Directed by Steven Lisberger / Screenplay by Steven Lisberger

From Pong to Killer Shark to Space Invaders, the evolution of increasingly sophisticated computer games in the 1970s was swift, and by the turn of the decade every amusement arcade on the planet was alive with the electronic babble of Pac-Man, Asteroids and Donkey Kong. Arriving in cinemas at the peak of this golden age was Tron, the brainchild of director and animator Steven Lisberger, whose revolutionary proposal to combine live action elements with both backlit and computer animation had been rejected by several studios before Walt Disney Productions recognised the project’s potential and gave it the green light. Tron tells the tale of software engineer and arcade game creator Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), whose work is plagiarised by his former boss Ed Dillinger (the great David Warner at the height of his Hollywood villain phase). Dillinger in turn is being blackmailed by his own company’s Master Control Program, an artificial intelligence gone rogue, which digitises Flynn and transports him into the virtual world of his own computer games. There Flynn has to play out the games for real, alongside avatars of his friends and of Dillinger, here manifested as the malevolent command program Sark, whose machinations must be defeated before Flynn can return to the real world. The plot might be a trifle convoluted, but the computer animation sequences are genuinely dazzling, and there’s a classy score by electronic music pioneer Wendy Carlos, of A Clockwork Orange fame. As the first major feature film to make extensive use of CGI, Tron broke fresh ground and paved the way for a new kind of filmmaking. John Lasseter, head of Pixar Studios, later remarked that “Without Tron, there would be no Toy Story.”

Framed Dimensions: 400mm x 315mm

Acrylic on 230gsm Winsor & Newton canvas paper

Glazed, mounted and framed

Supplied with signed letter of authenticity from Barnaby.