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The title Tron Legacy could certainly be used in regards to a brief summary of the plot of the almost-30-years-in-the-making sequel: the son of a long vanished software engineer/computer visionary finds himself transported into a virtual world where he discovers his father has been held captive for nearly 20 years. Just as easily, and perhaps more accurately, it can be used to describe the long, convoluted road that Walt Disney Pictures followed in order to finally release a second installment to one of their more oddball and cultish type projects.

The original Tron came out in the summer of 1982, in the midst of what might be aptly termed the studio’s “dark days,” not only by virtue of a lack of potential hit animated releases on its slate (only a handful came out between 1978 and 1987) but for a collection of live-action features that broke sharply with the slapstick comedies, animal-centric tales, uplifting dramas, and crowd-pleasing musicals of previous decades. Beginning with Disney’s first-ever PG-rated feature, The Black Hole in 1979 (and its trippy/disturbing “happy” ending that feels like a Kidz Bop cover of 2001: A Space Odyssey), most of the live-action films of the next half-decade or so carried forth with the PG rating and an attempt to court a slightly more mature audience.

Trenchcoat and Condorman were middling attempts to bring detective thrillers and espionage tales respectively, to the younger set. The Watcher in the Woods and Something this Wicked Way Comes were both based on literary properties and both featured genuinely disturbing tales of young protagonists forced to confront supernatural mysteries with little to no guidance or help from their parents. (The trailer for Watcher honestly intoned, “It’s from Walt Disney, but it’s not for little kids.”)

There were also films with Bill Cosby playing the Devil (The Devil and Max Devlin), a biologist communing with wolves at the end of the world (Never Cry Wolf), a second visit to an Oz that is not one Judy Garland would recognize (Return to Oz) and an S.E. Hinton adaptation NOT helmed by Francis Coppola (Tex). Even a holiday tale with the innocuous title One Magic Christmas (and a G rating to boot) featured a mother whose “It’s a Wonderful Life”-esque travel back to the path of Christmas cheer involves her husband being shotgunned to death in a bank holdup and two children drowning after the car hijacked by that same bank robber goes off a bridge. This all culminated in Disney’s first ever PG-rated animated feature The Black Cauldron, with its cavalcade of disturbing images that at times seem to come from Ralph Bakshi’s imagination, minus a good percentage of the fascistic overtones.

But even as part of that eclectic bag of films, Tron stood out then as much as it does now, albeit for different reasons. Made on a budget of $17 million by writer-director Steven Lisberger, whose one previous feature as a helmer, Animalympics, was an animated short turned television project that wound up premiering on HBO, Tron was not based on any existing property. Through its custom-designed and groundbreaking special effects, it aimed to imagine what a life lived inside a computer program might be like, by rendering it as a state-of-the-art video game. Even allowing for the fact that Tron the movie preceded and inspired Tron the arcade game and Tron the home video game(s), it still has my vote for the best game adaptation ever. Tron performed okay at the box office, grossing back just over twice its costs at $36 million, but that didn’t make it the likeliest candidate for a sequel, and particularly one that would cost ten times what the original did.

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