What do you mean you haven't seen Tron: The Animated Series? It was my favorite cartoon when I was a kid!
So this all started as an exercise in how to explain why Sam inexplicably had merch for a 2010 movie in his 1989 house. In-universe there would have probably been toys using the 1982 aesthetic since that was what the video game used (and Sam DOES have an 82 Tron figure in his house!) but why the Grid stuff?
Enter THE CARTOON.
It was the 1980s everybody who was everybody made cartoons to sell toys. Encom made home gaming consoles by this point, and they would have had peripherals like Nintendo did. They had licensed characters like Nintendo did. You see where I am going.
Encom wants to sell Encom Gaming Power Gauntlets. Kevin wants to introduce kids to the ideas about the Digital Frontier since he's a futurist and knows kids will be mentally flexible enough to digest the new zeitgeist if it's fun and animated!
Production of the cartoon ran from Kevin's official retirement as CEO until his disappearance. Three official seasons with a fourth in production. Season three's airing was cut short due to the furor surrounding Kevin's going missing, but the "lost" final episodes of S3 were restored when the DVDs were eventually released for an anniversary collection.
The cartoon was also successful in syndication through the 1990s and early 2000s since it successfully anticipated the Educational/Informative movement-- Tron: The Animated Series actually does teach kids some of the basics of computer science around the silly adventure stuff. Think Captain Planet meets Captain N the Game Master for the overall tone of the series. It's not realistic, but you get the general concepts and issues.
The cartoon's popularity among millennials keeps Tron alive in pop culture to the present day. The IP remains a perennial revenue stream for Encom, and every so often they'll throw the fanbase something to keep the money going. (This is an ordeal to the program himself, since he has to deal with hackers sent by groups named after him on the reg.)
What's it about?
Young video game enthusiast Jethro "Jet" Keene lands himself the after school internship of a lifetime getting to work at Encom in a special new program for teenagers with attitude run by Kevin Flynn (voiced by himself).
However, it's not all fun and video game testing with the sweet new Encom Power Gauntlet. Thanks to some cartoon physics hijinks, Jet finds himself transported into the Grid, the Boss's new experimental computer system!
Jet gets to work with Clu (they hired a voice-alike for him) and Tron (ditto) to find a way back home to the real world, solving problems and learning how to code along the way... and that was the pilot episode.
Because this is a cartoon for children, Jet is naturally the regular User of the Grid instead of Flynn, though Flynn makes occasional appearances to dispense Yoda-like wisdom and is revered by all the programs inside the system as the Creator.
There are also no lasers or anything like that-- Jet does a silly toku-like thing with the power gauntlet to commute into the system.
Clu is more likable than in real life. He's mostly benevolent, trying to make a more perfect system but the show's writers actually picked up on the idea that making a perfect system is kind of an impossible lift and made it central to his character development. He's a little obsessed with copying the User world, and there's an arc in S3 where a lot of the conflict revolves around why can't programs be programs about it.
Tron's not a mayhem goblin, which is a crime. He's portrayed as a little bit Optimus Prime, since Jet's the primary mayhem source, and Fighting for the Users is otherwise his defining personality trait. He gets a surprisingly deep fate/free will arc in S2, since naturally several episodes revolve around attempts to reprogram him since he's the Champion and all. Afterward, he's a bit more chill.
Jet's storyline parallel's Kevin's real-life one a little bit-- a lot of the episodes focused on him as a character revolve around him trying to balance his double life.The cartoon also does not mention the time dilation jetlag. Jet, unlike Kevin, does learn how to ask for help, especially as S3 decides to diversify a little more and adds a girl intern, Paige.
S3 in general has a lot of emphasis on diversity and tolerance of others and their differences. The ISO-Basic tensions were running high in the real Grid. It was on Kevin's mind a lot. He was also starting to make thinks on introducing the ISOs to the rest of the world at the time.
Like Reboot in the 1990s, Tron has a lot of episodes devoted to video games and playing games on the Game Grid is a frequent trope. (Hardcore Tron partisans accuse Reboot of stealing this.) Unlike in Reboot, there's no derezzing the losers if the User wins. Games are sometimes the entire plot and sometimes an obstacle or diversion from solving an episode's actual problem.
Since the Grid is open in Tron, there is a recurring cast of villains in the form of viruses and hackers from other systems in addition to technical problems that have to be solved through coding and computer science know-how.
The fourth season didn't get much past a few animatics for the S4 pilot, but what was there got a release for the fancy anniversary collections as special features. Design docs indicate that some new characters were about to be introduced-- Jalen and Radia. Kevin Flynn disappeared while voice actors were being cast for these roles.
NGL I am extremely mad this wasn't a real cartoon.
Thought it would be funny to share that. Had a conversation with a Tron bot (basically Flynn creating Proxy to be a security system that helps Tron and wanting him to show her around).
No Tron… Proxy is not a virus, even though she has green hair and maybe looks like one…😂
Okay PSA for the fandom: meercat55 has done extremely questionable things before and I tried to brush it off as them not knowing any better despite the fact that they never fixed their issues properly and constantly crossed boundaries... But I just found this on their Instagram and this is proof that we should all probably just block and move on tbh.
THE CONTENT THEY POSTED IS A SEXUALIZED KUKI. I WILL BE SHARING THE DRAWING WITH PROOF OF THE CHARACTER BEING KUKI (THE TAGS) AND PROOF OF USERNAME BUT FOR THOSE WHO DON'T WISH TO SEE IT, THAT'S THE SUMMARY! BELOW THIS READ MORE IS THE ACTUAL IMAGE THEY MADE FOR THOSE WHO WANT PROOF OF THEIR ACTIONS.
TW// SEXUALIZATION
"I aged her up" isn't an excuse. You should be inclined to not need to age up a character just for nsfw. Gross
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