(Insert stupid Blog name here)

So, it turns out this is what's going:

 

This can't be blamed on the blog software--I am changing these links myself to include the "atariage" referrer information. I follow an Amazon link, copy a special link generated by Amazon, and then change the original link here in the forum. If someone clicks on that link and actually buys something from Amazon, I get a small amount of money. It's not much, but it's better than nothing. I do a similar thing with eBay links (when don't use the ebay bbcodes or cannot use them for some reason). It's a non-intrusive means of getting some money back for the time and money spent on the site every month without having to put ads on the site (subscriptions also help).

 

..Al

 

I can't say I'm particularly happy about this. I was given no notice ahead of time that my blog content was going to be edited without my permission. Those links were placed there for the convenience of my readers, not for the purposes of generating income. I don't recall agreeing to that at any point when signing up for AtariAge.

 

I have since corrected the links back to the way they were. If it happens again, I'll simply remove them entirely.

The links take you to the exact same place, so it's transparent to the individual clicking on them. Would you rather have ads appearing in your blog entries, which would probably generate more income than these Amazon referrals but be far more intrusive? I've been doing this for some time and you are the only person who's taken issue with it. Over the years I've been approached by several companies that would take links to external sites such as Amazon and use Javascript to convert them to referral links--all such links would then be converted automatically. I've shunned those companies thus far.

 

With the dedicated server AtariAge is running on and various software costs, it costs thousands of dollars a year to keep the site up and running. There are very few sites out there that get as much traffic as AtariAge does without trying to at least break even on their costs without using some sort of advertising/referral links.

 

..Al

I object to not being asked prior to having my entries edited without my knowledge. If I would have been asked beforehand, or informed that this was going to become a policy so I was aware of it, then I wouldn't be taking issue with it.

Spoilers ahead.

 

So I got Tron: Legacy on Blu-Ray today, which marks the first time I've seen the film since I saw it in the theater (and only the second time overall).

 

Perhaps because I knew what to expect, I wasn't as put-off by the convoluted plot this time of Clu somehow planning to bring an entire army of programs into the real world. Don't get me wrong - it's still completely ridiculous, absurd and unbelievable, and therefore next-to-impossible to accept as a viable threat - but at least I wasn't blindsided by it this time around.

 

The fake Jeff Bridges looks just as bad as he did before. Being reduced to the size of an HDTV didn't help. The strange thing is, in a few shots, he actually looks fine. Maybe those were the ones they did last. But it's very distracting. Reminds me a bit of the new Mythbusters episode they aired this week, where Adam and Jamie put on rubber masks and tried to impersonate each other. Creepy.

 

The movie itself looks and sounds amazing - from the standpoint of a Blu-Ray transfer, that is. Everything is crisp and vivid, and several times the aspect ratio expands to fill the entire picture (during IMAX scenes). I didn't really notice it happening, so it's not intrusive, but it does make those scenes seem more vast.

 

There's not much in the way of bonus material. There's no image gallery, trailers/commercials, deleted scenes or commentary track (which have been standard bonus materials on pretty-much everything).

 

There are a handful of very short documentaries, but nothing of much substance. It's all glossed over quite quickly, which is a bit disappointing considering how much work went into making the film. There's a trailer for the Tron: Uprising animated series (the same one that's online), and the Daft Punk "Derezzed" video (again - already online).

 

There's a "The Next Day" short which reveals who was behind the Flynn Lives campaign, and what's going on at Encom now. It sounds cooler than the actual execution of it, but it's nice to see Dan Shor (RAM) again, and hopefully it points to a Tron 3 (although in a recent interview, Steven Lisberger says that's still up in the air). At the end of it, you'll see a Space Paranoids screen that you can "unlock" additional clips with, by entering in the initials that you see on the high score listing. It's pretty cool, and should keep you occupied for maybe 15 or 20 minutes. (There's even an Atari 2600 Space Paranoids commercial in there, although no effort was made to make the game look 2600-ish.)

 

One thing I haven't tried yet, is the Second Screen viewing, where you watch the movie on Blu-Ray, and on a computer (or iPad) there's supposedly some additional materials you can view along with it.

 

Overall, if you liked the movie (and I mostly did) it's worth getting. The picture quality is second-to-none, and really shows off what a Blu-Ray can do. And even on my less-than-ideal sound system, the audio sounded great. I don't think I'd bother with the collector's sets or anything, and I can't speak of how the 3D Blu-Ray looks, but for under $20, the Blu-Ray+DVD combo should set you up nicely. (IGN posted a video in their review of them opening the collector's disc packaging. Personally, I think it's a nice idea, but so badly executed as to not be worth it.)

 

In other Tron-news, there's a video online of Steven Lisberger and Joe Kosinski signing copies of the movie (and other stuff at Best Buy):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJsR-52Clm4

 

And finally, a nice interview with Bruce Boxleitner at the L.A. Times.

And today, the Blu-Ray of Tron showed up, so I watched it tonight.

 

The picture quality is leaps and bounds over previous releases. I thought the 20th Anniversary DVD looked great, but this completely puts it to shame. The colors are vivid, the picture is crisp, there's been significant work done to remove dirt and scratches, but all of the inherent flaws due to the original effects processes have been left intact. Film grain, computer graphics glitches, all left mercifully alone.

 

The depth and wealth of detail really jumps off the screen now. Stuff I'd never seen in the film before really shows how much thought went into every aspect of its design when it was originally created. This is really Blu-Ray at its best - allowing you to revisit older films in all their glory that have been otherwise relegated to the ignominy of TV broadcasts, low-resolution DVDs, or worse - VHS. If you've been on the fence about Blu-Ray, films like Tron may well convince you to make the jump. It really looks that good.

 

The sound is exceptional, too. The film seems to have been remixed, and now there's a clarity to the soundtrack that I don't recall hearing before. Again, there's a wealth of sounds to be rediscovered.

 

Most of the bonus material consists of leftovers from the DVD (and in fact, from the laserdisc before that), but it's still all good material, and there is a lot of it. My one gripe is they didn't bother to remaster the two deleted scenes with Tron and Yori in HD. They really should have gone that extra step.

 

There are two new documentaries, one of which is a retrospective by various people associated with Tron and Tron: Legacy, discussing its impact on them, film, and technology in general. The second is actually far more interesting, and features Steven Lisberger sifting through some photos in the Disney Tron archives with his son, and reminiscing. On the surface that may not sound all that exciting, but it's actually very compelling and gives some great insight into Lisberger and his relationship with his son. In light of Tron: Legacy, you can see that relationship being at least some of the inspiration for the relationship between Kevin and Sam Flynn. Good stuff.

 

Tron is absolutely worth getting on Blu-Ray. The cover art is unfortunately disappointing (as if some intern hacked it together in five minutes with Photoshop), but the movie itself has been lovingly cared for and preserved - cheesy dialog, glowing spandex, grid bugs and all.

Tron (in its various incarnations) occupies 4 of the top 10 Blu-ray spots at Amazon at the moment:

 

2. Tron: Legacy 2-disc set

7. Tron: Legacy 4-disc set

8. Tron: Legacy + the original Tron 5-disc set

10. the original Tron 2-disc set

One thing I haven't tried yet, is the Second Screen viewing, where you watch the movie on Blu-Ray, and on a computer (or iPad) there's supposedly some additional materials you can view along with it.

And now I have.

 

Second Screen is a Flash-based website that has extra stuff, and it syncs to your Blu-ray player (assuming both your Blu-ray player and computer/iPad are on the same network), so as the movie plays, it steps through the material. Basically, it's a slide-show. The nice thing is you can play/pause the movie from either the Blu-ray remote or from the computer, so you can stop to look at the materials in more detail, then resume watching.

 

So you might get some pre-visualization artwork:

 

Or a look at the making of some special effects:

 

Or behind-the-scenes photos:

 

Which you can zoom into... sort-of:

 

There are also videos, 3-D turnarounds, before-and-after effects comparisons, text tidbits from the filmmakers, and other stuff. In fact there's so much of it, that if you were to look at everything, you'd continually have to pause the movie to get through it all.

 

And while there's a wealth of information, it doesn't really sync with the movie very well. In fact, one often becomes a distraction from the other. You'll either be watching the movie and miss a bunch of stuff in the app, or be looking at something in the app, and have to pause the movie to keep the slide show from moving too fast. Also, everything is quite disjointed in how it's presented. There may be a part of the film with storyboards, then a part with photos, then a part with some pre-viz work, then back to story boards, then a behind-the-scenes clip... it just makes for a disorganized mess. I'd rather just have everything neatly laid-out as as series of galleries on the Blu-ray disc, that I could step through as I wished. It would also be nice to see everything in HD resolution - not scaled down to fit on a website. And none of the video clips have audio. What's up with that?

 

Unfortunately, you'll also get spinning "waiting for something to load" icons:

 

Assuming, that is, that the app can actually stay synced with your Blu-ray player:

 

Which it frequently didn't. I lost count of how many times the connection dropped. There's a way to manually re-start the slide show if when it loses sync, but then you no longer get the interactive pause/play control (you wait for a countdown, then hit "start", and it just sort-of runs in-sync). The computer app can also audibly sync to the soundtrack of the movie, but that's flaky as well. Several times I had to quit my browser entirely when Flash crashed.

 

The weird thing is that this is also supposed to work on an iPad. If that's the case, then why am I forced to run a Flash version on my desktop? Can't I run the iPad version (which is presumably just an HTML5 site)?

 

The whole experience was buggy, slow, and frustrating. There was some interesting material in there, but since it was scaled down to a fairly useless size, presented simultaneously with the movie (which was distracting), had all sorts of timing problems, and was completely unreliable, it doesn't make me want to sit down and go through any of it. (You can manually step through the slide show, but it makes for a pretty tedious experience.) I would have much rather had traditional behind-the-scenes galleries on the Blu-ray disc, not to mention some filmmakers' commentaries (which Second Screen does nothing to address). Disney got too gimmicky with this, probably thinking that somehow an overly high-tech feature would appeal to their target demographic. Sometimes, just because you can do something technically interesting, doesn't mean that you should.

Disney got too gimmicky with this, probably thinking that somehow an overly high-tech feature would appeal to their target demographic. Sometimes, just because you can do something technically interesting, doesn't mean that you should.

 

I agree. In fact, I disagree with any online based feature - it's just too easy for it to disappear.

 

And it's funny going back and watching some of the earlier DVDs how much time & effort was spent on the menus and transistions. Not so much these days.