Lora Baines and Encom

In 1982, Lora Baines invented the SHV Laser, a.k.a. "Shiva" which with the help of original Encom founder, Dr. Walter Gibbs, scanned and transformed an orange (citrus sinensis) into a digitalized form, and stored it on the Encom Mainframe for a few seconds, and returned it back to reality again. "Here goes nothing." There went something, into 'nothing' and then back again.

This is the laser we know which was used to take Kevin Flynn to the Grid. This device in the films essentially is the tornado which takes Dorothy to the land of Oz. It is the DeLorian which takes Marty to the past...or the future. It is the looking-glass through which transports Alice to Wonderland. There is always one of these 'things' necessary to take our characters, and explain through some form of 'magic' or 'hocus pocus' or 'pseudoscience' how our characters get to where they are going. Like some magic vessel or device, it is different in each story, as each story is about something different, however, this 'magic device' also plays a part in not simply exlaining 'how' our characters get to where they are going, but offers a symbol with more meaning than one might first assume. To examine those other stories closer, you might find that the tornado, the looking-glass, the DeLorean, etc, also mean something else as well.

In our case here, our Laser was invented by a scientist in the real world called Dr.Lora Baines, in our story about Flynn, who is seeking to obtain data, evidence, on the Encom computer about the origin of his videogame programs, stolen by the evil Dillinger who essentially made it out to be that he created those games, and he gets to reap the rewards for their success. In this scenario, as the motivation for Flynn's journey, which takes an unexpected turn when the Laser brings him into the world of the Grid, Flynn is seeking justice, and just as in the real world, the Steve Jobs and Bill Gates of the world profit, and take all the credit while the Wozniaks and all the other programmers whose code has been usurped and appropriated, take the back seat, often getting nothing for their contributions. So it is that Kevin Flynn is a hero capable of fighting back, and he can do it inside the computer itself. The adventure becomes a multi-fold meaning, and adventure which takes on a variety of subtexts.

But... for all of Tron Legacy's hype about Kevin Flynn and his great

accomplishments, built on the success of the first movie, as well as Jeff Bridges himself, it could be pointed out that this movie called "TRON" has the character "Tron" in it for only a couple of minutes, and shortchanges him at that. Not only this, though the technology is being 'appropriated' by Flynn in the secrecy of his basement office, and he isn't necessarily getting rich off the thing, our movie makes no mention of one of the three main characters in the first film who built the damn thing in the first place. Perhaps Lora needs to hack into to Flynn's secret computer system to obtain the files to prove that she actually invented the SHV Laser and that Flynn has in fact in a way become like Dillinger, but only so far as we are speaking of Disney itself, or the creators of this movie, TRON LEGACY.

Eh, lots of movies end up leaving out characters in their sequels you say, what's all this nonsense about "TRON" and Yori and all that? Well, other than the fact that TRON LEGACY was actually pretty decent, I liked it a lot more than "AVATAR" though I saw neither in 3-D, the thing is, and we know how sequels sometimes go, this one really did re-energize the Tron 'franchise' in the hearts and minds of the people, the fans, etc. The thing we're doing here is saying, TRON LEGACY was great, but it was missing a few things, "TRON" for one was missing largely throughout a movie called "Tron" Legacy, and was hardly about "Tron's" legacy, but Flynn's, and we see that somebody out there was trying to involve the other beloved characters, and involve 'Alan Bradley,' Bruce Boxleitner more in these 'peripheral' supplemental videos that were made to promote the film itself, because they simply weren't in the film, either very much or at all! Alan Bradley, Roy Kleinberg, Lora Baines...Tron/Ram/Yori were simply not really much in the story... it would seem Alan and Tron were added in some last minute changes... now what we really want to see, is more of the world of the 'promotional videos' such as "Tron the Next Day" and the "Encom Event" videos, with our characters Lora Baines, Alan Bradley and Roy Kleinberg, if you're not going to give us our characters roles in the next movie, then there really isn't a "Tron" franchise here, it's a "Flynn" Franchise.

If this happens my dear Disney readers, then Tron Legacy will henceforth be referred to as "Flynn Legacy" and looked down upon as the Star Wars Prequels are today, as 'in name only' such as some fans view the last Star Trek Remake, and though all this sounds like a bunch of fanboy garbage... guess who makes your damn computers, your damn iphones, your damn cartoons, your damn television shows, your damn video games, that's right, nerds like us, who took astronauts to the moon and made it so you can download all that porn.

This may come down to an ultimatum at some point, if Yori, Ram and "Tron-as-Tron," or at the very least, Lora Baines, Roy Kleinberg and Alan Bradley DO NOT APPEAR in the next film, well I'll tell you Disney, you go ahead and spend that 200 million dollars on that thing, and hire back Hedlund and Wilde, and you see what happens to that 200 million dollars.

In the meantime, if you're paying attention to what we the fans are doing, with what spare time we do throw up something here or there on the web, you might get one or two ideas on this whole thing and where to take it, and how willing these 'Tron Fans' are to spend money on virtually anything "Tron" at all... you ignore that, and you might as well pretend you never made TRON LEGACY, and take that department in your vast corporate enterprise and set it on fire, and collect the insurance money. You'd be fools not to follow this up, even simply for the sake of $$$.

The elements and details are all there, and I don't care what some ridiculous new 24 year old director wants 'his own vision' or 'take' on TRON, that's not how you do sci-fi, sorry, look at the past, remakes seem to only work in the comic-book-superhero department, and sometimes the horror department, but the sci-fi remakes...well, they're usually horrible disasters and embarrassments. (Unless you're doing TV Shows).

So it might be that you can torture Tron with your TRON TV show and survive, it might be you completely disintegrate the TRON story with that cartoon, and you might make it work, who knows, but as far as these films go, there's a certain sense in Hollywood that if you do not pay homage, if you do not play the nostalgia card correctly, and not by cheating, your continuations of these sci-fi franchises go down in flames time after time. Look at both Planet of the Apes revivals, one was horrible and failed miserably, the other worked like a charm, and neither were because of how much money was spent on the films or the special effects. One was simply a total travesty and had virtually nothing to do with the Planet of the Apes series whatsoever, the other departed from the original plot of the series, but because it looked to that series for its main ideas, not simply the skeleton of a plot, or its imagery, but its subtext, and its intellectual foundations, and payed homage heavily to it, it worked. What I'm saying here is that Lora, Alan, Roy are deeply connected to both the original Tron's plot, but its meaning, and its subtext, you cannot surgically remove Lora from the Tron franchise and expect there not to be a reaction from fans, so why do it?

The reaction to "Tron the Next Day" and the Encom Video by fans are of great appreciation for adding back the characters which were not in the movie. Most people actually believe and assume that these characters will ALL be returning, including David Warner, as Dillinger, and his son. It just makes sense to everybody, but we sit here wondering what the hell they're going to do while we still mull over why "Tron" was given so little to do in another movie called "Tron." I've heard the answers from Liberger which sound a little forced and reaching, they know what they did, and they got by, BUT THEY WON'T BE GETTING BY THIS NEXT TIME AROUND BELIEVE ME.

Yori Programming Feats

A long time ago, at a place called the Palo Alto Research Center, Xerox put a bunch of people together to develop a whole lot of stuff for what might be considered the sort of computers we use now. This was before Bill Gates and Steve Jobs messed about with Microsoft and Apple. Many things were discovered and invented there, and it might have been the sort of place Alan Bradley worked.

Two men who worked there were to later co-found a company called Adobe. John Warnock and Charles Geschke would develop a graphics language controlling printing. When Apple finally developed a graphical interface for their personal computers, and then a way you could change fonts and manipulate images, it was all fine and well, but you sure couldn't print that crap, you could only look at it on your screen. Warnock and Geschke's 'page description language' and PostScript, thus brought the digital design from the digital realm to the real world, and voila, stuff from your computer could be brought forth, manifested, onto a printed page.

While Computer-Aided Design goes all the way back to 1960, for the masses, the everyman, it might have been this moment, and Adobe's programs which made it possible for you, for me, for all of us, to have what we have, in the way of designing, and printing, bringing ideas into the Three-Dimensional world, through the device you are utilizing to read this article.

At Encom, what would have been a separate entity which pre-dated Apple and Microsoft, inside a single mainframe, and not a personal computer, existed a program which was a particularly unique design application. It was able to command a series of sub-functions, all handling various details of the design process, one for color perhaps, one for wire-framing, one for rendering, and put the ideas and designs of the USERS into digital reality. This program was called YORI.

We do not know who created this program, but it has been speculated that Dr.Lora Baines developed it. At Encom, she created the Digitizing Laser, which could store physical objects in a computer. It may be that this idea came from her research into the algorithms of the computer-aided design process, and how objects exist in virtual space.

Yori, during the Program Rebellion, when the MCP denied the USERS access, along with other Programs seemed to develop minds of their own, and while a program called Tron was able to literally 'fight back' against the Master Control Program, other programs were able to detach, and refuse commands from the MCP to seemingly operate on their own.

As Tron was able to utilize and manipulate various conceptual elements from different programming systems, even though he was applied, along with hundreds of other programs to become video games by the MCP, Yori was also able to find some way to take a 3-D simulation called the 'Solar Sailer' and apply it to use in navigation to escape the permutations of the MCP. Nobody knows to this day just how all these programs were able to do these things, and we are only recently beginning to understand.

Yori managed to utilize all the functions of a C.A.D. program, and apply all sorts of seemingly unrelated theories and algorithms along with Tron and User Flynn, to crash the Master Control Program, which was itself developing its own Artificial Intelligence.