Tron (1982) vs. War Games (1983): Part 1

<v Speaker 1>Wow, we got something we're in Greetings. Hello, shall we play?
<v Speaker 2>Then?
<v Speaker 3>Oh love to.
<v Speaker 4>Let's play Global Thermo Nuclear War.
<v Speaker 5>Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Shirley You Can't
<v Speaker 5>Be Serious Podcast. I am here with my friend Jason Coln. Jason,
<v Speaker 5>I got a story for you. Ready for this?
<v Speaker 3>Yes?
<v Speaker 5>Okay. In nineteen eighty three, heads of the military believed
<v Speaker 5>that a real nuclear attack was about to occur. They
<v Speaker 5>begin readying their nuclear forces, placing air units on alert,
<v Speaker 5>and loading nuclear warheads onto combat planes in preparation for war.
<v Speaker 5>And all of this was based upon a misinterpretation of
<v Speaker 5>what was a simulation, something they should have known was
<v Speaker 5>just a war game. You want to know what the
<v Speaker 5>plot twist is. Let's plot twist. This happened four months
<v Speaker 5>after the movie Wargames came out. This is real life
<v Speaker 5>plot twist. This is not the plot of the movie.
<v Speaker 5>This is the plot of real life a situation called
<v Speaker 5>the Able Archer eighty three incident, where NATO was conducting wargames.
<v Speaker 5>The Soviet Union was sure that it was all just
<v Speaker 5>a ruse, and they literally manned their lanes, loaded the
<v Speaker 5>nuclear warheads, and we came other than the Cuban missile crisis.
<v Speaker 5>We came closer to nuclear war at that moment, and
<v Speaker 5>nobody knew what was going on over here at all. Really,
<v Speaker 5>we're going to tell you more about this. That's incredible. Later.
<v Speaker 3>Hey, wait, before you get any further, I still really
<v Speaker 3>enjoy How, like Gene Hackman, you say nuclear, I.
<v Speaker 5>Knew it's gonna come. I can't help it. Nucular. I
<v Speaker 5>learned the word by watching Quest for Peace. That's how
<v Speaker 5>I know that word. That's why I say nu killar.
<v Speaker 3>Okay, fantastic guys.
<v Speaker 5>We are blessed to be joined by a very special
<v Speaker 5>guest today. We have a Patreon member of all things.
<v Speaker 5>He hit us up and he said love the show
<v Speaker 5>and I said great, you have any episodes you'd like
<v Speaker 5>to hear? And he said, I'd be great if I
<v Speaker 5>could hear an intelligent podcast about wargames and AI and
<v Speaker 5>that sort of thing. And I said, super, why don't
<v Speaker 5>you come do that for us? And so we are
<v Speaker 5>here today with doctor Chad Briggs, a global security expert.
<v Speaker 5>He advises global organizations on the intersection between climate change
<v Speaker 5>and national security. He has advised the US Department of State,
<v Speaker 5>the US Air Force, the Swedish military, the EU, the
<v Speaker 5>US Department of Energy, all kinds of other academic organizations.
<v Speaker 5>He's an intelligent guy, but an underachiever and alienated from parent.
<v Speaker 5>Oh wait a minute, I'm sorry. That was Matthew Brof.
<v Speaker 5>I gotta let you far there on that one. Chad.
<v Speaker 5>It is so wonderful to have you with us. Thank
<v Speaker 5>you for joining us today.
<v Speaker 2>Thank you, guys, glad to be here.
<v Speaker 3>Chad. Would you say you're a little more Dabney Coleman
<v Speaker 3>or are you more General Barringer on this deal?
<v Speaker 2>I'm more a professor Falkan.
<v Speaker 3>Really awesome, nice, awesome, nice.
<v Speaker 5>That is fantastic. So just to give you guys an
<v Speaker 5>idea of this notion of the intersection between national security
<v Speaker 5>and climate change. In April of twenty eleven, they are
<v Speaker 5>conducting wargame scenarios. It's a simulation. It is led by
<v Speaker 5>Air Force Colonel I'm not kidding, Wilbur Wright. What. Yes,
<v Speaker 5>he led the simulation. But the participants were presented with
<v Speaker 5>four different scenarios. One was that the Mexican government had collapsed.
<v Speaker 5>The other was that Iran was carrying out a nuclear test.
<v Speaker 5>The third was that China was taking control of the
<v Speaker 5>Spratley Islands in the South China Sea. And the fourth
<v Speaker 5>was the eruption of Mount Spur, the volcano in Alaska.
<v Speaker 5>And a lot of the officers laughed off this fourth
<v Speaker 5>option until a couple of days later when they realized
<v Speaker 5>that they couldn't see anything on the ground because all
<v Speaker 5>of the volcano ash had basically eliminated all of their
<v Speaker 5>aerial observation capabilities. And so that is kind of Chad's
<v Speaker 5>specialty is how does environmental change affect national security and
<v Speaker 5>potential warfare? Did I get that about right?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah? I mean technically it was more they didn't want
<v Speaker 2>to fly through the ash clouds because that's really dangerous
<v Speaker 2>and if you're trying to get aircraft from North America, Asia,
<v Speaker 2>kind of hard to miss Alaska. So it just it
<v Speaker 2>just sort of threw off a lot of their assumptions
<v Speaker 2>about stuff. But yeah, it was trying to just insert
<v Speaker 2>ideas of well, you know, we always assume that environment
<v Speaker 2>it's there, it's a steady state. But what if it
<v Speaker 2>you know, what if we did it thrown a curveball
<v Speaker 2>and something happens you just don't expect.
<v Speaker 5>Yeah, So a few days into the scenario, real tornadoes
<v Speaker 5>and thunderstorm started happening in Alabama, and they're listening to
<v Speaker 5>news reports and one of the participants leans over to
<v Speaker 5>Chad and says, is this really happening or is this
<v Speaker 5>part of the simulation?
<v Speaker 2>And unfortunately that was real. That was a huge outbreak
<v Speaker 2>of tornadoes that night. That was one of the things
<v Speaker 2>we shoot for, is for people just not to know
<v Speaker 2>necessarily if something's real or if it isn't. But that's
<v Speaker 2>also one of the most famous lines from wargames.
<v Speaker 3>I was just gonna mention this. Today coincidentally is the
<v Speaker 3>forty third anniversary of the eruption of Mount Saint Helens. Oh, yeah,
<v Speaker 3>which I take would it'll be a big deal of
<v Speaker 3>satellite images and that type of thing.
<v Speaker 5>So nineteen eighty the world becomes covered in ash yep.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, And unfortunately I'm old enough to remember that.
<v Speaker 3>I mean too. Today we're going to compare war games
<v Speaker 3>from nineteen eighty three to Tron from nineteen eighty two.
<v Speaker 5>Yeah, they were. It was the first time for a
<v Speaker 5>lot of folks to be seeing this type of stuff
<v Speaker 5>pretty accurately portrayed in a lot of circumstances. Obviously a
<v Speaker 5>lot of fantasy and Tron, but still had some components
<v Speaker 5>that were very cutting edge and brand new to the
<v Speaker 5>audiences that were watching them, for sure.
<v Speaker 3>Chad, what are your memories of these two movies?
<v Speaker 2>Well, I was in grade school. I think when these
<v Speaker 2>came out. Tron completely blew me away, you know, in
<v Speaker 2>terms of its vision of computers. It's it's computer graphics.
<v Speaker 2>I didn't quite understand the story, and we can get
<v Speaker 2>into that just because Blinton, the Jeff Bridges' character was
<v Speaker 2>already living the dream because he already owned an arcade,
<v Speaker 2>So what more could you get?
<v Speaker 5>The right war games?
<v Speaker 2>I remember, and you know, my brother and I were
<v Speaker 2>both into computers. He ended up getting a master's in
<v Speaker 2>computer science and where's the list alamos now? And this
<v Speaker 2>kind of inspired us a lot. But I didn't understand
<v Speaker 2>wargames until I was much older, and I understood the politics.
<v Speaker 2>Both of them sort of caught up to technology, but
<v Speaker 2>in really different ways. So they're they're they're really really
<v Speaker 2>influential for me. And of course I also remember the
<v Speaker 2>Tron arcade game I believe absolutely made more money than
<v Speaker 2>the movie itself.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, we absolutely have to talk about that.
<v Speaker 5>By the way, Jason pointed this out and sure enough
<v Speaker 5>I saw it as you come in on David Lightman
<v Speaker 5>in that first arcade scene, as it pans across the arcade,
<v Speaker 5>you see very prominently the video game Tron.
<v Speaker 3>Along with the much less influential Jungle Hunt game you
<v Speaker 3>didn't like Jungle Hut.
<v Speaker 2>I like Jungle Hunts better Jungle Hunt than Tron.
<v Speaker 5>The nerves that I would build up whenever I was
<v Speaker 5>having to fight those spiders, the spiders which were there
<v Speaker 5>spiders in the moon. Yeah, okay, they call them grid bugs,
<v Speaker 5>Oh right, right, the grid bugs. Okay, yeah, So it
<v Speaker 5>was just spiders to me that one. And then when
<v Speaker 5>you got a couple levels up, when you were diving
<v Speaker 5>into the Master Control rainbow spinny thing and it was
<v Speaker 5>going so fast and you were going so fast, anxiety
<v Speaker 5>to the max. But I would still shove my borders
<v Speaker 5>in for sure.
<v Speaker 3>Oh my gosh. Yes, okay, which one we which one
<v Speaker 3>we're going to talk about first?
<v Speaker 5>I'd say let's talk about war games first. Yeah, yeah,
<v Speaker 5>all right, see, let's sign up here up here.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah. Con that indicates our current defense condition.
<v Speaker 2>It should read the def con five.
<v Speaker 5>Which means piece it's.
<v Speaker 2>Still on four because of the little stunt you pulled.
<v Speaker 3>Actually, if we hadn't caught it in time, it might
<v Speaker 3>have gone to def Con one.
<v Speaker 5>You know what that means, David, No, what does that mean?
<v Speaker 3>World War three?
<v Speaker 5>Chad? Tell us, tell us what you know or you know,
<v Speaker 5>give us some information on how things went from the
<v Speaker 5>development of the movie war games to when you got
<v Speaker 5>involved yourself doing them, Like, what's what's kind of the
<v Speaker 5>history there? I talked a little bit earlier about the
<v Speaker 5>able Archer incident in eighty three, and part of what
<v Speaker 5>happened in that scenario was that they started using a
<v Speaker 5>lot of new technology. So what do you know? What
<v Speaker 5>do you know about what happened between nineteen eighty three
<v Speaker 5>and whenever you started participating live and in living color
<v Speaker 5>with true wargames simulations.
<v Speaker 2>Well, I can tell you there were actually a couple
<v Speaker 2>other incidents too, and I will go into detail about it,
<v Speaker 2>But you have November nineteen seventy nine. That was another
<v Speaker 2>nuclear alert that was thrown off by someone mistakenly putting
<v Speaker 2>a training tape into the computer, which then was interpreted
<v Speaker 2>as being real because of course the computer doesn't know
<v Speaker 2>the difference.
<v Speaker 5>That came up when they were writing the script for
<v Speaker 5>wargames because they began to question, you know, could this
<v Speaker 5>really happen? Would the military really not know what was
<v Speaker 5>going on in this situation? And literally turned on the
<v Speaker 5>news story and Walter Cronkite is saying, oh, for three minutes,
<v Speaker 5>we thought we were at the brink of nuclear war.
<v Speaker 5>And it turns out somebody just left a simulation tape
<v Speaker 5>inside the tape player.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, and something similar happened the following summer. So June
<v Speaker 2>nineteen eighty, that was a computer glitch, but the people
<v Speaker 2>at NORAD suddenly saw thousands of nuclear missiles headed for
<v Speaker 2>the United States. I had to figure out is this
<v Speaker 2>real or not? Or is this just And turned out
<v Speaker 2>it was just the computer hiccupping and just throwing out
<v Speaker 2>odd radar returns that didn't actually exist.
<v Speaker 3>Turns out Chad was just playing missile command in the
<v Speaker 3>next room.
<v Speaker 5>So you guys, you and your brother were into computers.
<v Speaker 5>Did you do any you do any hacking back? Then
<v Speaker 5>try to sneak into any school.
<v Speaker 2>Oh, I would never have done anything. Now, I was
<v Speaker 2>an overachiever in school, so I didn't have to change grades.
<v Speaker 2>But and I will say my junior high principle was
<v Speaker 2>pretty smart. Because he co opted me. I think he
<v Speaker 2>knew and this is like nineteen eighty six and I
<v Speaker 2>tay seven. So he was testing out some sort of
<v Speaker 2>new library system, you know, get the computer online at
<v Speaker 2>the school. This is the first time that they were
<v Speaker 2>really trying this, and so he invited me and said, hey,
<v Speaker 2>we want you to figure this out and whether it's
<v Speaker 2>worth doing. And it's sort of like I realized later, Okay,
<v Speaker 2>this is keep your enemies close closer. Yeah, right, and
<v Speaker 2>I know what they're up to. Yeah, I knew how
<v Speaker 2>to do those sorts of things because sometimes, I mean, honestly,
<v Speaker 2>it is so easy to break into computers sometimes some
<v Speaker 2>of the back doors, and you know what they don't
<v Speaker 2>address is that oftentimes it's just people making the mistakes.
<v Speaker 2>You know, well, either you're leaving the scenario tape in
<v Speaker 2>the computer or you just didn't put in the right password.
<v Speaker 2>So yeah, all those sorts of tricks we knew. And
<v Speaker 2>partly that's because when I started working on cybersecurity, you
<v Speaker 2>sort of have to know this, and I worked more
<v Speaker 2>on the human side of cybersecurity. It sort of inspired
<v Speaker 2>us just to sort of know how computers work. And
<v Speaker 2>maybe both movies inspired that because we were so taken
<v Speaker 2>in with this idea that hey, you can create programs
<v Speaker 2>and they're sort of like these little living things and
<v Speaker 2>they're yours and they're your identity, right and they live
<v Speaker 2>inside the computer. But the internet stuff I really didn't
<v Speaker 2>get into heavily until probably the mid nineties.
<v Speaker 5>So Chad listened to our Best of eighty eight episode
<v Speaker 5>and said, boy, was I in an entirely different world
<v Speaker 5>as you guys were at that point. I made him
<v Speaker 5>send the list, but do you do you remember it?
<v Speaker 5>Do you know what your top five is from eighty
<v Speaker 5>h et Partly.
<v Speaker 2>I was teasing you, guys. I thought you were sending
<v Speaker 2>me emails asking about albums by Poison, So why didn't
<v Speaker 2>I just throw in Melissa Athringe and see what you
<v Speaker 2>guys think. I don't know. It's a transition time, partly
<v Speaker 2>for me because I was leaving the US, and I
<v Speaker 2>think partly for music too, because eighty eight you start
<v Speaker 2>getting Millie Vanilli. By eighty nine you've got what new
<v Speaker 2>kids on the block? Yeah, boy bands. So when I
<v Speaker 2>looked at my computer, all the music from the eighties
<v Speaker 2>that I had, and like the compilation files that I'll
<v Speaker 2>have or it'd be like, you know, best of nineteen
<v Speaker 2>eighty five for one hour, it stops in nineteen eighty seven.
<v Speaker 2>By that point I was just cut off. I just
<v Speaker 2>I had no connection to it anymore. And you know,
<v Speaker 2>I went to Europe and to started listening to seventies music.
<v Speaker 2>That's what everyone is listening to.
<v Speaker 5>So you were you were in Europe around that time,
<v Speaker 5>and you mentioned something about I think in an email
<v Speaker 5>to us about Aha. Yeah, listen to your episode because
<v Speaker 5>you're calling them heavy wonder you guys.
<v Speaker 2>For you guys to say that Alha was a one
<v Speaker 2>hit wonder was for anyone who's ever lived in Norway,
<v Speaker 2>you know, it's sort of heresy personally, I like the
<v Speaker 2>sun always shines on TV better than take on me.
<v Speaker 5>Wow, it's all about where you were, That's right, That's
<v Speaker 5>true what you were doing at the time, at the
<v Speaker 5>risk of forgetting to do this before we're done with
<v Speaker 5>our day, and at the risk of somebody calling me
<v Speaker 5>away and I don't get to ask this question. On
<v Speaker 5>one of your very first emails, I asked you how
<v Speaker 5>you came across us. You said you're looking for eighties podcast.
<v Speaker 5>You came across our Toto episode really got engaged with
<v Speaker 5>our Dirty Dancing the album episode, and you mentioned I
<v Speaker 5>won't name a specific country at the risk of offending somebody,
<v Speaker 5>but there's a country over in Europe that the military
<v Speaker 5>has a strange fascination and love affair with the movie
<v Speaker 5>Dirty Dancing. You give me more details, please.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, I won't say the particular country, but I will
<v Speaker 2>say there's more than one country. I won't say it's
<v Speaker 2>the entire military. I just know people in the military
<v Speaker 2>you have a strange affiliation with it. But yeah, that
<v Speaker 2>movie resonates. I mean, you guys said on your Dirty
<v Speaker 2>Dancing podcast that that was the highest selling album ever
<v Speaker 2>in Germany and it did a thriller in Germany, and
<v Speaker 2>being a good professor, I had to go up and
<v Speaker 2>look it up, and yeah, it was true. But I
<v Speaker 2>think it resonated with people in a way, you know,
<v Speaker 2>because in the US, we had this idea of nostalgia
<v Speaker 2>for this sort of innocent time in the US the
<v Speaker 2>early sixties, and so Lucas gave us American graffiti. But
<v Speaker 2>Americans wouldn't care about a bunch of teenage kids driving
<v Speaker 2>around Medesto all night, right, But they had Dirty Dancing,
<v Speaker 2>which which is innocent America. It's the sort of America
<v Speaker 2>that they wanted to believe in. And the music I
<v Speaker 2>think really helped that so much because it was it
<v Speaker 2>was this sort of missimash of you know, fifties and
<v Speaker 2>sixties and even stuff from the eighties that they just loved,
<v Speaker 2>you know, and have a movie in a soundtrack start
<v Speaker 2>with the run ats like that. I think it was
<v Speaker 2>just intoxicating for so many people.
<v Speaker 5>Did I tell you that Chad has driven his bike
<v Speaker 5>not once, but twice up to the resort where they
<v Speaker 5>filmed Dirty Dancing in Virginia? Yeah?
<v Speaker 3>Man, that's awesome. I love that, Jason Is.
<v Speaker 2>It's actually a semi famous mountain for cyclists because it's
<v Speaker 2>a really tough one to climb, especially to the backside.
<v Speaker 2>But yeah, the first time I got up there, I
<v Speaker 2>didn't even know where I was and I looked around.
<v Speaker 2>It's like, wait a second.
<v Speaker 3>That's the staircase the baby danced on it.
<v Speaker 5>Fantastic.
<v Speaker 3>That's awesome. Okay, So we want to get in the
<v Speaker 3>origin story of wargames.
<v Speaker 5>Okay, yeah, sure, Okay. So Wargames starts off with Lawrence Lasker.
<v Speaker 5>He gets fascinated with a guy we've all heard of
<v Speaker 5>at this point named Stephen Hawking, who is less famous
<v Speaker 5>at that point in the general world, but was super
<v Speaker 5>famous in the science world, and also is interested in
<v Speaker 5>the fact that he has als and this idea that
<v Speaker 5>this you know, genius who could potentially come up with
<v Speaker 5>the theory of everything might not be able to commute
<v Speaker 5>indicated to us, and so he thinks, Okay, I want
<v Speaker 5>to have a story where this older genius finds this
<v Speaker 5>younger genius that he can communicate with. And that's how
<v Speaker 5>this story gets passed along by the way. Side note,
<v Speaker 5>the meeting that he had in mind was supposed to
<v Speaker 5>be the old geniuses in his mechanical wheelchair sitting on
<v Speaker 5>a pier trying, you know, fishing, and the young kid
<v Speaker 5>walks up from behind, and when he turns around, the
<v Speaker 5>old man is John Lennon.
<v Speaker 3>That would have been amazing to see John Lennon in
<v Speaker 3>this role.
<v Speaker 5>Yeah, And obviously, unfortunately, I mean wise, it didn't work out.
<v Speaker 5>It did not work out. There were a couple of
<v Speaker 5>different important assassination attempts, and unfortunately John Lennon's was a success.
<v Speaker 5>So anyway, Lawrence Lasker has this idea he calls up
<v Speaker 5>his college roommate whose name is Walter Parks, and they
<v Speaker 5>start working together on this script and they spent this
<v Speaker 5>is seventy nine or so. They spend quite a bit
<v Speaker 5>of time developing this genius master and genius student story.
<v Speaker 5>They had this idea that he's going to be thirteen
<v Speaker 5>year old kid at California Berkeley, which sounds like real
<v Speaker 5>genius to me.
<v Speaker 3>It does sound like real genius.
<v Speaker 5>I don't know if they like snag that idea and
<v Speaker 5>redid it with real genius or not, but that's what
<v Speaker 5>it's sounded like anyway. At some point in this process
<v Speaker 5>they meet a very famous guy named Peter Schwartz. Peter
<v Speaker 5>Schwartz is what we call a futurist, and that just
<v Speaker 5>means he's like looking at different analytical models and trying
<v Speaker 5>to predict what's going to happen in certain fields in
<v Speaker 5>the future. And he says, hey, you know, computer games
<v Speaker 5>are getting really popular right now. And I don't know
<v Speaker 5>if you guys have looked at this, but those computer
<v Speaker 5>games really seem to resemble the same screen images that
<v Speaker 5>you see over at Norad with all of their war
<v Speaker 5>models on there. Of course, that's a little light bulb
<v Speaker 5>for both of them all say this is great. How
<v Speaker 5>do we combine these ideas right? And then of course
<v Speaker 5>they start getting interested in the hacker culture, which it's
<v Speaker 5>starting to really ramp up at this point. And Lawrence
<v Speaker 5>Lasker has a friend from Yale named Ron Rosenbaum who
<v Speaker 5>writes this article called The Subterranean World of the Bomb
<v Speaker 5>and talks about these military simulations that go on that
<v Speaker 5>are basically like games. They think, Wow, if you know,
<v Speaker 5>if only we could get into Nord and look around
<v Speaker 5>and see what it's like in there, we'd really have
<v Speaker 5>some meat for our story. Well, as it turns out,
<v Speaker 5>Norrad actually invites Hollywood types out. I'm watching the movie
<v Speaker 5>and I'm like, there's no way. There is no freaking
<v Speaker 5>way they're going to have a guided tour in the
<v Speaker 5>middle of the war games simulations.
<v Speaker 3>The bus from Birmingham.
<v Speaker 5>Turns out they do. Turns out they do. That's incredible,
<v Speaker 5>So they get they managed to get themselves out to Norad.
<v Speaker 5>They're going on this tour. They're about to get back
<v Speaker 5>on the bus and this guy named General Hardinger stops
<v Speaker 5>them and says, boys, I hear you're writing a story
<v Speaker 5>about me, and they're like, uh yeah. He goes, well,
<v Speaker 5>let's go, let's go talk, let's go have some drinks.
<v Speaker 5>And they're like, well, we got to get back on
<v Speaker 5>the bus. And he goes, I's got forty three men
<v Speaker 5>under my command right now, I think I can get
<v Speaker 5>you back to your hotel. And so they go with
<v Speaker 5>him and start talking about things, and it turns out
<v Speaker 5>very similar to the character that they develop. He feels
<v Speaker 5>that it is vital that human beings have some sort
<v Speaker 5>of involvement with the decision to set a nuclear strike
<v Speaker 5>into play. You got any info on that, Chad, I mean,
<v Speaker 5>could it happen that there is no human involvement?
<v Speaker 2>Well, it's it's kind of tricky. I mean if you
<v Speaker 2>think back to the plots for fail Safe and Doctor Strangelove,
<v Speaker 2>right which her influences on wargame, and they're both on
<v Speaker 2>this idea of accidental nuclear war that in Doctor Strangelove
<v Speaker 2>you get a general who just goes crazy and sets
<v Speaker 2>off an attack that he shouldn't and fail Safe they
<v Speaker 2>mistakenly think that a civilionaire liner is a bomber, and
<v Speaker 2>bombers get sent off to Moscow. That they can't control.
<v Speaker 2>All these strategies have been based on this idea of
<v Speaker 2>launch on warning, so you don't wait until the bombs
<v Speaker 2>actually hit before you launch your own missiles, right, But
<v Speaker 2>that means you have to rely upon what the computers
<v Speaker 2>are telling you. So you don't have plane spotters out
<v Speaker 2>there in Alaska actually just looking for the missiles. You're
<v Speaker 2>relying upon radars and satellites to tell you that something's happening.
<v Speaker 2>But they can be wrong, right, So it's always it's
<v Speaker 2>always a bit fantastical to begin with that. Okay, whatever
<v Speaker 2>you see on the screen is just what the computer's
<v Speaker 2>telling you is on the screen, and you have to
<v Speaker 2>trust that, right. So, yeah, there always had to be
<v Speaker 2>some sort of control there, right, The two keys that
<v Speaker 2>you saw famously at the first scene, that you've seen
<v Speaker 2>in other movies too, like Crimson Tide, and that's always
<v Speaker 2>been there both for the US and the Soviets precisely
<v Speaker 2>because they always knew that. Well, you can't always trust
<v Speaker 2>what the computer is seeing because the computer can't make
<v Speaker 2>judgments on whether something's real or not.
<v Speaker 3>Crimson Die is a great reference, by the way. I
<v Speaker 3>love that movie. Yeah, they get the message to launch
<v Speaker 3>and then it's sort of corrupted or incomplete and they
<v Speaker 3>have to decide no, this is a partial message. No,
<v Speaker 3>this is the real message. We need to launch. No,
<v Speaker 3>we don't need a launch.
<v Speaker 5>Yeah. I think there's an actual historical event that's related
<v Speaker 5>to that as well. Was I think a similar situation Maybe.
<v Speaker 5>I think it was the Soviets though, but it was
<v Speaker 5>that incomplete message, and like, I think they had three
<v Speaker 5>guys who had to do something, and two of the
<v Speaker 5>three were like, we're doing it, and one guy was
<v Speaker 5>a holdout and averted a nuclear catastrophe because of it,
<v Speaker 5>Thank god.
<v Speaker 2>If that's the Petrov incident, yeah, yeah, yeah. So there
<v Speaker 2>was a colonel by the name of Sanslow Petrov, and
<v Speaker 2>he was in charge of this early warning system that
<v Speaker 2>had been set up by the Soviets. It was a
<v Speaker 2>satellite system to watch for missile launches from the United States.
<v Speaker 2>And he got this report from the satellites that there
<v Speaker 2>were missiles being launched. They couldn't exactly tell it was
<v Speaker 2>maybe five missiles, and his protocol, right his checklist, said
<v Speaker 2>you need to report this. It's not a judgment. You're
<v Speaker 2>just a lieutenant colonel. You're just supposed to report it
<v Speaker 2>up the chain of command. And then things get moving,
<v Speaker 2>but he knew that the system was kind of glitchy.
<v Speaker 2>He knew that, well, the US wouldn't attack US with
<v Speaker 2>just a couple of missiles, they would attack with thousands
<v Speaker 2>of missiles. So he refused to he refused to report it,
<v Speaker 2>and of course he didn't tell anyone for a long
<v Speaker 2>time because he would have gotten into trouble. But if
<v Speaker 2>that had gone on, and you have to remember the context,
<v Speaker 2>nineteen eighty three was a really really bad time between
<v Speaker 2>the US and the Soviets. So September of nineteen eighty three,
<v Speaker 2>the Soviets had just shut down Korean airliner, you know,
<v Speaker 2>the Korean airliners seven forty seven, and only three weeks
<v Speaker 2>later this happened, you know, this Petrov incident. And then
<v Speaker 2>only three weeks after that was the instant the able
<v Speaker 2>Archer that you were mentioning earlier, right, which also coincidentally
<v Speaker 2>was the same week that Wargames was released in West Germany.
<v Speaker 5>Wow, that's cool.
<v Speaker 3>It's cool.
<v Speaker 2>Life imitating art right.
<v Speaker 5>Well, And just to finish the story, like Reagan has
<v Speaker 5>come in. I mean we for twenty years things have
<v Speaker 5>kind of been cooling down, and the Reagan comes in
<v Speaker 5>and turns the heat up to hide. He calls them
<v Speaker 5>the Evil Empire. They start engaging in some serious psyops,
<v Speaker 5>which when I watched the When I was watching the
<v Speaker 5>documentary and John Badam was talking about how changed the
<v Speaker 5>name of the computer from Psyop to Whopper, He's like,
<v Speaker 5>Syop doesn't make any sense. I'm like, it makes perfect
<v Speaker 5>sense because it's psychological operations. But okay, anyway, so they're
<v Speaker 5>doing and I love this. So what the US would
<v Speaker 5>do is they would have these planes, these attack planes,
<v Speaker 5>fly straight for Soviet airspace, and at the very last second,
<v Speaker 5>right before they enter the space, they would veer off.
<v Speaker 5>It was the global thermal nuclear war equivalent of I'm
<v Speaker 5>not touching you. I'm not touching you. Really, it's fantastic.
<v Speaker 5>And so that is why the Soviets were at the
<v Speaker 5>top of their paranoia. They were completely afraid of what's
<v Speaker 5>going on. And so Norad is doing these real wargame simulations.
<v Speaker 5>They add all these other components, and the Russians think
<v Speaker 5>this is a ruse, this is a fake. They're really
<v Speaker 5>about to attack, and they literally put everything in place
<v Speaker 5>to begin their retaliatory strike. Before the first US missiles hit, I.
<v Speaker 3>Could just sear Maverick can go saying we can't shoot
<v Speaker 3>this son of event. You might as well have fun
<v Speaker 3>with him.
<v Speaker 2>But yeah, once things get started, it's hard to stop.
<v Speaker 2>So during the Kuban missile crisis, Kennedy told all of
<v Speaker 2>his advisors Street the Guns of August by Barbara Tuckman,
<v Speaker 2>because that talked about the start of World War One.
<v Speaker 2>And once you get things started, you can't back down.
<v Speaker 2>It's really tough, just because organizationally, things get move in
<v Speaker 2>and once someone starts firing, other people start firing back.
<v Speaker 2>It's like being in a boxing match. Well, you know,
<v Speaker 2>when someone punches you, you got punched back even a little
<v Speaker 2>bit harder.
<v Speaker 5>Yeah, we didn't, Like I said, we didn't even know
<v Speaker 5>that this had occurred. We did not know that the
<v Speaker 5>Soviets were about to Nucas out of existence until like
<v Speaker 5>almost two years later. There was a Soviet double agent
<v Speaker 5>named Olegg Ordievsky. He was a double agent, and eventually
<v Speaker 5>they figured out that he was a double agent and
<v Speaker 5>they were about to They sneak in, they get him
<v Speaker 5>back out, and he's the one that tells them, hey,
<v Speaker 5>this is how close everybody came beginning annihilated.
<v Speaker 3>Well, I'm sitting there playing with my Transformers and listening
<v Speaker 3>to Michael Jackson. I was about to be glowing in
<v Speaker 3>the dark.
<v Speaker 5>I never learned to swim.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, people were scared them The Europeans remember the
<v Speaker 2>Euromissile Crisis in nineteen eighty three, it's what they're referred
<v Speaker 2>to it. And by then Threads had already been released
<v Speaker 2>in the UK, right, which was the UK equivalent of
<v Speaker 2>The Day After Tomorrow, and that was a pretty brutal movie.
<v Speaker 2>You can find that, I think on YouTube these days.
<v Speaker 2>But then I think it was nineteen eighty three. That
<v Speaker 2>was when Day After Tomorrow came out in the US,
<v Speaker 2>and that scared the hell out of me as a kid.
<v Speaker 2>I mean, that's what I remember that more than wargames
<v Speaker 2>at least be first interesting.
<v Speaker 3>Okay, yeah, so the company that put Wopper, you know,
<v Speaker 3>the US military that put Wopper into play obviously didn't
<v Speaker 3>work out at the end of War Games, so Cyberdine
<v Speaker 3>perfected that a few years later, and then Skynet and
<v Speaker 3>I'm just kidding. Actually there's a lot of similarities here
<v Speaker 3>between the Terminator franchise and wargames.
<v Speaker 5>I think I don't know why we're talking about all
<v Speaker 5>this old stuff. Why don't we talk about something that's
<v Speaker 5>relevant today.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah. Right, So, okay, computers would never tell us what.
<v Speaker 5>To do exactly. There's no way that they can actually
<v Speaker 5>learn and be intelligent. So the guys who are writing wargames,
<v Speaker 5>Parks and Laskar, they have hit up this guy named
<v Speaker 5>Leonard Goldberg. He's a producer. He's like, hey, go write
<v Speaker 5>the script. After a year of waiting, he's like, I said,
<v Speaker 5>write it, not carve it in stone. Let's get something.
<v Speaker 5>But he's expecting this genius mentor to genius student story
<v Speaker 5>that they proposed to him. So a little while later,
<v Speaker 5>ficretary comes in and says, well, they didn't write the
<v Speaker 5>story they said they're going to write, but they wrote
<v Speaker 5>this war movie instead. He's like war movie. And then
<v Speaker 5>she's like, why don't you just read it? We got it.
<v Speaker 5>It's something, And he reads it and says, thank you
<v Speaker 5>for an awesome weekend. It is a fantastic story. Yeah.
<v Speaker 5>So he shops it around to various studios, gets turned
<v Speaker 5>down repeatedly, ends up that United Artist MGM says, yes,
<v Speaker 5>we're willing to do this, and that is what we
<v Speaker 5>call a green light. Okay, so war Games came out first.
<v Speaker 5>We're going back in time now a year before when
<v Speaker 5>Tron came.
<v Speaker 4>Out nineteen eighty two.
<v Speaker 5>Nineteen eighty two, so earlier than that, I'm going to
<v Speaker 5>go back to let's say seventy six. This guy named
<v Speaker 5>Stephen Lisberger is a aspiring animation artist. Has even put
<v Speaker 5>together a little studio of his college friends, about five people,
<v Speaker 5>called Lisburger Studios. He gets introduced to this new crazy
<v Speaker 5>invention called.
<v Speaker 3>Pong pong that's mind blowing.
<v Speaker 5>Yeah, and he is inspired. He is like, holy crap,
<v Speaker 5>I gotta make a movie about video games.
<v Speaker 3>Hey, let's talk about that for just a second.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah.
<v Speaker 3>So if you're younger than we are, you don't really
<v Speaker 3>grasp how mind blowing that pong was. At that time.
<v Speaker 3>The idea that you could actually compete using electronics on
<v Speaker 3>a TV screen was unbelievable at the time.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, there were so many quarters wasted invested investment in
<v Speaker 2>time that was training training. Atari even called that special Olympics, right,
<v Speaker 2>video Olympics.
<v Speaker 3>When I was growing up, my church had a gym
<v Speaker 3>and a little ping pong area. We had space invaders,
<v Speaker 3>we had asteroids, and we had Donkey Kong guess what
<v Speaker 3>I did all the time?
<v Speaker 5>Redchid Bibelin prayed, no, that would be interorrect.
<v Speaker 3>I played a crap ton of Donkey Kong.
<v Speaker 5>Gotcha? Gotcha, Chad? Did you have an Atari growing up?
<v Speaker 2>Yeah? Yeah, we had an Atari twenty six hundred.
<v Speaker 3>You Yes, of course.
<v Speaker 5>So Pong Breakout, eventually Pitfall, which was to me the
<v Speaker 5>Atari game of all Atari games.
<v Speaker 3>Eventually Tron Deadly Discs was an incredible twenty six hentred game.
<v Speaker 5>So I know we're going to talk about, uh, we're
<v Speaker 5>going to talk about the video game here in a
<v Speaker 5>little bit. But yes, the Deadly disc was supposed to
<v Speaker 5>be a part of the original game. They didn't even
<v Speaker 5>have time to get it done. That's okay. Four games
<v Speaker 5>was plenty for me. Unfortunately, it comes out right at
<v Speaker 5>the time that video games are starting to the bubble
<v Speaker 5>is starting to burst.
<v Speaker 3>I don't care that Tron. The black light from that
<v Speaker 3>video game and the music, the windy Carlos music blaring
<v Speaker 3>through the arcade. I put a million dollars worth of
<v Speaker 3>quarters of that game myself. Love that game.
<v Speaker 5>So Liz Burger is inspired by Pong. He thinks, okay,
<v Speaker 5>how can I do Pong combined with Alice in Wonderland
<v Speaker 5>and the wheels start turning right. But he is an animator,
<v Speaker 5>he is not a live movie producer. And in nineteen
<v Speaker 5>seventy nine he gets ten thousand dollars from AFI a
<v Speaker 5>grant from them to a seven minute short film and
<v Speaker 5>it involves animals competing in the Olympics. And the name
<v Speaker 5>of the show is Animal Olympics. Yeah, very creative Animal Olympics.
<v Speaker 5>That one does well enough that NBC decides to fund
<v Speaker 5>a full film, which is a seven figure budget. He
<v Speaker 5>leaves Boston, goes out to California with his partner and
<v Speaker 5>they start working on this full fledged Animal Olympics movie.
<v Speaker 5>Go ahead, I got something for you that you skipped over. Okay.
<v Speaker 3>In nineteen seventy three, he won the Student Academy Award
<v Speaker 3>for a little short film called Cosmic Cartoon where a
<v Speaker 3>gladiator throws glowing discs. In nineteen seventy three.
<v Speaker 5>Oh wow, that's solid, dude. I gotta tell you. I
<v Speaker 5>saw that he won that thing. I'm like, it's too much,
<v Speaker 5>I'm gonna cut that out. I did not realize that
<v Speaker 5>the game actually comes into DirectPlay. That's disks fantastic. So
<v Speaker 5>he ends up producing two thirty minute parts, a Animal
<v Speaker 5>Olympics Winter Games and an Animal Olympics Summer Games, but
<v Speaker 5>only the Winter Games gets aired on NBC because the
<v Speaker 5>Soviets come into play again. They invade Afghanistan, and the
<v Speaker 5>US boycotts the Olympics, and so they are taking all
<v Speaker 5>Olympic related things off of the boob tube. And so
<v Speaker 5>he's got these two pieces, only one of which the
<v Speaker 5>rest of the world has seen. Fortunately, he gets a
<v Speaker 5>deal with HBO, puts those two parts together, adds about
<v Speaker 5>another thirty minutes of additional footage, and it airs exclusively
<v Speaker 5>on HBO and gains a cult following. And I got
<v Speaker 5>to say, I remember I looked at the pictures here
<v Speaker 5>and I remember this cartoon. I remember seeing this on HBO.
<v Speaker 5>I feel like there's a naked lion in there somewhere,
<v Speaker 5>like a naked female lion, anamorphic thing. Yeah, that had
<v Speaker 5>been a reason for me to remember it, But this
<v Speaker 5>nineteen eighty what are you going to do? So interestingly,
<v Speaker 5>one of the animators on this series, Brad Bird Get
<v Speaker 5>out of Here? No, Yeah, brad Bird. One of his
<v Speaker 5>very first credits is he is an animator on the
<v Speaker 5>Animal Olympics. Also you had. The voices of the characters
<v Speaker 5>were Gilda Radner, Billy Chris, and Perry Shearer.
<v Speaker 3>Really, yeah, that's fantastic. By the way, flashback to our
<v Speaker 3>best movie since two thousand episode right, Well, we talked
<v Speaker 3>extensively about The Incredibles.
<v Speaker 5>Yeah, yeah, because you picked it as number one because
<v Speaker 5>it's best movie since two thousand. Well, Okay, I don't
<v Speaker 5>know if I agree with you there, but we'll keep
<v Speaker 5>on going. Okay, okay, So why am I telling you
<v Speaker 5>about animallypics when we're here to talk about Tron Because
<v Speaker 5>the opening studio credits marked the very first appearance of
<v Speaker 5>the character Tron. At this point, it was a mascot
<v Speaker 5>for Lisberger's company, and it was more like an electric light,
<v Speaker 5>and it was yellow instead of blue. Okay, but do
<v Speaker 5>you know where the name Tron comes from?
<v Speaker 3>Electron?
<v Speaker 5>Yeah, electronics, Electronics. This is the Tron in the middle
<v Speaker 5>of electronics. That is it. It's awesome. So the original
<v Speaker 5>Tron character actually looked like the Cylons from Battlestar Galactica. Yes,
<v Speaker 5>if they had a beard like it was a big
<v Speaker 5>bearded guy with that kind of look about him.
<v Speaker 3>You're talking about the appearance of these things the appearance
<v Speaker 3>of the characters in the movie Tron. You know why,
<v Speaker 3>Jeff Ridges has a little skirt type of thing that
<v Speaker 3>he wears.
<v Speaker 5>He literally Morgan was in the movie with him in
<v Speaker 5>her own tight little outfit.
<v Speaker 3>Basically, yes, to keep the film modest. Apparently, Jeff Bridges
<v Speaker 3>is uh, he's the Huey Lewis of the movie world. Huh.
<v Speaker 2>It was a Disney film by then, his deadly disc
<v Speaker 2>was showing a little too much, so they had to
<v Speaker 2>cover him up.
<v Speaker 5>That's hilarious. Hey, Jason, I was gonna tell you there's
<v Speaker 5>another podcast that's covered Tron recently that you should go
<v Speaker 5>check out.
<v Speaker 3>Oh yeah, what is it?
<v Speaker 5>So the name of the podcast is the All Eighties
<v Speaker 5>Movies Podcast.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, Bill and Jason. There are good buddies over there.
<v Speaker 3>Oh yeah, you know, yeah I do.
<v Speaker 5>Yeah, they do great stuff. They've just covered Tron. Be
<v Speaker 5>sure and go and check out their episode on Tron.
<v Speaker 5>That is the All Eighties Movies podcast available on all
<v Speaker 5>streaming platform.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah. In fact, they did The Outsiders and Tron recently,
<v Speaker 3>so we're kind of crossing past a couple different ways. Yeah,
<v Speaker 3>definitely go check him out. There are good friends over there,
<v Speaker 3>all eighties movie podcast.
<v Speaker 5>So they planned to use the money that they had
<v Speaker 5>borrowed against the anticipated profits of Animal Olympics to develop
<v Speaker 5>the storyboards for Tron. But then this article appears in
<v Speaker 5>Variety magazine and this guy named Alan Kay sees the article.
<v Speaker 5>Alan Kay reads this article in Variety, and Alan Kay,
<v Speaker 5>if you don't know who he is, is a pioneer
<v Speaker 5>of the computer world. He is a computer scientist. He
<v Speaker 5>is responsible largely for the object oriented programming and the
<v Speaker 5>windy wing graphical user interface that Xerox came up with
<v Speaker 5>that you know, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs stole the
<v Speaker 5>ideas from. He's a mastermind of computers.
<v Speaker 3>He sees this.
<v Speaker 5>Little article in Variety and he calls up Steve Lisberger
<v Speaker 5>and says, I want you to make me a consultant
<v Speaker 5>on your movie. And he's like okay, and he goes
<v Speaker 5>and also, you don't need to do this hand drawn
<v Speaker 5>animation stuff. You can do the animation with computers. And
<v Speaker 5>so that's how in nineteen eighty two we get one
<v Speaker 5>of the very first uses of CGI.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, it's incredible. You know, when I watched this movie,
<v Speaker 3>there's some effects that are a little hookey for today,
<v Speaker 3>but back in nineteen eighty two, this was mind blowing stuff.
<v Speaker 5>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>For them to have a computer that had two megabytes
<v Speaker 2>of around, I mean that's nothing now, but back then
<v Speaker 2>it was just Yeah, it was mind blowing. And certain
<v Speaker 2>scenes like the light cycles, you know, still kind of
<v Speaker 2>holds up.
<v Speaker 3>Oh yeah, the light cycle stuff is incredible.
<v Speaker 2>And back then though, it was just beyond belief.
<v Speaker 5>It's amazing. I mean there was nothing like it at
<v Speaker 5>the time at all.
<v Speaker 3>I'll use more stories than that to make this podcast,
<v Speaker 3>to make a phone call.
<v Speaker 5>Yeah. Yeah. So Steve Lisberger has been working with this
<v Speaker 5>friend of his name de Bonnie mcbird. She's an actress,
<v Speaker 5>and so she starts working on him with the story.
<v Speaker 5>Alan Ka comes into the project and she develops the
<v Speaker 5>character Alan the creator of trone after Alan Kay yes,
<v Speaker 5>and she suggests Robin Williams as the Flynn character because
<v Speaker 5>she wants him to be fun and kind of crazy,
<v Speaker 5>and so she gets credit in this as the story
<v Speaker 5>by They definitely worked on the story together and Alan
<v Speaker 5>Kay was heavily involved. But basically there's maybe one line
<v Speaker 5>in the whole thing that she composed that ends up
<v Speaker 5>in the movie, and later on they end up having
<v Speaker 5>kind of a bitter, kind of legal battle about writing
<v Speaker 5>credits for the movie, but turns out okay for her
<v Speaker 5>in the end because she and Alan Kay become so
<v Speaker 5>close that they actually end up getting married and have
<v Speaker 5>been married.
<v Speaker 3>Really, yeah, that's fantastic.
<v Speaker 5>So they develop the script. They get rejected by a
<v Speaker 5>great many studios who just don't get it, but they
<v Speaker 5>ultimately get picked up by Disney.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, so, in fairness, I didn't really get it in
<v Speaker 3>nineteen eighty two either, but one company that did was Disney.
<v Speaker 3>They decided to do it. Now, this is a time
<v Speaker 3>when Disney is kind of feeling their way out of
<v Speaker 3>the seventies. They're trying to branch out do more live
<v Speaker 3>action stuff. They've swung and missed three times, like swung
<v Speaker 3>hard and missed The Black Hole, Yeah, which I liked
<v Speaker 3>as a kid, but it wasn't Star Wars.
<v Speaker 2>In fairness, nothing could be Star Wars but Hole. I
<v Speaker 2>asked so many questions of my poor mom of astrophysics
<v Speaker 2>and cosmology that eventually it did help inspire me to
<v Speaker 2>actually study the physics.
<v Speaker 3>But okay, it was your mother a physicist or was
<v Speaker 3>she just the person.
<v Speaker 5>In the room that knew more than you.
<v Speaker 2>She was just the poor person who had taken me
<v Speaker 2>to the movie, and I expected her to know these things.
<v Speaker 3>Why is the robot in hell?
<v Speaker 5>Mom?
<v Speaker 3>What the heck is going on here? That movie scared
<v Speaker 3>the crap out of me as a kid.
<v Speaker 2>That one scene, Maximilian still Ranks is one of the
<v Speaker 2>really toughest robots they've ever created.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, no doubt. So.
<v Speaker 5>It was a swing in the miss in the seventies,
<v Speaker 5>but we still like it today. Yeah, okay, what else
<v Speaker 5>you got? What are there other three?
<v Speaker 3>The other swing of miss is another movie called Midnight Madness.
<v Speaker 3>I remember it, Chad, Nope, never heard of it, okay,
<v Speaker 3>all right. And the other was a movie that I
<v Speaker 3>actually saw the trailer for. I remember watching it in
<v Speaker 3>the theater. It may have been when I saw a
<v Speaker 3>black hole. It's called The Watcher in the Woods. Yeah,
<v Speaker 3>well it kind of it is like a it's kind
<v Speaker 3>of a ghost story for for Disney. Betty Davis was in.
<v Speaker 3>I think it may have been her one of her
<v Speaker 3>last movies. Anyway, all three of those tanked, and Disney
<v Speaker 3>was still trying to find the way. So they say, okay, yeah,
<v Speaker 3>we'll do your video game movie. That sounds cool. They
<v Speaker 3>read the script, they punted it back to him and said, hey,
<v Speaker 3>we like what you're doing here. There's some religious aspects
<v Speaker 3>to this story. This is stuff I never picked up
<v Speaker 3>on at the time, the idea of do you believe
<v Speaker 3>in users? How would I get here if there's not
<v Speaker 3>a user? So there's there's some spiritual aspects to this.
<v Speaker 3>I talked about that, yeah, for sure, and Disney actually
<v Speaker 3>wanted to emphasize those, right, So they punted it back
<v Speaker 3>to him, says, bring more on this. They bring in
<v Speaker 3>Wendy Carlos to do the music. Wendy Carlos had done
<v Speaker 3>a clockwork Orange and the.
<v Speaker 5>Shining fantastic soundtrack like that may be the best feature
<v Speaker 5>of the whole movie. That and the animation might be
<v Speaker 5>the two top features of the movie.
<v Speaker 3>Well, and I know the music so well from the
<v Speaker 3>video game. Right, you walk in an arcade, you can
<v Speaker 3>hear Wendy Carlos down the hall. There's Tron way over there.
<v Speaker 3>And then you also have two Journey songs on this soundtrack.
<v Speaker 5>That's right, They're barely there, but they're there.
<v Speaker 3>You know why the Journey was picked because Supertramp was unavailable.
<v Speaker 3>I'm not kidding. I like Super Trimp, but this is
<v Speaker 3>the most interesting thing to me. So you talked about
<v Speaker 3>how they're when they shot this, they're in colorless bodysuits.
<v Speaker 3>There's no blue glowing nothing. It's white and black, and
<v Speaker 3>there's no life to it when they film it. And
<v Speaker 3>they add all that of course later. But this was
<v Speaker 3>originally scheduled for a Christmas nineteen eighty two release, okay,
<v Speaker 3>but Don Bluth had left Disney and taken a bunch
<v Speaker 3>of animators with them to go create this thing called
<v Speaker 3>The Secret of Nim, right, and Disney was pissed about
<v Speaker 3>that and said, let's go head to head and go
<v Speaker 3>kick the Secret of Nim's butt, okay, and so they
<v Speaker 3>moved it to the summer of eighty two. Well, the
<v Speaker 3>problem was the summer of eighty two, and we've already
<v Speaker 3>discussed it in a three part podcast that we did, right,
<v Speaker 3>was you were up against Blade Runner, the Thing Star
<v Speaker 3>Trek to the Rathakon Pultergeist, but really et Et and
<v Speaker 3>that was sort of the death blow for all these
<v Speaker 3>movies and really was not a brilliant move by Disney.
<v Speaker 2>Jason didn't didn't a lot of the Disney animators refuse
<v Speaker 2>to work on this.
<v Speaker 3>That's interesting. What do you got for me on that?
<v Speaker 5>I don't know.
<v Speaker 2>Well, a lot of the animators didn't want to work
<v Speaker 2>on it because, just like today, they thought that, well,
<v Speaker 2>if you computerize everything, then we're out of jobs. So
<v Speaker 2>you know, they viewed this just like we view AI
<v Speaker 2>art nowadays as well, this is just really stealing our stuff.
<v Speaker 2>And later on, of course, the Academy Awards refused to
<v Speaker 2>even consider them for special effects because they said that
<v Speaker 2>using computers for special effects is cheating.
<v Speaker 3>That's amazing, right.
<v Speaker 2>One other thing I can mention about black Hole was
<v Speaker 2>that the opening credits for black Hole, where you see
<v Speaker 2>the sort of grid system and everything, that was the
<v Speaker 2>first use in a movie of computer animation.
<v Speaker 3>Really. Yeah, so Disney's pioneering this stuff. So no wonder
<v Speaker 3>they're interested in tront.
<v Speaker 2>They did, they did have some experience with it.
<v Speaker 3>Wow, that makes me want to go back and watch
<v Speaker 3>black Hole. Maybe we should cover the black Hole.
<v Speaker 5>We should cover the black Hole. I think that's a
<v Speaker 5>great idea.
<v Speaker 3>Maximilian goes to Hill.
<v Speaker 1>Greetings yesterday same was interrupted, although primary go pass not
<v Speaker 1>yet being achieved. Solution this near game time denapsed. That's
<v Speaker 1>one dollars twelve minutes fifty seconds estimated time remaining two
<v Speaker 1>as seventeen meets.
<v Speaker 2>Ten is the primary goal.
<v Speaker 1>To win the game.
<v Speaker 5>Okay, so they've gotten the green light for war games,
<v Speaker 5>and so now they need a director. Lawrence Lasker knew
<v Speaker 5>this guy from college named Martin Brest, Yes, happened to
<v Speaker 5>be absolutely on fire at the moment as a new
<v Speaker 5>upcoming director, and so he gives him a call. Martin
<v Speaker 5>Brest says, I'm in, and they've got to go right.
<v Speaker 5>They've got a fantastic director. The only problem is is
<v Speaker 5>that Martin is wanting to take this script in a
<v Speaker 5>much darker place than Lawrence and Walter had intended it
<v Speaker 5>for to go. So yeah, so they end up arguing
<v Speaker 5>quite a bit about what should be done with various things.
<v Speaker 5>Martin is adding a lot to the script and manipul
<v Speaker 5>relating a lot of things, and at some point they're
<v Speaker 5>in an argument. Lawrence and Walter are in an argument
<v Speaker 5>with Martin on the phone, back and forth, back and forth,
<v Speaker 5>back and forth, and finally Martin is like, you know what,
<v Speaker 5>it's okay, don't worry about it. It's good. We're all
<v Speaker 5>good and they hang up the phone and they said, Walter
<v Speaker 5>said to Lawrence, it's all done. I think we might
<v Speaker 5>have just gotten fired. And sure enough, within the next
<v Speaker 5>hour they get a call from their agent and they said,
<v Speaker 5>you're off the picture. And so this is pretty hard blow.
<v Speaker 5>I mean, they started this project in seventy nine, this
<v Speaker 5>is eighty two. They put a lot of blood, sweat
<v Speaker 5>and tears into developing this story and now they're completely
<v Speaker 5>off of it. But it turns out that Martin was
<v Speaker 5>not getting along with the studio either. Right now. What
<v Speaker 5>he did contribute was that it was his idea to
<v Speaker 5>put Ali in the second half of the movie. Like
<v Speaker 5>the original concept was, she sends him the money and
<v Speaker 5>he's just on his own after that. But they thought,
<v Speaker 5>he needs somebody to talk You need somebody to talk to, right,
<v Speaker 5>Are we gonna know what he's thinking if he doesn't
<v Speaker 5>have somebody to talk to. So he puts her flying
<v Speaker 5>in to meet David instead of just sending him money.
<v Speaker 5>Now the studio is unhappy with this dark vision. It's
<v Speaker 5>back and forth again, and eventually the studio says Martin,
<v Speaker 5>I don't think we need you anymore, which is pretty rare,
<v Speaker 5>but He's like, Okay, you know, I stands on his principles,
<v Speaker 5>doesn't cower? I mean he's on fire at the point
<v Speaker 5>at that moment, so why not? Right? So he tells
<v Speaker 5>Ali and Matthew, I don't think I'm going to be
<v Speaker 5>directing this movie anymore. And of course they're paying they
<v Speaker 5>think they're gonna get fired, right, right, And so he
<v Speaker 5>ends up doing Okay.
<v Speaker 3>He lands on Beverly Hills.
<v Speaker 5>Cop next like, which does you know two hundred and
<v Speaker 5>fifty million dollars or something? He did? Okay, he did
<v Speaker 5>it right for this, we don't need to worry about him, right,
<v Speaker 5>But they're now without a director, and so who do
<v Speaker 5>they go to? A guy that we've discussed before, a
<v Speaker 5>guy named John Adam.
<v Speaker 3>John Badam. We talked about it on our Saturday Night
<v Speaker 3>Fever episode. He's the guy who did that movie. Hey,
<v Speaker 3>listen to the eighties of John Batham. Okay, yeah, listen
<v Speaker 3>to this. He does, of course Saturday Night Fever. He
<v Speaker 3>does war games. He does Blue Thunder in nineteen eighty
<v Speaker 3>two Blue Thunder, remember that. He does Short Circuit Wow
<v Speaker 3>with Johnny five and Steve Gutenberg and Ali Sheety.
<v Speaker 5>Yeah, he does Steak Out.
<v Speaker 3>In nineteen eighty seven, one of your favorites. I love Steakout.
<v Speaker 3>It's one of my favorites, Emilio asked as Richard Dreyvis.
<v Speaker 5>Yeah.
<v Speaker 3>Uh, And then of course he does Bird on a
<v Speaker 3>Wire with Mel Gibson and Goldie Haun. I think that's
<v Speaker 3>nineteen ninety. But still, that's a string of great, sort
<v Speaker 3>of fun movies.
<v Speaker 5>That's a string of sort of sort of sort of
<v Speaker 5>sort of okay movies.
<v Speaker 3>You tell me you don't like Short Circuit.
<v Speaker 5>It was innovative for its time. I think if you
<v Speaker 5>go back to watch it now, we will be less
<v Speaker 5>impressed than we were when we were then.
<v Speaker 3>Might be true, that might be.
<v Speaker 2>But it does talk about a computer becoming self aware,
<v Speaker 2>you know, Johnny.
<v Speaker 5>Five, great point there you go.
<v Speaker 3>Hi, Hey, Plus, you got have a helicopter going upside
<v Speaker 3>down in Blue Thunder.
<v Speaker 5>So John Badam is thrown into this project. He starts
<v Speaker 5>looking over what Martin Brest has done with the script,
<v Speaker 5>and he calls up Lawrence and Walter and says, guys,
<v Speaker 5>I'm looking at what I'm guessing is probably a three
<v Speaker 5>hour long movie with the script. Do you guys have
<v Speaker 5>anything that you'd like to send me that I might
<v Speaker 5>be able to look at instead of this, and they said, yeah,
<v Speaker 5>we wrote a second draft that like nobody has looked at.
<v Speaker 5>He goes send it over and they're like, well, you know,
<v Speaker 5>a guy down the hall has a copy. He goes,
<v Speaker 5>I'd prefer if you came and gave it to me.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, give it direct.
<v Speaker 5>At that moment, they're like, maybe we're back in. He
<v Speaker 5>reads it. He says, this is the best script I've
<v Speaker 5>read so far, and the writers are back in. They
<v Speaker 5>no longer have to watch somebody else making love to
<v Speaker 5>their girlfriend. They can enjoy making love to the girlfriend themselves.
<v Speaker 5>So Badam brings on the one big chance other than
<v Speaker 5>you know, going back to this second draft script, the
<v Speaker 5>one big change that Batham brings is he brings on
<v Speaker 5>mister Barry Corbin.
<v Speaker 2>Mister McKittrick.
<v Speaker 3>After very careful consideration, sir, I've come to conclusion that
<v Speaker 3>your new defense system sucks. He steals every scene that
<v Speaker 3>he's in.
<v Speaker 2>Absolutely, he was the best. I mean, he was based
<v Speaker 2>on the real life Nora in general of the time
<v Speaker 2>and basically ad lid his way through the whole movie
<v Speaker 2>that came up with the most quotable lines of the
<v Speaker 2>movie as well.
<v Speaker 3>Absolutely, they would come to him and they say, hey,
<v Speaker 3>can you say something colorful right here? And he's like,
<v Speaker 3>I'd piss on a spark plug if I thought of
<v Speaker 3>doing a good that's all his stuff.
<v Speaker 5>A question might be what happened to the guy that
<v Speaker 5>was originally cast in that part.
<v Speaker 3>You know, he was moved to like the side character.
<v Speaker 5>He's the guy I can't even imagine, like you've got
<v Speaker 5>the general's role. New director comes on and he says, Okay,
<v Speaker 5>you're now going to be the general's helper. Yeah. Who
<v Speaker 5>doesn't say any And it's the actor's name is Michael
<v Speaker 5>Ensign And I mean he's been in a ton of
<v Speaker 5>stuff as well. Like when I saw him in the movie,
<v Speaker 5>I'm like, he's a pretty famous actor. I wonder why
<v Speaker 5>he's not saying anything. And I think at one point,
<v Speaker 5>probably improvised, Barry Corbin goes, where is that guy? Oh?
<v Speaker 5>There he is. I didn't see you there.
<v Speaker 3>That's good.
<v Speaker 2>By the way, guys, do you know what happened to
<v Speaker 2>one of the versions of the original script that Alaska wrote?
<v Speaker 5>What tell me?
<v Speaker 2>Oh? He rewrote it and it became Sneakers the movie
<v Speaker 2>in nineteen ninety two with Robert Redford and Ben Kinsgilly
<v Speaker 2>oh Perfet. Wow.
<v Speaker 3>I love Sneakers the hacker movie, right, it is a
<v Speaker 3>hacker movie perfect Redford, River, Phoenix City Potier, Dan Aykroyd.
<v Speaker 2>A lot of what Alaskar originally wanted to write about
<v Speaker 2>he couldn't put into war Games, and so he took
<v Speaker 2>all of that and years later rewrote it into Sneakers.
<v Speaker 5>Fantastic.
<v Speaker 3>Wow, that's incredible.
<v Speaker 5>By the way, if you don't recognize the name Michael Ensign,
<v Speaker 5>he's the hotel clerk from Ghostbusters.
<v Speaker 3>Yes, he's also the guy in Titanic who's like, we're
<v Speaker 3>dressed in our best and prepared to go down with
<v Speaker 3>the ship.
<v Speaker 5>There you go. I know, you bring Titanic into it.
<v Speaker 3>I love Titanic. Well, I mean, let's talk first of all,
<v Speaker 3>Matthew Broderick in the lead role. He was actually filming
<v Speaker 3>Max Dugan Returns, which was his first movie at the time,
<v Speaker 3>when he was hired to be in Wargames, and when
<v Speaker 3>there's a change with the boss, he thought he was
<v Speaker 3>going to get fired.
<v Speaker 5>Yeah, but they kept him.
<v Speaker 3>Of course. Ali Sheety where you know her from Breakfast
<v Speaker 3>Club and Sante almost fire and short circuit.
<v Speaker 5>Yeah, I mean it's interesting. Obviously, John Hughes saw this
<v Speaker 5>movie because he cast Ali Sheety in Breakfast Club, and
<v Speaker 5>then he casts Matthew Brodrick in Paris Bueler's Day Off,
<v Speaker 5>where again he is using a computer to change his
<v Speaker 5>grades nine times.
<v Speaker 3>Grace, I'll tell you who the guy that I think
<v Speaker 3>is the best in this movie. I mean, he's literally
<v Speaker 3>the best in every movie. Dabney Coleman brings his A
<v Speaker 3>game in this movie. He actually brings sense of authority.
<v Speaker 3>You really feel like you're in trouble when he's talking
<v Speaker 3>to you.
<v Speaker 5>It is a true contest. It is a true contest
<v Speaker 5>of Will's whenever he is arguing with Barry Corbin. I mean,
<v Speaker 5>those two guys are imminently confident and strong characters, and
<v Speaker 5>those actors are the same way, and they both play
<v Speaker 5>them as perfect contrast to each other.
<v Speaker 2>I loved it, and you really needed them at the
<v Speaker 2>beginning of the movie because the second scene they do
<v Speaker 2>a lot of trying to explain what's going on with
<v Speaker 2>the whole command and control system of Nora in a
<v Speaker 2>two minute scene, which is not easy. You know, you
<v Speaker 2>could have exposition that would last for half an hour,
<v Speaker 2>or you could have a twelve part series that would
<v Speaker 2>talk about everything that they were mentioning. But it takes
<v Speaker 2>actors like yeah, Dadney Coleman and Barry Corbin to go
<v Speaker 2>through that. And that's when Corbin actually repeated one of
<v Speaker 2>the lines that the General actually said to the writers
<v Speaker 2>in the first place, Right, well, I sleep very well
<v Speaker 2>at night knowing those boys are down there.
<v Speaker 5>Yeah.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, of course he had to throw into how do
<v Speaker 2>doty references?
<v Speaker 5>Yeah, I think the actual general said I sleep well
<v Speaker 5>at night knowing I'm in charge. Yeah. Let me ask
<v Speaker 5>this Chad, like, is this a debate or has it
<v Speaker 5>ever been a debate among the wargame simulations of how
<v Speaker 5>much control do we put in the hands of the
<v Speaker 5>computers versus how much control do we put in the
<v Speaker 5>ends of the humans?
<v Speaker 2>I think theoretically, yeah, But that means by theoretically, I
<v Speaker 2>mean you're always going to have some academics or people
<v Speaker 2>at the Rand Corporation saying, hey, maybe we could be
<v Speaker 2>more efficient, we could have more control, right, But then
<v Speaker 2>you end up getting the Walter Matthau character from Failsafe,
<v Speaker 2>you know, rather than the people who who are actually
<v Speaker 2>working at it. And so the military has always been
<v Speaker 2>adamant no, no, we need men and no women, you know,
<v Speaker 2>to be in the command and control that there has
<v Speaker 2>to be a clear set of controls. And you got
<v Speaker 2>to have the men with the brass keys because they're
<v Speaker 2>the only ones who can stop it if they're.
<v Speaker 3>The keys, sir.
<v Speaker 5>By the way, early appearance by Michael Mattson and On Spencer, Yeah,
<v Speaker 5>Matt's and beat popping a guy's ear off and reservoir
<v Speaker 5>dogs in a few years and John Spencer's running the
<v Speaker 5>West Wing.
<v Speaker 3>That's right, And that.
<v Speaker 2>Was Madison's first role. In fact, he auditioned for it
<v Speaker 2>as a joke. He didn't think anything was going to
<v Speaker 2>come with it, but yeah, he he really made that
<v Speaker 2>first scene.
<v Speaker 3>And then you've got Art Lafleur, who's the third guy
<v Speaker 3>in that scene. He's the guy who plays the babe
<v Speaker 3>in Sandlot. He's kind of a.
<v Speaker 5>Guy, that guy, Yeah, who's talking to Yeah, talking to
<v Speaker 5>him as they come in. I remember that.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, you've got some other guys, I mean so, I
<v Speaker 3>mean John Wood goes on to do Lady Hawk with
<v Speaker 3>Matthew Broderick. Yep, Okay, Barry Corbyn we talked about. He's
<v Speaker 3>the general who comes up with all the colorful lines
<v Speaker 3>he was in any which way, you can playing strip
<v Speaker 3>poker with the old ladies, which I can't wait to
<v Speaker 3>talk about with you.
<v Speaker 5>Right Eddie, see the way he yanked me out of
<v Speaker 5>the car like that finger?
<v Speaker 3>You have Eddie Deeson, the guy who plays Malvin. He's
<v Speaker 3>from Greece.
<v Speaker 1>Wow, what'd you get?
<v Speaker 3>I was trying to break into provision.
<v Speaker 1>I wanted to see the program for their new games.
<v Speaker 2>Wait, I'm not through yet. Remember you told me to
<v Speaker 2>tell you when you were acting foodly and insensitively. Remember
<v Speaker 2>that you're doing it right now.
<v Speaker 3>And then, of course you have William H. Macy as
<v Speaker 3>the nor D officer.
<v Speaker 5>I missed. I missed that.
<v Speaker 3>He is just he's in the background.
<v Speaker 5>Wow, yeah, I missed that completely.
<v Speaker 3>One more name for you. You have James Tolkien, the
<v Speaker 3>principle from Back to the Future. And the guy in
<v Speaker 3>Top Gun who's gonna tell Maverick that he's gonna fly
<v Speaker 3>a cargo ship full of rubber dog crab.
<v Speaker 5>Jeez, didn't that guy ever have hair? Yeah?
<v Speaker 3>There you go? How about that? The cast incredibly strong
<v Speaker 3>in war games. Oh, one more name for you. Jason Bernard.
<v Speaker 3>He plays the judge in Liar Larry, the kind of
<v Speaker 3>the black officer.
<v Speaker 5>Oh yeah, yeah, I remember seeing him. I'm going Liar
<v Speaker 5>Larry judge another guy. Yep. By the way, I don't
<v Speaker 5>know that everybody knows this, but Wood wasn't just Stephen
<v Speaker 5>Faukin character. He was also the voice of the computer.
<v Speaker 5>So they realized that when text appears on a computer screen.
<v Speaker 5>Unlike today where everybody's used to reading text on a
<v Speaker 5>screen all the time, back then ninety percent of people
<v Speaker 5>weren't reading whatever was up there. And so John Batham
<v Speaker 5>came up with this idea, Well, why don't we have
<v Speaker 5>why don't we give the computer a voice, a speaker
<v Speaker 5>so that we can hear what it says. And by
<v Speaker 5>the way, one of the most memorable parts of the movie,
<v Speaker 5>I mean that voice is incredible. John Wood is the
<v Speaker 5>guy who gives the voice for the computer. Yep. John
<v Speaker 5>Badam comes to him and says, Okay, I want you
<v Speaker 5>to read these lines, but I want you to read
<v Speaker 5>them from right to left instead of left to right
<v Speaker 5>and yeah, and John Wood is like, why would I
<v Speaker 5>do that? He goes, well, because the computer would not
<v Speaker 5>have the personality of speech that you have, and so
<v Speaker 5>if you read them backwards, you've got to basically isolate
<v Speaker 5>each word and it will sound like a computer where
<v Speaker 5>each word has been pre recorded.
<v Speaker 3>So rather than shall we play a game, it's play
<v Speaker 3>a game.
<v Speaker 5>Good try thing it.
<v Speaker 3>I'd have to have it written down for me.
<v Speaker 2>Yeah, and they they really had trouble even using the computers.
<v Speaker 2>No one knew how to type, right, so they had
<v Speaker 2>to come up with what is pretty common nowadays that
<v Speaker 2>whatever key you press, it'll it'll write what's supposed to
<v Speaker 2>be in the script. But at first they were trying
<v Speaker 2>to do it with Matthew Broderick. He just didn't know
<v Speaker 2>how to type, and so they were trying to give
<v Speaker 2>him computers so we could practice. But of course they
<v Speaker 2>also had to give him a Galago so we could
<v Speaker 2>practice on that before the arcade scene.
<v Speaker 5>Focus a little more.
<v Speaker 3>On the gallery, I think, So I wish somebody had
<v Speaker 3>given me a gallagant game and focus.
<v Speaker 5>Okay, so we're ready to talk casting on Tron.
<v Speaker 3>Then let's talk casting on tron all right. Okay, So
<v Speaker 3>in the lead role of Kevin Flynn, we have Big
<v Speaker 3>Lebowski himself, Jeff Bridges. Jeff Bridges of course has done
<v Speaker 3>true grit against all odds. He's Obadiah Stain and Iron
<v Speaker 3>Man Show in a Million Things. Glynn is Hans Solo.
<v Speaker 3>He's the Gunslinger, He's the guy who breaks the rules.
<v Speaker 3>He's the guy the girl really secretly likes. I'll make
<v Speaker 3>the case that Riyori is Princess Lea. Tron is Luke,
<v Speaker 3>and Sarcus Darth.
<v Speaker 5>Vader, who's Gold five five five Gold five is Gold five.
<v Speaker 5>You if you watch this movie and are familiar in
<v Speaker 5>the least with Star Wars, you gotta be going these
<v Speaker 5>guys were Star Wars fans.
<v Speaker 3>Dumont was clearly Obi Wan Kenobi obviously Yep, yep. Bernard Hughes,
<v Speaker 3>Bernard Hughes, who was also Berlin and the TV series,
<v Speaker 3>and of course the grandpa on The Lost Boys. Ah.
<v Speaker 3>The bad thing about this plays it's too many damn vampires,
<v Speaker 3>all right. Bruce Boxleitner plays Tron.
<v Speaker 5>Yes.
<v Speaker 3>The only thing I know from him is that he
<v Speaker 3>was in Babylon five. Yeah, shout out to our buddy
<v Speaker 3>Van Allen Plexico. I've never seen Babylon five life, but
<v Speaker 3>he runs a podcast on Babylon five. If you want
<v Speaker 3>to know about that, go listen.
<v Speaker 5>To his stuff.
<v Speaker 3>Then, of course you have Cindy Morgan who plays Laura Baines.
<v Speaker 3>She's Lacy underalls.
<v Speaker 5>From Lacy Underalls like I saw, I'm like, I feel
<v Speaker 5>like there's a hot girl behind those glasses somewhere. So
<v Speaker 5>I looked up the actress and sure enough, she's back there.
<v Speaker 2>Yes, it's great that you could go from being a high,
<v Speaker 2>high class socialite to being a computer programmer and such
<v Speaker 2>a short period of time.
<v Speaker 5>Well she wore the computer outfit, Well, yes she did.
<v Speaker 4>She did.
<v Speaker 3>By the way, the little dome thing that she had on.
<v Speaker 3>I heard her talking about this, so they would like
<v Speaker 3>glue it to her face in her head. It looks
<v Speaker 3>like a like those little plastic things you put on
<v Speaker 3>your head so you don't have to wash your hair.
<v Speaker 3>Ladies wear the shower cap, shower caup.
<v Speaker 5>There you go.
<v Speaker 3>Hey, it's a shower cap. But they would kind of
<v Speaker 3>glue it to her face, and then as she would
<v Speaker 3>take it on and off, she began to get these
<v Speaker 3>little blisters on her face. She's like, why can and
<v Speaker 3>I have a freaking hockey helmet like the guys get
<v Speaker 3>so towards the end of the movie, she actually is
<v Speaker 3>wearing a more of a hockey style. All right, you
<v Speaker 3>have David Warner who plays Ed Dillinger. He's also Sark. Yeah,
<v Speaker 3>he's Darth Vader.
<v Speaker 5>Yeah.
<v Speaker 3>David Warner just passed away last year.
<v Speaker 5>I think we talked about how good he is being
<v Speaker 5>a bad guy. He's a bad guy from the time banded,
<v Speaker 5>time banded bad guy in Titanic. He his favorite movie. Yes,
<v Speaker 5>what was the other one? He was a bad guy
<v Speaker 5>in another one too? Oh, he was. He was in
<v Speaker 5>one of the Star Trek in one of the Star Treks.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, it was discovered country is Star Trek six.
<v Speaker 5>Yeah. Yeah, he's good at being a bad guy, and
<v Speaker 5>he's a good bad guy in this one too.
<v Speaker 3>By the way, Peter O'Toole was approached to play Sark
<v Speaker 3>in this movie. Peter O'Toole Lawrence of Arabia.
<v Speaker 5>Yeah.
<v Speaker 3>Right, he read the script and he's like, hey, guys,
<v Speaker 3>this is really good.
<v Speaker 5>I want to play Tron.
<v Speaker 3>And they're like, ah, you're not really what we had
<v Speaker 3>in mind for Tron. Yeah, and he really tried to
<v Speaker 3>sell them on the idea that he could play Tron.
<v Speaker 3>So he ended up getting neither.
<v Speaker 5>Yeah, so he got my favorite year.
<v Speaker 3>Yes, also for the role of Yori, they wanted Debbie
<v Speaker 3>Harry of Blondie.
<v Speaker 5>Well, they had a similar look. I mean, they definitely
<v Speaker 5>have a similar similar look.
<v Speaker 3>I can see that both would look good in the
<v Speaker 3>you know, form fitting electronic suit argument.
<v Speaker 2>I think Blondie music would have gone well in place
<v Speaker 2>of Journey.
<v Speaker 3>That would have been easy, flip in, flip out.
<v Speaker 5>Right, sure, Yeah, I feel like Flynn would have been
<v Speaker 5>a bigger Blondie fan than he would have been a
<v Speaker 5>Journey fan. Yeah.
<v Speaker 3>And then of course Bernard Hughes Uncle Grandpa from The
<v Speaker 3>Lost Boys, as Dumont call him Uncle Grandpa, Uncle Grandpa,
<v Speaker 3>don't dodge my oreos, Okay, And that's pretty much it
<v Speaker 3>in Toronto. I mean, you got a couple other guys.
<v Speaker 3>One guy plays Ram and one guy plays an accountant
<v Speaker 3>who gets killed ten seconds. But you know, right, so
<v Speaker 3>there's really not that much going on cast wise in Tron.
<v Speaker 5>Yeah, so let's talk about the movies themselves. I'm gonna
<v Speaker 5>touch on Tron just a little bit. You mentioned that
<v Speaker 5>there's obviously some significant theological questions and impacts going on here.
<v Speaker 5>He's a guy who is comes from above, goes down
<v Speaker 5>to the world below, and is a user incarnate and
<v Speaker 5>the powers that be very strong similarity to the Roman
<v Speaker 5>Empire and the games that they would have the peasants
<v Speaker 5>and the other ladiators play all very similar and requires
<v Speaker 5>them to renounce their belief in the silly superstition or
<v Speaker 5>they're going to get the standard substandard training, or they
<v Speaker 5>can renounce it and have the expert training right right.
<v Speaker 5>And the guys even say, you know, do you really
<v Speaker 5>believe in the users? And the guy says, yeah, I
<v Speaker 5>mean if I don't have a user who created me,
<v Speaker 5>So it's very It has a lot of those religious quotes. Sure,
<v Speaker 5>what was kind of interesting to me and Chad you
<v Speaker 5>touched on this just a little bit, But we all
<v Speaker 5>kind of have from almost our inception a little personality
<v Speaker 5>that belongs in the computer system. Like from the time
<v Speaker 5>that we are born, we are immediately entered into a
<v Speaker 5>computer database as a number, our social security number. Right.
<v Speaker 5>Like I had this weird case where I was dealing
<v Speaker 5>with a guy who, even though he was alive, he
<v Speaker 5>appeared to be dead because somehow in the computer system,
<v Speaker 5>they had decided he was dead and he had no
<v Speaker 5>way to prove that he was alive because the computers
<v Speaker 5>said he was dead. Huh. So it's a very interesting
<v Speaker 5>concept that we really are these little guys running around
<v Speaker 5>an avatar computer person that is us, that's there from
<v Speaker 5>our birth until our death.
<v Speaker 2>And then you add the new technology of like Facebook
<v Speaker 2>and social media, who are keeping track of everywhere we
<v Speaker 2>go and what we buy and who our friends are,
<v Speaker 2>and they have their own idea of who we are,
<v Speaker 2>right and sometimes it's even a better idea. They know
<v Speaker 2>what we want to buy, they know what we want
<v Speaker 2>to see next. I think met is a little confused
<v Speaker 2>over where I live.
<v Speaker 5>But that's probably true around a lot.
<v Speaker 2>But it's true those identities exist, right, and there are
<v Speaker 2>other computers that keep track for our credit scores and
<v Speaker 2>judges based upon that. And then there's a sort of
<v Speaker 2>online identities. You know, you can even ask if you're
<v Speaker 2>better known on the internet, and you can ask chat
<v Speaker 2>GPT you know who is so and so, and then
<v Speaker 2>they'll come up with an idea of well, this person right,
<v Speaker 2>And if people do a search for my name, you
<v Speaker 2>get really different results depending upon which keyword you use
<v Speaker 2>with it, because there are other Chad Briggs is out there.
<v Speaker 5>And the media out there with your name as well
<v Speaker 5>you'll lit you up.
<v Speaker 3>Yeah, So whenever you delete something from face, you have
<v Speaker 3>a little man in the computer who throws a disc
<v Speaker 3>at it and it blows up.
<v Speaker 5>All right, everybody that does it. For our first part
<v Speaker 5>of the Tron Versus Wargames series, we are going to
<v Speaker 5>be back next week. Chad, our expert guest, is going
<v Speaker 5>to be with us and we are going to be
<v Speaker 5>talking about real life wargames versus what we saw in
<v Speaker 5>the movie and how close those might be.
<v Speaker 3>Please join us for that episode.
<v Speaker 5>Chad, as I mentioned before, not only is a super genius,
<v Speaker 5>but also a Patreon subscriber, So if you want to
<v Speaker 5>be like the other super geniuses in the world, be
<v Speaker 5>sure and check out our Patreon page. It's patreon dot
<v Speaker 5>com back slash Shirly podcast where you can sign up
<v Speaker 5>for as little as five bucks a month, and like
<v Speaker 5>Chad's favorite episode of Aha, take on Me, you get
<v Speaker 5>to hear our analysis of various one hit wonders and
<v Speaker 5>other random choices by Jason that the general public doesn't
<v Speaker 5>get to hear, just star Patreon subscribers, so be sure
<v Speaker 5>and check us out there. If you don't have the
<v Speaker 5>funds to do that, do us a favor and hit
<v Speaker 5>a review, hit a five star review, write us a review.
<v Speaker 3>We'll see you guys here next week. Chad you coming back,
<v Speaker 3>I'll be here, awesome man, Bye, guys,