"It will remind you of something you h'ave never seen before!" is what everyone working on Tron says with a mischievous twinkle in the eye. Obviously, the statement is an in-joke of sorts. But in spite of the fact that it seems to describe an impossibility, there is some truth to it. The visual py rotechnics in Tron have been used only briefly before in features-spectacular effects developed by the same visual physicists whose laboratory has been that of contemporary television commercial design and production . Thanks to them, every person in the world with access to a television set is a connoisseur of sophisticated motion graphics techniques. But before Tron, only scant examples of these techniques had found their way into the cinema. […]
