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