Cast and Crew: Bruce Boxleitner, Dan Shor, Barnard Hughes, Peter Jurasik, Michael Dudikoff
What It’s About: Hacker and arcade owner Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) tries to break into his former employer Ed Dillinger’s (David Warner) systems to prove that his games were stolen. In response, Dillinger’s artificially intelligent computer program Master Control (also Warner) uses an experimental laser to transport Flynn into the computer-where he must survive and stop Master Control before it’s too late.
Why Watch it Today?: Wham-O introduced the first Frisbees on this day in 1957. If you were a kid in the 1980s and never imagined your Frisbee was one of the deadly discs from TRON then something was seriously wrong with you. My older brother even, as was his custom, came up with elaborate rules for replicating the game from the movie. TRON is a lightweight and rather silly sci-fi effects vehicle that features some early computer animation, a whole lot of neon and a fun cast.
The League of Dead Films 
Ha. Another one I saw on its initial release. We weren’t blown away, but it was a lot more impressive and interesting than The Black Hole was. I think the end result was wondering if games would look like that at some point, so it’s good they did and got better over time…
I do recall thinking the games looked fantastically cool. I”m a bit younger than you are, so my siblings actually used the plot of this movie (cross pollinated with that story in the anthology horror movie Nightmares with “the Bishop of Battle” to scare me into playing less on the Atari. They actually convinced me someone had been sucked into the game when they played too long.
Yikes. I have a hilarious Nightmares story that relates to yours, but I’ll add that to the review I’d started a little while back but haven’t yet completed. Thanks for reminding me about that (and you didn’t even know!!). I think I’ll randomly yell “I’m the Bishop of Battle!” when I’m outside today in this -10 wind chill. No one will even blink in my direction because it’s too cold to think straight.