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ON THECUSP OF ANEW DAWN IN SPECIAL EFFECTS MOVIEMAKING, WRITER/DIRECTOR STEVEN LISBERGER'S TRON BOLDLY WENT WHERE NO MOVIE HAD BEEN BEFORE. FEATURING A CUTTING EDGE COMBINATION OF LIVEACTION, BACK-LIT ANIMATION AND CGI THAT REACHED ITS PEAK INTHAT THRILLING LIGHT CYCLE RACE, THE VISIONAR DIRECTOR TOOK CINEMAGOERS ON A JOURNEY INTO THE FUTURE.

"Tron stands alone. There is nothing to compare it to," Jeff Bridges says of the 1982 Disney film in which he starred, and he is not wrong. In fact, hyperbole and superlatives tend to surround Tron. Sure, its visual effects, by today"s Na'aviųinfused 3D standards, are distinctly dated, but at the start of the Eighties they were nothing short of revolutionary. To achieve the distinctive look of Tron, the film's writer and director Steven Lisberger used a combination of live action footage, back-lit animation sequences and computer-generated imagery. In an era before the world had gone digital, Tron presented cinemagoers with something that they had genuinely never seen before and a story -a battle for freedom set inside a computer -which was as futuristic, and no doubt unfathomable to much of the public, as could possibly be. As well as breaking down technological barriers and forging new methods of filmmaking, Tron posed something of a contradiction, though.

A Disney-funded special effects action film on the one, and more instantly visible, hand, Tron had harder, sci-fi tendencies too. A story about corporate conspiracy, the perils of technology (the film's Master Control Program is as threatening a creation as 2001's HAL), and the importance of freedom and the fight to preserve it. Or, as producer Donald Kushner puts it, Tron was about "authoritarian government versus democratic government." There was real thematic weight underneath all the neon-tinged body suits and Amstrad-era graphics, and certainly no House of Mouse sing-along songs. Despite these prevalent thematic undercurrents though, Tron is famed for its pioneering visuals and effects, and rightly so; they have been mocked, celebrated and paid homage to in popular culture extensively since they first perplexed audiences, and they remain as distinctive now as they were back in 1982. Perhaps, not entirely unsurprisingly, they were not achieved without the spilling of some blood, sweat and tears, though, and there were even fears at the time that the film would not come off at all.

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