Computer-generated monsters, from the trolls in “Harry Potter” and “Lo — Tron

"When hacker Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) first got zapped inside a computer grid in Tron, the digitized ether was a much simpler place. Black, minimalist, streaked with neon piping and floaty geometric figures, it was home to enslaved "programs" who played deadly gladiatorial games (Frisbee, Jai-alai) at the whim of an evil operating system with a giant Lego head. Everyone wore dorky uniforms. There was no downtown, no crowded arenas, no nightlife and certainly no drunken hobos."

"TRON means to be a gloriously puerile movie, the full-fledged screen embodiment of a video game. It even means to go to the heart of video gamesmanship, and its premise is very promising in its way. What if those tiny Space Invaders and Pac-Men were real creatures, miniature gladiators sent to do battle for the amusement of their heartless captors?"

"The interior of a computer is a fine and private place, but none, I fear, do there embrace, except in "Tron," a dazzling movie from Walt Disney in which computers have been used to make themselves romantic and glamorous. Heres a technological sound-and-light show that is sensational and brainy, stylish, and fun."

"The film would never come close to an Oscar, but that doesn’t make it unimportant. Nobody talks about cyberspace anymore—sci-fi writer William Gibson had just coined the term when Tron came out. But that’s what the movie gave shape to—a “consensual hallucination,” as Gibson wrote, “bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void.” Though Gibson says he had an entirely different look in mind. “An issue of Omni magazine that contained one of my earliest cyberspace stories also contained a preview of Tron,” he says. “If Disney was into that stuff, I thought, I wasn’t even remotely ahead of the curve.”"

"“Tron” may have exerted its greatest influence through its crew of young artists who have gone on to do important work in animation and special effects: Tim Burton (director of “Planet of the Apes,” “Ed Wood,” “Edward Scissorhands”), Roger Allers (co-director of “The Lion King”), Barry Cook (co-director of “Mulan”), Dennis Edwards (producer of “Osmosis Jones”), Andy Gaskill (art director of “The Lion King”), Bill Kroyer (director of “Fern Gully: The Last Rainforest”), Jerry Rees (director of “The Brave Little Toaster”)."

"The addition of that stately "legacy" to the title strains to confer a retrospective classic status on Disneys virtual reality sci-fi thriller from 1982, about people trapped in a computer game and forced to engage in gladiatorial combat. It might have come as a surprise to some that Tron had much of a legacy; the film was overshadowed by Spielbergs ET in that year, and in the UK suffered the mortification of being upstaged by Peter Greenaways The Draughtsmans Contract. Yet a generation grew up prizing Tron for being audacious, ahead of its time, a futurist trailblazer about games culture and the digital world."

"I say this to you because we Spaniards are a forgetful people, because we are used to living for the moment, because we do not look back, because we do not know how to see the chain of heroes, because we do not contemplate the sum of sacrifices."

"If it fulfills our hopes, this center will be, at once, a symbol and a reflection and a hope. It will symbolize our belief that the world of creation and thought are at the core of all civilization. Only recently in the White House we helped commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare. The political conflicts and ambitions of his England are known to the scholar and to the specialist. But his plays will forever move men in every corner of the world. The leaders that he wrote about live far more vividly in his words than in the almost forgotten facts of their own rule. Our civilization, too, will largely survive in the works of our creation. There is a quality in art which speaks across the gulf dividing man from man and nation from nation, and century from century. That quality confirms the faith that our common hopes may be more enduring than our conflicting hostilities. Even now men of affairs are struggling to catch up with the insights of great art. The stakes may well be the survival of civilization. The personal preferences of men in government are not important--except to themselves. However, it is important to know that the opportunity we give to the arts is a measure of the quality of our civilization. It is important to be aware that artistic activity can enrich the life of our people, which really is the central object of Government. It is important that our material prosperity liberate and not confine the creative spirit."

"There was a man and he had eight sons. Apart from that, he was nothing more than a comma on the page of History. Its sad, but thats all you can say about some people."

"Children must be free to think in all directions irrespective of the peculiar ideas of parents who often seal their childrens minds with preconceived prejudices and false concepts of past generations. Unless we are very careful, very careful indeed, and very conscientious, there is still great danger that our children may turn out to be the same kind of people we are."

"I hear people say I swing at bad pitches. What is a bad pitch? If I can hit it, its not a bad pitch."

"A free people will always refuse to put up with preventable poverty. If freedom is to be saved and enlarged, poverty must be ended. There is no other solution. The problem of how to prevent these three forces from coming into head-on collision is the principal study of the more politically conscious Conservative leaders. How can wealth persuade poverty to use its political freedom to keep wealth in power? Here lies the whole art of Conservative politics in the twentieth century."