Flynn's Adventures in Wondergrid
It's hard to separate the influence of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland from basically any story of a fantastical otherworld written after 1865. The 1982 movie Tron supposedly takes some inspiration from Alice (wikipedia cites a magazine article, but the original is no longer available so this is hard to verify). This seems obvious enough, considering the movie’s premise is "person beamed into a curious and colorful computer world". But unlike many similar stories of someone inexplicably transported to an unfamiliar world, Tron, at least to me, seems a lot closer to Lewis Carroll’s original books, and to Through the Looking-Glass especially.
To start with, the movie’s protagonist, Flynn, is very like Alice. In Carroll’s books, Alice’s personality takes center stage, and we find out a lot about her despite not spending much time in her world. She loves playing games like croquet and chess (the two games we see her play in the books(1)), and often plays against herself(2). She has a strong sense of justice (especially concerning the administration of punishments, as do most children), even going so far as to scold herself on occasion(3). When the Queen of Hearts orders the execution of the card gardeners in Alice, Alice saves them from death by hiding them in a flower pot(4). Alice is “very fond of pretending to be two people(5)” and often talks to herself, whether she is commenting on the world around her or simply trying to remember something she has learned. She is both educated and clever, and always jumps at a chance to show off her knowledge of mathematics, languages like French and Latin, the rotation of the Earth on its axis, and poetry(6). She has a very powerful imagination, often envisioning bizarre and hilarious scenarios, or wonderful games(7).
Similarly, Flynn is a brilliant game designer, as well as displaying great skill in arcade games. The Master Control Program at one point makes a remark about playing chess with Flynn, a game Alice also enjoys. Flynn’s initial motivation is to uncover evidence of another programmer stealing his work, but after being digitized and trapped by the MCP, his motivation pivots to overthrowing the MCP, and freeing all the Programs imprisoned in the Game Grid. Flynn refuses to kill his opponent Crom in the Games, defying a direct command to do so. Like Alice, he too has a strong sense of justice. Flynn also talks to himself throughout the movie, usually making snarky comments about himself or things happening around him (very noticeably in his first scene). In the movie’s sequel Tron: Legacy, Flynn makes a digital copy of himself to help run things on the Grid, echoing Alice’s liking for pretending to be two people. He shows himself to be both imaginative and an excellent programmer, having created at least 5 video games by the time Tron takes place. His knowledge of programming, computers, and science in general (such as the law that any beam can be diverted), all help him to thwart the MCP.
Then there are the plot similarities between Tron and Alice Through the Looking-Glass. While the original Alice has many references to card games, TtLG is explicitly patterned after a chess game. Alice takes the place of a white pawn and must travel across the grid of the chessboard to reach the last square and become a queen(8). Along the way she receives help and advice from creatures like the White Knight and the Gnat(9). Alice does not change size in this book, rather the world changes abruptly around Alice as she moves from square to square. The scene changes from a garden, to a train, to a forest, each with only a single step(10). She ends the book in a castle at the end of the board, where she checkmates the Red Queen and shakes her until she turns into a harmless kitten (yes, really(11)). Upon besting the Queen, she wakes up at home in the very same chair she started in(12).
Compare this to Tron, where Flynn finds himself in a computer world called the “Game Grid” after being digitized by the Master Control Program, a chess program with aspirations of world domination. Flynn is forced to compete in the Games with the intent for him to die in combat (paralleling Alice being forced to play croquet with the Queen of Hearts, with the Queen beheading anyone who plays the game to her displeasure). Flynn recruits several allies with the goal of getting to a tower where the character Tron (a sentient, knight-like program) is to receive information on how to defeat the MCP. Like Alice in TtLG, the world changes dramatically as Flynn moves through it, with sharp delineations between sections. He breaks out of the flat, wide Lightcycle grid into a cramped maze, then a cave full of rocky, geometric slabs with a pool of glowing water in the middle; he climbs a heap of digital wreckage to enter a small chamber which turns out to be the control room of a ship. Though Flynn never makes it to the tower, he does have a part in defeating the MCP when he jumps inside of it, where it briefly transforms into an old man (yes, really) before disappearing entirely. Upon besting the MCP, Flynn wakes up in front of a computer, in the very same chair he started in.
It’s hard to know how much of this was intentional on the part of the writers, Bonnie MacBird and Steven Lisberger without a direct word from them. Even if it is all a coincidence, I think the parallels are undeniable.
