TRON

The Disney studios made animation a global art form, and can also be credited with creating the first (1982) movie based on computer-generated images, TRON. The man credited with its success was writer-director Steven Lisberger, who hawked his ideas around Hollywood and finally found acceptance at Disney.

He co-produced the movie, investing his earnings from Animalympics (1980), and presumably earned a decent living subsequently from the Tron franchise in the form of its arcade games and other spin-offs. Because his only other films were Hot Pursuit (1987), an RKO action-comedy starring John Cusack and a young Ben Stiller, and Slipstream (1989), a low-budget UK scifi thriller starring Bob Peck (supported by Mark Hamill and Bill Paxton). Disney re-employed him (only as a producer, for the use of his "characters") for its long-awaited sequel, Tron: Legacy. Released in 2010, it also brought back the cult film's original stars, Jeff Bridges and Bruce Boxleitner.

Bridges, with his signature cocky grin, played Flynn, the master programmer "User" transformed into Clu, a character dropped inside his former company's master control system by its evil boss. He pals up with Tron, a heroic security programme who's User is his human equivalent, a security boffin (Boxleitner) worried about the company's megalomaniac senior executive (David Warner) whose voice reappears in the computer world as commander Sark and his Master Control Program (MCP).

A female boffin (Cindy Morgan, who only worked in TV later) also has a computer double, as does an elderly scientific character, and a third short-lived hero rides through the computer's linear systems with the valiant defenders of computer freedom. Their memories are stored in powerful Frisbee-like discs, and one of their fight-to-the-death games is a stylised version of jai alai (indicating how the whole project was inspired by the mid-70s craze for Atari's Pong - ping-pong - computer game).

Amazingly, despite occasional patches of hammy dialogue and action a la early Star Treks, the movie is still an attractive attempt at blending live action and CGI. It doesn't feel three decades old, and it will be interesting to see how timeless the first Star Wars movie feels by comparison.