tronsequel.com

This new section on ‘Novelization notes’ is going to be seriously dorky and not full of ad hominem attacks on the upcoming sequel production.

One weird thing about this book is that there is a BUNCH of words I don’t know. Like what is a “vembrace”? I don’t know if they are all made up or not. They weren’t in the movie.

Another thing is that scene were Crom is escorted to his cell and meets Ram…after the line “who does he calculate he is?” he says, “If only Tron was still around…Did you ever see that guy in action? A hudred-percent independent!” This blew me away. In the original movie, you don’t really get any idea of what “free” programs are like. I guess there is still a whole world of working programs, but you don’t really get much of a sense of that in the movie. You also don’t get the impression of how mythic Tron was. There is that scene after Flynn and others are marched in front of Sark to receive their formal introduction/instructions and they overlook a game in progress, and someone says “That’s Tron. He fights for the users”. But that is the only hint I can think of of the stature of Tron.

Anyways, that scene continues in the book, and Tron steps out while Crom is waxing about him and Crom says, “Oh, my User-Tron! They’ve got you in here?”. The narration continues: “Tron- a legend come to life. When programs throughout the System spoke among themselves of independence, of loyalty to the Users, of defying the MCP, it was Tron’s name that was most often invoked.” Weird, eh? When I was a kid, I didn’t even pay attention to Tron’s character. The whole movie was about Flynn. Later it started to dawn on me that it is odd that the movie was called ‘Tron’, considering his role seems to be relatively minor. He is special because he has some mystery data on his disk, which he needs to jam all up in the MCP’s crack.

Anyways, the only other thing I noticed was that Sark is some kind of badass gladiator himself. He is introduced as “Sark the Red, the unbeaten”. The only hint you get of this in the movie is the very opening scene where Sark is doing the light cycle thing and totally jukes some kid in the real world playing the arcade game. And this makes the MCP’s comment about Sark being “brutal…and needlessly sadistic” make a bit more sense…because he is out on the game grid punking little kids and blasting the bits out of accounting programs all day.

This is some exciting news. A friend of mine picked this up for me for a dollar. I’ve never read a “novelization”, but I flipped through it, and the dialogue is straight out of the script. BUT there are some significant differences. I’m going to start a new category for notes/annotations on the differences between the novelization and the movie.