what they bring to the table.

TR2N

The first of the two was originally titled TR2N, although now it’s just listed as an early visualization trailer for Tron: Legacy. Released at San Diego Comic Con the year before, TR2N is more of a mood piece than a real story, a promise of what was to come. And, honestly, it was a pretty good promise. If Disney wanted to build hype and get people interested in the sequel that was to come, this was the right trailer to release for the occasion.

TR2N focuses on an unnamed program, colored in blue, who is being chased by another program, colored in yellow. The guy, chased around the dark streets of the Grid, has to hop on his lightcycle and ride off. This leads to a pretty interesting tease of the lightcycle battles that would show up in the film to come and then the blue guy gets away… he thinks. In the end he gets taken out by the man in yellow, who then reveals himself to be CLU (Jeff Bridges). The man pleads for his life, “it’s just a game!” But CLU responds, “not anymore…” teasing what’s to come. Oh, and all of this happens while Flynn (also Bridges) watches on.

Again, it’s not really that deep of a story, just a simple chase through some cool visuals. Hell, you don’t even learn who the blue guy is or why CLU is chasing him. You don’t know what CLU wants beyond, “murder this dude.” But it’s convincing as a piece of promotional material and, I’d argue, it does a much better job of showing off the world of Tron: Legacy (or what it would eventually become once a little more time was put into the visual effects) than any other trailer really could have. This is its own little effective story and it really works.

The one thing I will note is that they didn’t quite have the visual language down for the film yet. Specifically while the program here is dressed with blue LED lighting, Tron: Legacy dressed them all in white LEDs. Meanwhile, CLU’s colors are far more yellowy here when, in the main film, he’s more of an orange tone. It’s a small thing, and not something I think anyone would really bitch about (you could easily explain these away as colors that bridge the first movie to the second), but still, it’s something to note.

Tron: The Next Day

And then, after the events of the film we get Tron: The Next Day. The name, though, is a bit misleading because most of the story takes place before the events of Tron: Legacy. The story is about an online group, Flynn Lives, who believe that Kevin Flynn (the tech CEO who disappeared years earlier) isn’t dead and he’s actually planning the next big wave of tech evolution. While these people aren’t entirely wrong (see Tron: Legacy), mostly they seem stuck in the past, documenting every rumor and hint they have that Flynn might be around somewhere.

We eventually get to the present when, the day after Sam returns from the Grid, we see new ENCOM CEO Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner) encounter one of the Flynn Lives hackers, Roy (Dan Shor), working in the basement of Flynn’s Arcade. Apparently Bradley has been funding the Flynn Lives movement all this time (as if an underground, .onion movement really needs corporate funding), and with Bradley taking on the big chair at ENCOM he wants Roy to come work for him at the company. They agree, knowing that the future for ENCOM, and the Grid, will be very bright indeed.

To be honest, Tron: The Next Day is a serious nothing-burger of a story. Eight minutes of its ten minute run time are spent rehashing details we already knew in documentary format, as if the story of Flynn’s disappearance was worthy of documenting. We only get new material right at the end, and it’s a promise of things to come… which then didn’t come because the planned trilogy for Tron: Legacy never happened. We got movie one, and then the poor Box Office returns for this first sequel meant the other two were quietly scrapped, their scripts shelved and forgotten entirely (if they were even written at all).

There’s nothing new to learn from this short, and the only thing that really “matters” is that an actor from the first film (who played the actuarial program, RAM) gets to reprise a version of his role in this short (but, notably, not the main movie). It’s a nice cameo, sure, but it would have been nicer if it came in a story that really mattered.

Final Thoughts

Of the two shorts, TR2N feels more essential. Not only does it hunt at what was to come in the main movie but it does so via a cool little mood piece that really sets the tone for Tron: Legacy. By comparison, Tron: The Next Day is a cobbled together collection of outtakes, fake shemp scenes, and a lot of blather. It does nothing and says less and if it hadn’t even been finished (and then included on the home media discs for the film) I doubt anyone would have cared. If you want to see either of these, watch TR2N. You can skip Tron: The Next Day, though, because nothing of consequence happens within.