Twenty eight years after the release of Tron, Hollywood is coming out with a sequel that will surely be packed to the gills with special effects. But can the new Tron Legacy movie beat the groundbreaking original? Do you remember the old one? (Heck, were you born yet?)

To help jog your memory, here are some neat facts about Tron:

1. Tron was inspired by Atari's Pong. Tron's creator, then animator Steven Lisberger was working with his own studio when he saw a demo CGI reel from a computer firm and Atari's game Pong. (Source)

2. Where did the name "TRON" come from? Some people said that it was from a debugging command in the BASIC programming language (TRON or TRace ON).

But Lisberger actually got the name from "electronic." The first Tron was actually Lisberger's studio logo:

3. Part of Tron was filmed at the Lawrence Livermore Lab. It's the only movie ever filmed inside the famed lab, and probably for a good reason. During filming there, Cindy Morgan (who played Yori) actually stepped into a radioactive spill and had to have her shoes removed and decontaminated. (Source)

4. Back then, many Disney animators were wary of computer animation and feared that it would replace them, so they refused to work on Tron.

5. If you think Tron was pure CGI, you'd be forgiven. It was mostly old school effects and matte paintings. The glowing circuitry on the character's costumes? Those were hand-painted onto each frame.

At the time, computers could generate static image but not animation, so the coordinates for each image in the light cycle scene had to be entered by hand for each individual frame. It took 600 coordinates to get 4 seconds of film.

Later, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the people behind the Oscars, skipped over Tron when considering visual effects awards because they felt that using computers was cheating!

6. There's a Hidden Mickey in Tron. In the Solar Sailer scene, the heroes fly over a giant Mickey Mouse head.

7. How did Jeff Bridges and fellow actors prepare for the movie? By playing arcade games, of course. Indeed, there was lots of coin-op arcade games on the set of Tron to serve as "inspiration." In an interview with /Film for the new Tron Legacy movie, Jeff Bridges said:

“I remember I couldn’t believe it we showed up the first day at work and around the walls of the studio – this is the first Tron – are video games that you have to put quarters in just all over,” Jeff Bridges said in a recently published interview. Bridges told the director that all those arcade games might make getting down to work difficult.

“It did hold up the work every once in a while but it was great fun,” Bridges continued. “I remember I got locked into this game, Battle Zone. You familiar with that game? The tanks. God, hours and they would come and try to yank me away. I’d say I’m preparing, I’m preparing.”

8. Tron was a box office flop, though it became a cult sensation and inspired a video game franchise.

9. Talking about video games, does anyone remember the light cycle duel from the 1982 Bally Midway arcade game Tron? It was my favorite game growing up. Ah, good times!

10. Tron Guy

Forget Jeff Bridges! If you ask the Web 2.0 crowd about Tron, most of them will tell you about Jay Maynard or the Tron Guy who rose to Internet fame with his homemade Tron costume.

If you've ever played Super Mario Bros. on the NES, I'm sure you've thought about jumping over the flagpole at the end of some of the levels. Perhaps you've even tried a couple of times, but undoubtedly you've failed. Still, you've heard rumors that it was possible and the myth of Mario jumping over the flagpole was born.

So, can Mario really jump over the flagpole? What happened afterwards? In their video clip series Pop Fiction, Game Trailers performed such a feat (without any programming shenanigans) and proved once and for all that indeed the chubby little plumber do it.

Gearfuse has the clip: Link [embeeded Flash player]

Then Kirk set his phaser to "fabulous" and shot Sulu ... From Guy and Rodd's excellent comic strip Brevity. Find more here: Link

When The New York Times foreign correspondent Clifford J. Levy was posted to Russia, he and his wife didn't send their kids to international school, which was taught in English and filled with children of other expatriates.

Instead, they sent the kids (who didn't speak a lick of Russian) to a local Russian school. Here's the fascinating story about the family's experience in extreme schooling:

My three children once were among the coddled offspring of Park Slope, Brooklyn. But when I became a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, my wife and I decided that we wanted to immerse them in life abroad. No international schools where the instruction is in English. Ours would go to a local one, with real Russians. When we told friends in Brooklyn of our plans, they tended to say things like, Wow, you’re
so brave. But we knew what they were really thinking: What are you, crazy? It was bad enough that we were abandoning beloved Park Slope, with its brownstones and organic coffee bars, for a country still often seen in the American imagination as callous and forbidding. To throw our kids into a Russian school — that seemed like child abuse.

Don't miss the video clip: Link (Photos: James Hill/NY Times) - via kottke

I see a Super Soaker in his future! We dare you to watch and not smile
at this cuteness! Hit play or go to Link
[YouTube]

What parents don't want beautiful and smart kids - but in the genetic roll of the dice, can one stack the odds in your favor? Here are some ways to get yourself a "designer baby":

Sperm and Egg Bank for Beautiful People

BeautifulPeople, which as its name clearly states, is a dating site devoted exclusively to good lookin' people. The company's latest venture is to create a "virtual sperm and egg bank" (in reality a fertility introduction service) stocked with donors from the beauty gene pool. Best of all, it's open to ugly folks who want to better their hereditary lines:

"Initially, we hesitated to widen the offering to non-beautiful people. But everyone -- including ugly people -- would like to bring good looking children in to the world, and we can't be selfish with our attractive gene pool," company founder Robert Hintze said in a statement." (Source)

What about a specific-kind of beauty? If you want a blond, blue-eyed Nordic beauty, there's a sperm bank for you. Cryos International Sperm Bank in Denmark exports sperms to 60 countries around the world. Its motto? "Congratulations, it's a Viking."

The Celebrity Look-A-Like Sperm Bank

Handsome is good, but what if you want your son to be celebrity-handsome. Say, like Beckham? Don't worry, there's California Cryobank:

Celebrity worship, it seems, has gone in utero. No longer is it enough to name your baby after your favorite star. With the help of the California Cryobank fertility clinic in Los Angeles, your child might actually look like that star.

"It can be the shape of the eyes, the nose, the mouth, any specific feature," said Scott Brown, director of communications at California Cryobank. "It can be the shape of the head. It can be the complexion. It can even be the hairstyle because you're talking about [what] someone looks like. That's what we're going for." (Source)

The Nobel Prize Sperm Bank

What if you prefer genius to beauty? In 1980, millionaire optometrist Robert Clark Graham (he invented "impact resistant" plastic eyeglasses - image from DamnInteresting) opened a sperm bank stocked with "donations" from the world's smartest men.

The Repository for Germinal Choice, located in an underground bunker in San Diego, aimed to collect sperms from Nobel Laureates, which earned it the nickname "Nobel Prize Sperm Bank".

In reality, it only managed to collect sperm from one Nobel Laureate, physicist William Shockley (who probably did more damage to Graham's effort to enlist more Nobel Laureates, as he believed the genetic superiority of whites over blacks and proposed sterilizations of imbeciles to improve the average intelligence in society). Graham concentrated his search for scientist donors instead.

Needless to say, Graham's sperm bank was controversial:

When the Los Angeles Times publicized the repository in 1980, a furor erupted. Eugenic ideas like Graham's had been mainstream in the United States for the first half of the 20th century. (Graham had even borrowed the idea of a Nobel sperm bank from a scheme proposed by respected Nobelist Hermann Muller in the '30s.) But by the time Graham opened the repository, eugenics had been utterly tarnished by Nazism. It was considered at best elitist, at worst racist and genocidal.

Graham was pilloried and mocked, accused of trying to create a "master race." Critics dubbed it the "Superbaby" program and compared it to Nazi eugenics practices. Ethicists denounced it as a cold, utilitarian approach toward children and an alarming step toward "designer babies." Only one of Graham's Nobel donors, transistor inventor William Shockley, would admit to having contributed sperm. That did not help matters. Shockley's views on race, genes, and intelligence had made him a national pariah, and his association with the repository confirmed suspicion that it was a dastardly racist plot. Demonstrators picketed Graham's Escondido estate. He hired security guards to protect the sperm. (Source)

When the Repository for Germinal Choice closed after Graham's death 1999, there were 229 babies none of which was fathered by Nobel Prize winners. So far, none of these kids had grown up to win the Nobel Prize either.

David Plotz of Slate has a series of fantastic articles about the story of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank: Link

A guest post by Bill Zeman of Tiny Art Director

My wife and I really wanted to see The Milkmaid when it came to the Metropolitan Museum last year but couldn't find a time to go without our kids. Vermeer's paintings have a wonderfully emotional effect on me – they are so still and quiet they come alive in the simple moments they depict. But that quietness that I love is just about the last thing any kid would be interested in, especially my kid, Rosie. Finally in the show's last week we decided to risk it and dragged the kids along, knowing full well what was likely to happen: after a long subway ride we'd arrive, run to the bathrooms, get sidetracked by the Temple of Dendur, then the armor collection, and finally end up in the cafeteria, exhausted and cranky, and never get to see the Vermeers at all.

I've tried a few times to make my kids look at paintings in museums. It usually goes even worse than when I try to get them to look at my own paintings. Rosie, in particular, has always had a very strong reaction to art; generally one of outrage.

You might know her from my blog Tiny Art Director. Since she was two, I have been painting pictures for her, consistently failing to please her with them, and blogging her funny and usually devastating critiques. The result, Tiny Art Director: A Toddler and Her Vision has now been published by Chronicle Books.

If you've read either the blog or the book you'll know that calm scenes of 17th century domestic life would not be to her taste.

Strangely though, she was excited to see the Vermeer show, so we set off eager to experience a moment of the Dutch Master's delicious tranquility, imagining our attentive and sophisticated daughters at our sides. When we entered the dimly lit gallery we understood why Rosie had been willing to come.

"Where's the stage? I thought this was a show. I wanted dancing!"

She was immediately and literally bored to tears, and it looked like, as predicted I was not going to be able to enjoy the art myself. Somehow, The Milkmaid wouldn't come alive for me with Rosie struggling like a cat in my arms.

But soon after she managed to free herself, she discovered Vermeer's Allegory of Faith – a large painting with a snake being crushed by a rock in the bottom corner – right at her eye-level. Awesome! A scary creature being killed! Rosie had found the drama she was looking for – the story in this painting unfolded for her and gave her a rare opportunity to inspect primal forces up close. She was entranced and stood millimeters from the canvas, studying the details for several minutes.

Allegory of Faith by Johannes Vermeer (c. 1670-72)

A guard came over to ask her to step back. "I'm wondering about the blood coming out of its mouth," she explained.

What makes kids so strangely fascinated with gruesome and violent scenes? Is it pure bloodlust? And if that's all they care about in art, why do we bother to pollute their angelic little minds with it? Isn't art supposed to civilize them?

Throughout the Tiny Art Director project, and in after-school art classes I teach, I've noticed that cute, sweet stuff like puppies, ponies, and princesses definitely has a place in kids' hearts and minds, but what really gets them interested is blood, violence, death, and of course, the awesome creatures that cause all that destruction – dinosaurs, dragons, and monsters.

In one class we made a trading card game. The children invented characters including "Evil Death," "Evil Rain," and "Evil Pumpkin" each with creatively deadly powers (Evil Pumpkin rolls around and flattens people, and Evil Death poisons people by licking them). At one point, worrying that the deck was getting a little too murderous I suggested they also do some nice characters. They dutifully produced "Refreshing Raindrops" and "Heart Power (Loves everything and everyone)", but I felt that I had stifled their creativity.

Perhaps they were exploring the dark side in their drawings as a way of safely trying out dangerous ideas and gaining confidence and understanding of their place in the world. By drawing dinosaurs, dragons, and ninjas, they could feel powerful and be in control! By creating evil and deadly characters they could explore and come to terms with their own fears of death and violence.

My own Tiny Art Director often requests gruesome or violent pictures from me, such as the head of a princess poking out of a dragon's mouth, and although I don't always indulge her on these, I think I understand and don't get too disturbed by her morbid intensity. Once she asked me to paint her a duck and a crocodile.

As usual, she was disappointed in the result, but unlike some previous efforts (and despite my obvious intent), it wasn't because it was too scary. Her response was "You have to do it with him killing that bird." The picture failed because it missed the crucial moment and left us with a kind of Schrödinger's Duck – forever trapped in a state between life and death, always swimming away but never escaping or being eaten. Unlike Allegory of Faith this painting wouldn't come alive for her and couldn't teach her anything about life and death or her place in the world.

That day in the museum, after I finally got my moment of peace with The Milkmaid, I watched my daughter stare at the dying snake and tried to answer her questions. Eventually she became aware of the woman in the painting with her hand on her heart.

"What's that girl doing? Is she scared?"

I realized then that she was feeling brave and powerful for looking so closely at this scene, and didn't want to identify with a frightened character. Like with the kids in the after-school class art was lending Rosie its power. It reminded me of her comments about a collaboration that we had done previously featuring a T-Rex trying to eat a girl.

"I want her to be brave. She's not scared of one thing cause that's me and I'm not scared."

NEATOBAMBINO EXCLUSIVE: Want to get something really neat for Father's Day? Bill Zeman has kindly agreed to do a really neat NeatoBambino-exclusive contest, with the Grand Prize of an original sketch for your Father's Day gift and 4 signed copy of the Tiny Art Director book.

To enter leave a comment submitting a picture you'd like Bill to paint with some connection to the theme of fatherhood

One winner chosen by Bill will win the Grand Prize, and four others will win signed copy of the Tiny Art Director book, made out to your father's day gift recipients. Good luck!

Hello, Neatoramanauts! Thank you for participating in the Tiny Art Director contest on NeatoBambino earlier this week!

Congratulations to Wendy, CheeseThief, TheRhube and nepomuk who got signed copies of Bill Zeman's book Tiny Art Director.

The Grand Prize of a custom drawing went to Maceo24 who requested "A daddy and baby dragon picking their teeth with a devoured knight's sword. Armor can be laying on the ground and the baby dragon can be playing dress-up with the devoured princess' clothes."

Here's Bill rendition of the drawing:

Don't forget to visit Tiny Art Director - Thanks Bill!