Alicia Malone
While a third “TRON” movie isn’t a given [yet], Disney have greenlit an animated TV series based on the film series. Today, some new details surfaced about the series – in particular, specs on when the show takes place.
At this stage, Bruce Boxleitner (‘Alan Bradley/Tron’) is the only actor from the movies involved in the ‘toon. That could change though – hopefully David Warner and Cindy Morgan get a call, we’d all love to know what Ed Dillinger and Lora are up to these days. For the moment, the voice cast of “TRON : Uprising”, which will air on Disney XD in 2012, are Mandy Moore (who of course recently lent her voice to Disney’s “Tangled”), Lance Henriksen (of “Aliens” fame), Elijah ‘Froddo’ Wood, Emmanuelle Chriqui (Sloane from “Entourage”), Paul ‘Pee Wee’ Reubens, and Nate Corddry, who played Tom Jeter on Aaron Sorkin’s “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip”. Great cast.
So where does “TRON : Uprising” fit on the “TRON” timeline? Well, seems writers Adam Horowitz and Edward Kitsis are taking a page out of George Lucas’s “Clone Wars” series – it’s set before the latest movie (“TRON : Legacy”) but after the original.
Horowitz tells Box Office Magazine, “This animated show will take place from when Flynn is in a safe house. It’s from when Clu takes over the grid to before when Sam comes in. So if you were wondering what was the grid like before that, then watch the show.”
“To give you an example of how we approached storytelling sometimes is like when you’re in the End of Line club, when we first meet Castor and he’s being berated by one of the patrons saying, ‘I want an audience with Zuse.’ His name is Bartik, and there’s an entire back story we have for him. The guy with him, his name is Hopper, there’s a whole thing between the two of them, what they are doing in there, and how they got there.
“It’s like over the years of developing this movie, we developed all these mythologies and all these back stories and all little tangential things. Did we have time to do the Bartik story? No. But now maybe the Bartik story is in the animated series —you know, he’s got a huge scar on his face. I want to know how he got that scar. We couldn’t sit down and write that there’s a guy with a scar on his face without knowing what the scar was. So we hope it adds to the depth of the movie.
“Our intention is to try and make something that is more than just, let’s go get something. We treat TRON very, very seriously and as writers we try to have a reason and a world for everything and not all of it gets to be shown because in this particular movie, we only had two hours. [So] hopefully it fills in the blanks in and in a fun way and an intriguing way.”
Though a third live-action “TRON” movie hasn’t been greenlit, that doesn’t mean the scribes haven’t got their notepads out to jot ideas down on.
