Speaker 1: Wow, we got something we're in Greetings. Hello, shall we play?
Speaker 2: Then?
Speaker 3: Oh love to.
Speaker 4: Let's play Global Thermo Nuclear War.
Speaker 5: Hello everybody, and welcome back to the Shirley You Can't
Be Serious Podcast. I am here with my friend Jason Coln. Jason,
I got a story for you. Ready for this?
Speaker 3: Yes?
Speaker 5: Okay. In nineteen eighty three, heads of the military believed
that a real nuclear attack was about to occur. They
begin readying their nuclear forces, placing air units on alert,
and loading nuclear warheads onto combat planes in preparation for war.
And all of this was based upon a misinterpretation of
what was a simulation, something they should have known was
just a war game. You want to know what the
plot twist is. Let's plot twist. This happened four months
after the movie Wargames came out. This is real life
plot twist. This is not the plot of the movie.
This is the plot of real life a situation called
the Able Archer eighty three incident, where NATO was conducting wargames.
The Soviet Union was sure that it was all just
a ruse, and they literally manned their lanes, loaded the
nuclear warheads, and we came other than the Cuban missile crisis.
We came closer to nuclear war at that moment, and
nobody knew what was going on over here at all. Really,
we're going to tell you more about this. That's incredible. Later.
Speaker 3: Hey, wait, before you get any further, I still really
enjoy How, like Gene Hackman, you say nuclear, I.
Speaker 5: Knew it's gonna come. I can't help it. Nucular. I
learned the word by watching Quest for Peace. That's how
I know that word. That's why I say nu killar.
Speaker 3: Okay, fantastic guys.
Speaker 5: We are blessed to be joined by a very special
guest today. We have a Patreon member of all things.
He hit us up and he said love the show
and I said great, you have any episodes you'd like
to hear? And he said, I'd be great if I
could hear an intelligent podcast about wargames and AI and
that sort of thing. And I said, super, why don't
you come do that for us? And so we are
here today with doctor Chad Briggs, a global security expert.
He advises global organizations on the intersection between climate change
and national security. He has advised the US Department of State,
the US Air Force, the Swedish military, the EU, the
US Department of Energy, all kinds of other academic organizations.
He's an intelligent guy, but an underachiever and alienated from parent.
Oh wait a minute, I'm sorry. That was Matthew Brof.
I gotta let you far there on that one. Chad.
It is so wonderful to have you with us. Thank
you for joining us today.
Speaker 2: Thank you, guys, glad to be here.
Speaker 3: Chad. Would you say you're a little more Dabney Coleman
or are you more General Barringer on this deal?
Speaker 2: I'm more a professor Falkan.
Speaker 3: Really awesome, nice, awesome, nice.
Speaker 5: That is fantastic. So just to give you guys an
idea of this notion of the intersection between national security
and climate change. In April of twenty eleven, they are
conducting wargame scenarios. It's a simulation. It is led by
Air Force Colonel I'm not kidding, Wilbur Wright. What. Yes,
he led the simulation. But the participants were presented with
four different scenarios. One was that the Mexican government had collapsed.
The other was that Iran was carrying out a nuclear test.
The third was that China was taking control of the
Spratley Islands in the South China Sea. And the fourth
was the eruption of Mount Spur, the volcano in Alaska.
And a lot of the officers laughed off this fourth
option until a couple of days later when they realized
that they couldn't see anything on the ground because all
of the volcano ash had basically eliminated all of their
aerial observation capabilities. And so that is kind of Chad's
specialty is how does environmental change affect national security and
potential warfare? Did I get that about right?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I mean technically it was more they didn't want
to fly through the ash clouds because that's really dangerous
and if you're trying to get aircraft from North America, Asia,
kind of hard to miss Alaska. So it just it
just sort of threw off a lot of their assumptions
about stuff. But yeah, it was trying to just insert
ideas of well, you know, we always assume that environment
it's there, it's a steady state. But what if it
you know, what if we did it thrown a curveball
and something happens you just don't expect.
Speaker 5: Yeah, So a few days into the scenario, real tornadoes
and thunderstorm started happening in Alabama, and they're listening to
news reports and one of the participants leans over to
Chad and says, is this really happening or is this
part of the simulation?
Speaker 2: And unfortunately that was real. That was a huge outbreak
of tornadoes that night. That was one of the things
we shoot for, is for people just not to know
necessarily if something's real or if it isn't. But that's
also one of the most famous lines from wargames.
Speaker 3: I was just gonna mention this. Today coincidentally is the
forty third anniversary of the eruption of Mount Saint Helens. Oh, yeah,
which I take would it'll be a big deal of
satellite images and that type of thing.
Speaker 5: So nineteen eighty the world becomes covered in ash yep.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And unfortunately I'm old enough to remember that.
Speaker 3: I mean too. Today we're going to compare war games
from nineteen eighty three to Tron from nineteen eighty two.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they were. It was the first time for a
lot of folks to be seeing this type of stuff
pretty accurately portrayed in a lot of circumstances. Obviously a
lot of fantasy and Tron, but still had some components
that were very cutting edge and brand new to the
audiences that were watching them, for sure.
Speaker 3: Chad, what are your memories of these two movies?
Speaker 2: Well, I was in grade school. I think when these
came out. Tron completely blew me away, you know, in
terms of its vision of computers. It's it's computer graphics.
I didn't quite understand the story, and we can get
into that just because Blinton, the Jeff Bridges' character was
already living the dream because he already owned an arcade,
So what more could you get?
Speaker 5: The right war games?
Speaker 2: I remember, and you know, my brother and I were
both into computers. He ended up getting a master's in
computer science and where's the list alamos now? And this
kind of inspired us a lot. But I didn't understand
wargames until I was much older, and I understood the politics.
Both of them sort of caught up to technology, but
in really different ways. So they're they're they're really really
influential for me. And of course I also remember the
Tron arcade game I believe absolutely made more money than
the movie itself.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we absolutely have to talk about that.
Speaker 5: By the way, Jason pointed this out and sure enough
I saw it as you come in on David Lightman
in that first arcade scene, as it pans across the arcade,
you see very prominently the video game Tron.
Speaker 3: Along with the much less influential Jungle Hunt game you
didn't like Jungle Hut.
Speaker 2: I like Jungle Hunts better Jungle Hunt than Tron.
Speaker 5: The nerves that I would build up whenever I was
having to fight those spiders, the spiders which were there
spiders in the moon. Yeah, okay, they call them grid bugs,
Oh right, right, the grid bugs. Okay, yeah, So it
was just spiders to me that one. And then when
you got a couple levels up, when you were diving
into the Master Control rainbow spinny thing and it was
going so fast and you were going so fast, anxiety
to the max. But I would still shove my borders
in for sure.
Speaker 3: Oh my gosh. Yes, okay, which one we which one
we're going to talk about first?
Speaker 5: I'd say let's talk about war games first. Yeah, yeah,
all right, see, let's sign up here up here.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Con that indicates our current defense condition.
Speaker 2: It should read the def con five.
Speaker 5: Which means piece it's.
Speaker 2: Still on four because of the little stunt you pulled.
Speaker 3: Actually, if we hadn't caught it in time, it might
have gone to def Con one.
Speaker 5: You know what that means, David, No, what does that mean?
Speaker 3: World War three?
Speaker 5: Chad? Tell us, tell us what you know or you know,
give us some information on how things went from the
development of the movie war games to when you got
involved yourself doing them, Like, what's what's kind of the
history there? I talked a little bit earlier about the
able Archer incident in eighty three, and part of what
happened in that scenario was that they started using a
lot of new technology. So what do you know? What
do you know about what happened between nineteen eighty three
and whenever you started participating live and in living color
with true wargames simulations.
Speaker 2: Well, I can tell you there were actually a couple
other incidents too, and I will go into detail about it,
But you have November nineteen seventy nine. That was another
nuclear alert that was thrown off by someone mistakenly putting
a training tape into the computer, which then was interpreted
as being real because of course the computer doesn't know
the difference.
Speaker 5: That came up when they were writing the script for
wargames because they began to question, you know, could this
really happen? Would the military really not know what was
going on in this situation? And literally turned on the
news story and Walter Cronkite is saying, oh, for three minutes,
we thought we were at the brink of nuclear war.
And it turns out somebody just left a simulation tape
inside the tape player.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and something similar happened the following summer. So June
nineteen eighty, that was a computer glitch, but the people
at NORAD suddenly saw thousands of nuclear missiles headed for
the United States. I had to figure out is this
real or not? Or is this just And turned out
it was just the computer hiccupping and just throwing out
odd radar returns that didn't actually exist.
Speaker 3: Turns out Chad was just playing missile command in the
next room.
Speaker 5: So you guys, you and your brother were into computers.
Did you do any you do any hacking back? Then
try to sneak into any school.
Speaker 2: Oh, I would never have done anything. Now, I was
an overachiever in school, so I didn't have to change grades.
But and I will say my junior high principle was
pretty smart. Because he co opted me. I think he
knew and this is like nineteen eighty six and I
tay seven. So he was testing out some sort of
new library system, you know, get the computer online at
the school. This is the first time that they were
really trying this, and so he invited me and said, hey,
we want you to figure this out and whether it's
worth doing. And it's sort of like I realized later, Okay,
this is keep your enemies close closer. Yeah, right, and
I know what they're up to. Yeah, I knew how
to do those sorts of things because sometimes, I mean, honestly,
it is so easy to break into computers sometimes some
of the back doors, and you know what they don't
address is that oftentimes it's just people making the mistakes.
You know, well, either you're leaving the scenario tape in
the computer or you just didn't put in the right password.
So yeah, all those sorts of tricks we knew. And
partly that's because when I started working on cybersecurity, you
sort of have to know this, and I worked more
on the human side of cybersecurity. It sort of inspired
us just to sort of know how computers work. And
maybe both movies inspired that because we were so taken
in with this idea that hey, you can create programs
and they're sort of like these little living things and
they're yours and they're your identity, right and they live
inside the computer. But the internet stuff I really didn't
get into heavily until probably the mid nineties.
Speaker 5: So Chad listened to our Best of eighty eight episode
and said, boy, was I in an entirely different world
as you guys were at that point. I made him
send the list, but do you do you remember it?
Do you know what your top five is from eighty
h et Partly.
Speaker 2: I was teasing you, guys. I thought you were sending
me emails asking about albums by Poison, So why didn't
I just throw in Melissa Athringe and see what you
guys think. I don't know. It's a transition time, partly
for me because I was leaving the US, and I
think partly for music too, because eighty eight you start
getting Millie Vanilli. By eighty nine you've got what new
kids on the block? Yeah, boy bands. So when I
looked at my computer, all the music from the eighties
that I had, and like the compilation files that I'll
have or it'd be like, you know, best of nineteen
eighty five for one hour, it stops in nineteen eighty seven.
By that point I was just cut off. I just
I had no connection to it anymore. And you know,
I went to Europe and to started listening to seventies music.
That's what everyone is listening to.
Speaker 5: So you were you were in Europe around that time,
and you mentioned something about I think in an email
to us about Aha. Yeah, listen to your episode because
you're calling them heavy wonder you guys.
Speaker 2: For you guys to say that Alha was a one
hit wonder was for anyone who's ever lived in Norway,
you know, it's sort of heresy personally, I like the
sun always shines on TV better than take on me.
Speaker 5: Wow, it's all about where you were, That's right, That's
true what you were doing at the time, at the
risk of forgetting to do this before we're done with
our day, and at the risk of somebody calling me
away and I don't get to ask this question. On
one of your very first emails, I asked you how
you came across us. You said you're looking for eighties podcast.
You came across our Toto episode really got engaged with
our Dirty Dancing the album episode, and you mentioned I
won't name a specific country at the risk of offending somebody,
but there's a country over in Europe that the military
has a strange fascination and love affair with the movie
Dirty Dancing. You give me more details, please.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I won't say the particular country, but I will
say there's more than one country. I won't say it's
the entire military. I just know people in the military
you have a strange affiliation with it. But yeah, that
movie resonates. I mean, you guys said on your Dirty
Dancing podcast that that was the highest selling album ever
in Germany and it did a thriller in Germany, and
being a good professor, I had to go up and
look it up, and yeah, it was true. But I
think it resonated with people in a way, you know,
because in the US, we had this idea of nostalgia
for this sort of innocent time in the US the
early sixties, and so Lucas gave us American graffiti. But
Americans wouldn't care about a bunch of teenage kids driving
around Medesto all night, right, But they had Dirty Dancing,
which which is innocent America. It's the sort of America
that they wanted to believe in. And the music I
think really helped that so much because it was it
was this sort of missimash of you know, fifties and
sixties and even stuff from the eighties that they just loved,
you know, and have a movie in a soundtrack start
with the run ats like that. I think it was
just intoxicating for so many people.
Speaker 5: Did I tell you that Chad has driven his bike
not once, but twice up to the resort where they
filmed Dirty Dancing in Virginia? Yeah?
Speaker 3: Man, that's awesome. I love that, Jason Is.
Speaker 2: It's actually a semi famous mountain for cyclists because it's
a really tough one to climb, especially to the backside.
But yeah, the first time I got up there, I
didn't even know where I was and I looked around.
It's like, wait a second.
Speaker 3: That's the staircase the baby danced on it.
Speaker 5: Fantastic.
Speaker 3: That's awesome. Okay, So we want to get in the
origin story of wargames.
Speaker 5: Okay, yeah, sure, Okay. So Wargames starts off with Lawrence Lasker.
He gets fascinated with a guy we've all heard of
at this point named Stephen Hawking, who is less famous
at that point in the general world, but was super
famous in the science world, and also is interested in
the fact that he has als and this idea that
this you know, genius who could potentially come up with
the theory of everything might not be able to commute
indicated to us, and so he thinks, Okay, I want
to have a story where this older genius finds this
younger genius that he can communicate with. And that's how
this story gets passed along by the way. Side note,
the meeting that he had in mind was supposed to
be the old geniuses in his mechanical wheelchair sitting on
a pier trying, you know, fishing, and the young kid
walks up from behind, and when he turns around, the
old man is John Lennon.
Speaker 3: That would have been amazing to see John Lennon in
this role.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And obviously, unfortunately, I mean wise, it didn't work out.
It did not work out. There were a couple of
different important assassination attempts, and unfortunately John Lennon's was a success.
So anyway, Lawrence Lasker has this idea he calls up
his college roommate whose name is Walter Parks, and they
start working together on this script and they spent this
is seventy nine or so. They spend quite a bit
of time developing this genius master and genius student story.
They had this idea that he's going to be thirteen
year old kid at California Berkeley, which sounds like real
genius to me.
Speaker 3: It does sound like real genius.
Speaker 5: I don't know if they like snag that idea and
redid it with real genius or not, but that's what
it's sounded like anyway. At some point in this process
they meet a very famous guy named Peter Schwartz. Peter
Schwartz is what we call a futurist, and that just
means he's like looking at different analytical models and trying
to predict what's going to happen in certain fields in
the future. And he says, hey, you know, computer games
are getting really popular right now. And I don't know
if you guys have looked at this, but those computer
games really seem to resemble the same screen images that
you see over at Norad with all of their war
models on there. Of course, that's a little light bulb
for both of them all say this is great. How
do we combine these ideas right? And then of course
they start getting interested in the hacker culture, which it's
starting to really ramp up at this point. And Lawrence
Lasker has a friend from Yale named Ron Rosenbaum who
writes this article called The Subterranean World of the Bomb
and talks about these military simulations that go on that
are basically like games. They think, Wow, if you know,
if only we could get into Nord and look around
and see what it's like in there, we'd really have
some meat for our story. Well, as it turns out,
Norrad actually invites Hollywood types out. I'm watching the movie
and I'm like, there's no way. There is no freaking
way they're going to have a guided tour in the
middle of the war games simulations.
Speaker 3: The bus from Birmingham.
Speaker 5: Turns out they do. Turns out they do. That's incredible,
So they get they managed to get themselves out to Norad.
They're going on this tour. They're about to get back
on the bus and this guy named General Hardinger stops
them and says, boys, I hear you're writing a story
about me, and they're like, uh yeah. He goes, well,
let's go, let's go talk, let's go have some drinks.
And they're like, well, we got to get back on
the bus. And he goes, I's got forty three men
under my command right now, I think I can get
you back to your hotel. And so they go with
him and start talking about things, and it turns out
very similar to the character that they develop. He feels
that it is vital that human beings have some sort
of involvement with the decision to set a nuclear strike
into play. You got any info on that, Chad, I mean,
could it happen that there is no human involvement?
Speaker 2: Well, it's it's kind of tricky. I mean if you
think back to the plots for fail Safe and Doctor Strangelove,
right which her influences on wargame, and they're both on
this idea of accidental nuclear war that in Doctor Strangelove
you get a general who just goes crazy and sets
off an attack that he shouldn't and fail Safe they
mistakenly think that a civilionaire liner is a bomber, and
bombers get sent off to Moscow. That they can't control.
All these strategies have been based on this idea of
launch on warning, so you don't wait until the bombs
actually hit before you launch your own missiles, right, But
that means you have to rely upon what the computers
are telling you. So you don't have plane spotters out
there in Alaska actually just looking for the missiles. You're
relying upon radars and satellites to tell you that something's happening.
But they can be wrong, right, So it's always it's
always a bit fantastical to begin with that. Okay, whatever
you see on the screen is just what the computer's
telling you is on the screen, and you have to
trust that, right. So, yeah, there always had to be
some sort of control there, right, The two keys that
you saw famously at the first scene, that you've seen
in other movies too, like Crimson Tide, and that's always
been there both for the US and the Soviets precisely
because they always knew that. Well, you can't always trust
what the computer is seeing because the computer can't make
judgments on whether something's real or not.
Speaker 3: Crimson Die is a great reference, by the way. I
love that movie. Yeah, they get the message to launch
and then it's sort of corrupted or incomplete and they
have to decide no, this is a partial message. No,
this is the real message. We need to launch. No,
we don't need a launch.
Speaker 5: Yeah. I think there's an actual historical event that's related
to that as well. Was I think a similar situation Maybe.
I think it was the Soviets though, but it was
that incomplete message, and like, I think they had three
guys who had to do something, and two of the
three were like, we're doing it, and one guy was
a holdout and averted a nuclear catastrophe because of it,
Thank god.
Speaker 2: If that's the Petrov incident, yeah, yeah, yeah. So there
was a colonel by the name of Sanslow Petrov, and
he was in charge of this early warning system that
had been set up by the Soviets. It was a
satellite system to watch for missile launches from the United States.
And he got this report from the satellites that there
were missiles being launched. They couldn't exactly tell it was
maybe five missiles, and his protocol, right his checklist, said
you need to report this. It's not a judgment. You're
just a lieutenant colonel. You're just supposed to report it
up the chain of command. And then things get moving,
but he knew that the system was kind of glitchy.
He knew that, well, the US wouldn't attack US with
just a couple of missiles, they would attack with thousands
of missiles. So he refused to he refused to report it,
and of course he didn't tell anyone for a long
time because he would have gotten into trouble. But if
that had gone on, and you have to remember the context,
nineteen eighty three was a really really bad time between
the US and the Soviets. So September of nineteen eighty three,
the Soviets had just shut down Korean airliner, you know,
the Korean airliners seven forty seven, and only three weeks
later this happened, you know, this Petrov incident. And then
only three weeks after that was the instant the able
Archer that you were mentioning earlier, right, which also coincidentally
was the same week that Wargames was released in West Germany.
Speaker 5: Wow, that's cool.
Speaker 3: It's cool.
Speaker 2: Life imitating art right.
Speaker 5: Well, And just to finish the story, like Reagan has
come in. I mean we for twenty years things have
kind of been cooling down, and the Reagan comes in
and turns the heat up to hide. He calls them
the Evil Empire. They start engaging in some serious psyops,
which when I watched the When I was watching the
documentary and John Badam was talking about how changed the
name of the computer from Psyop to Whopper, He's like,
Syop doesn't make any sense. I'm like, it makes perfect
sense because it's psychological operations. But okay, anyway, so they're
doing and I love this. So what the US would
do is they would have these planes, these attack planes,
fly straight for Soviet airspace, and at the very last second,
right before they enter the space, they would veer off.
It was the global thermal nuclear war equivalent of I'm
not touching you. I'm not touching you. Really, it's fantastic.
And so that is why the Soviets were at the
top of their paranoia. They were completely afraid of what's
going on. And so Norad is doing these real wargame simulations.
They add all these other components, and the Russians think
this is a ruse, this is a fake. They're really
about to attack, and they literally put everything in place
to begin their retaliatory strike. Before the first US missiles hit, I.
Speaker 3: Could just sear Maverick can go saying we can't shoot
this son of event. You might as well have fun
with him.
Speaker 2: But yeah, once things get started, it's hard to stop.
So during the Kuban missile crisis, Kennedy told all of
his advisors Street the Guns of August by Barbara Tuckman,
because that talked about the start of World War One.
And once you get things started, you can't back down.
It's really tough, just because organizationally, things get move in
and once someone starts firing, other people start firing back.
It's like being in a boxing match. Well, you know,
when someone punches you, you got punched back even a little
bit harder.
Speaker 5: Yeah, we didn't, Like I said, we didn't even know
that this had occurred. We did not know that the
Soviets were about to Nucas out of existence until like
almost two years later. There was a Soviet double agent
named Olegg Ordievsky. He was a double agent, and eventually
they figured out that he was a double agent and
they were about to They sneak in, they get him
back out, and he's the one that tells them, hey,
this is how close everybody came beginning annihilated.
Speaker 3: Well, I'm sitting there playing with my Transformers and listening
to Michael Jackson. I was about to be glowing in
the dark.
Speaker 5: I never learned to swim.
Speaker 2: I mean, people were scared them The Europeans remember the
Euromissile Crisis in nineteen eighty three, it's what they're referred
to it. And by then Threads had already been released
in the UK, right, which was the UK equivalent of
The Day After Tomorrow, and that was a pretty brutal movie.
You can find that, I think on YouTube these days.
But then I think it was nineteen eighty three. That
was when Day After Tomorrow came out in the US,
and that scared the hell out of me as a kid.
I mean, that's what I remember that more than wargames
at least be first interesting.
Speaker 3: Okay, yeah, so the company that put Wopper, you know,
the US military that put Wopper into play obviously didn't
work out at the end of War Games, so Cyberdine
perfected that a few years later, and then Skynet and
I'm just kidding. Actually there's a lot of similarities here
between the Terminator franchise and wargames.
Speaker 5: I think I don't know why we're talking about all
this old stuff. Why don't we talk about something that's
relevant today.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Right, So, okay, computers would never tell us what.
Speaker 5: To do exactly. There's no way that they can actually
learn and be intelligent. So the guys who are writing wargames,
Parks and Laskar, they have hit up this guy named
Leonard Goldberg. He's a producer. He's like, hey, go write
the script. After a year of waiting, he's like, I said,
write it, not carve it in stone. Let's get something.
But he's expecting this genius mentor to genius student story
that they proposed to him. So a little while later,
ficretary comes in and says, well, they didn't write the
story they said they're going to write, but they wrote
this war movie instead. He's like war movie. And then
she's like, why don't you just read it? We got it.
It's something, And he reads it and says, thank you
for an awesome weekend. It is a fantastic story. Yeah.
So he shops it around to various studios, gets turned
down repeatedly, ends up that United Artist MGM says, yes,
we're willing to do this, and that is what we
call a green light. Okay, so war Games came out first.
We're going back in time now a year before when
Tron came.
Speaker 4: Out nineteen eighty two.
Speaker 5: Nineteen eighty two, so earlier than that, I'm going to
go back to let's say seventy six. This guy named
Stephen Lisberger is a aspiring animation artist. Has even put
together a little studio of his college friends, about five people,
called Lisburger Studios. He gets introduced to this new crazy
invention called.
Speaker 3: Pong pong that's mind blowing.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and he is inspired. He is like, holy crap,
I gotta make a movie about video games.
Speaker 3: Hey, let's talk about that for just a second.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: So if you're younger than we are, you don't really
grasp how mind blowing that pong was. At that time.
The idea that you could actually compete using electronics on
a TV screen was unbelievable at the time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there were so many quarters wasted invested investment in
time that was training training. Atari even called that special Olympics, right,
video Olympics.
Speaker 3: When I was growing up, my church had a gym
and a little ping pong area. We had space invaders,
we had asteroids, and we had Donkey Kong guess what
I did all the time?
Speaker 5: Redchid Bibelin prayed, no, that would be interorrect.
Speaker 3: I played a crap ton of Donkey Kong.
Speaker 5: Gotcha? Gotcha, Chad? Did you have an Atari growing up?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, we had an Atari twenty six hundred.
Speaker 3: You Yes, of course.
Speaker 5: So Pong Breakout, eventually Pitfall, which was to me the
Atari game of all Atari games.
Speaker 3: Eventually Tron Deadly Discs was an incredible twenty six hentred game.
Speaker 5: So I know we're going to talk about, uh, we're
going to talk about the video game here in a
little bit. But yes, the Deadly disc was supposed to
be a part of the original game. They didn't even
have time to get it done. That's okay. Four games
was plenty for me. Unfortunately, it comes out right at
the time that video games are starting to the bubble
is starting to burst.
Speaker 3: I don't care that Tron. The black light from that
video game and the music, the windy Carlos music blaring
through the arcade. I put a million dollars worth of
quarters of that game myself. Love that game.
Speaker 5: So Liz Burger is inspired by Pong. He thinks, okay,
how can I do Pong combined with Alice in Wonderland
and the wheels start turning right. But he is an animator,
he is not a live movie producer. And in nineteen
seventy nine he gets ten thousand dollars from AFI a
grant from them to a seven minute short film and
it involves animals competing in the Olympics. And the name
of the show is Animal Olympics. Yeah, very creative Animal Olympics.
That one does well enough that NBC decides to fund
a full film, which is a seven figure budget. He
leaves Boston, goes out to California with his partner and
they start working on this full fledged Animal Olympics movie.
Go ahead, I got something for you that you skipped over. Okay.
Speaker 3: In nineteen seventy three, he won the Student Academy Award
for a little short film called Cosmic Cartoon where a
gladiator throws glowing discs. In nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 5: Oh wow, that's solid, dude. I gotta tell you. I
saw that he won that thing. I'm like, it's too much,
I'm gonna cut that out. I did not realize that
the game actually comes into DirectPlay. That's disks fantastic. So
he ends up producing two thirty minute parts, a Animal
Olympics Winter Games and an Animal Olympics Summer Games, but
only the Winter Games gets aired on NBC because the
Soviets come into play again. They invade Afghanistan, and the
US boycotts the Olympics, and so they are taking all
Olympic related things off of the boob tube. And so
he's got these two pieces, only one of which the
rest of the world has seen. Fortunately, he gets a
deal with HBO, puts those two parts together, adds about
another thirty minutes of additional footage, and it airs exclusively
on HBO and gains a cult following. And I got
to say, I remember I looked at the pictures here
and I remember this cartoon. I remember seeing this on HBO.
I feel like there's a naked lion in there somewhere,
like a naked female lion, anamorphic thing. Yeah, that had
been a reason for me to remember it, But this
nineteen eighty what are you going to do? So interestingly,
one of the animators on this series, Brad Bird Get
out of Here? No, Yeah, brad Bird. One of his
very first credits is he is an animator on the
Animal Olympics. Also you had. The voices of the characters
were Gilda Radner, Billy Chris, and Perry Shearer.
Speaker 3: Really, yeah, that's fantastic. By the way, flashback to our
best movie since two thousand episode right, Well, we talked
extensively about The Incredibles.
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, because you picked it as number one because
it's best movie since two thousand. Well, Okay, I don't
know if I agree with you there, but we'll keep
on going. Okay, okay, So why am I telling you
about animallypics when we're here to talk about Tron Because
the opening studio credits marked the very first appearance of
the character Tron. At this point, it was a mascot
for Lisberger's company, and it was more like an electric light,
and it was yellow instead of blue. Okay, but do
you know where the name Tron comes from?
Speaker 3: Electron?
Speaker 5: Yeah, electronics, Electronics. This is the Tron in the middle
of electronics. That is it. It's awesome. So the original
Tron character actually looked like the Cylons from Battlestar Galactica. Yes,
if they had a beard like it was a big
bearded guy with that kind of look about him.
Speaker 3: You're talking about the appearance of these things the appearance
of the characters in the movie Tron. You know why,
Jeff Ridges has a little skirt type of thing that
he wears.
Speaker 5: He literally Morgan was in the movie with him in
her own tight little outfit.
Speaker 3: Basically, yes, to keep the film modest. Apparently, Jeff Bridges
is uh, he's the Huey Lewis of the movie world. Huh.
Speaker 2: It was a Disney film by then, his deadly disc
was showing a little too much, so they had to
cover him up.
Speaker 5: That's hilarious. Hey, Jason, I was gonna tell you there's
another podcast that's covered Tron recently that you should go
check out.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, what is it?
Speaker 5: So the name of the podcast is the All Eighties
Movies Podcast.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Bill and Jason. There are good buddies over there.
Oh yeah, you know, yeah I do.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they do great stuff. They've just covered Tron. Be
sure and go and check out their episode on Tron.
That is the All Eighties Movies podcast available on all
streaming platform.
Speaker 3: Yeah. In fact, they did The Outsiders and Tron recently,
so we're kind of crossing past a couple different ways. Yeah,
definitely go check him out. There are good friends over there,
all eighties movie podcast.
Speaker 5: So they planned to use the money that they had
borrowed against the anticipated profits of Animal Olympics to develop
the storyboards for Tron. But then this article appears in
Variety magazine and this guy named Alan Kay sees the article.
Alan Kay reads this article in Variety, and Alan Kay,
if you don't know who he is, is a pioneer
of the computer world. He is a computer scientist. He
is responsible largely for the object oriented programming and the
windy wing graphical user interface that Xerox came up with
that you know, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs stole the
ideas from. He's a mastermind of computers.
Speaker 3: He sees this.
Speaker 5: Little article in Variety and he calls up Steve Lisberger
and says, I want you to make me a consultant
on your movie. And he's like okay, and he goes
and also, you don't need to do this hand drawn
animation stuff. You can do the animation with computers. And
so that's how in nineteen eighty two we get one
of the very first uses of CGI.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's incredible. You know, when I watched this movie,
there's some effects that are a little hookey for today,
but back in nineteen eighty two, this was mind blowing stuff.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: For them to have a computer that had two megabytes
of around, I mean that's nothing now, but back then
it was just Yeah, it was mind blowing. And certain
scenes like the light cycles, you know, still kind of
holds up.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, the light cycle stuff is incredible.
Speaker 2: And back then though, it was just beyond belief.
Speaker 5: It's amazing. I mean there was nothing like it at
the time at all.
Speaker 3: I'll use more stories than that to make this podcast,
to make a phone call.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah. So Steve Lisberger has been working with this
friend of his name de Bonnie mcbird. She's an actress,
and so she starts working on him with the story.
Alan Ka comes into the project and she develops the
character Alan the creator of trone after Alan Kay yes,
and she suggests Robin Williams as the Flynn character because
she wants him to be fun and kind of crazy,
and so she gets credit in this as the story
by They definitely worked on the story together and Alan
Kay was heavily involved. But basically there's maybe one line
in the whole thing that she composed that ends up
in the movie, and later on they end up having
kind of a bitter, kind of legal battle about writing
credits for the movie, but turns out okay for her
in the end because she and Alan Kay become so
close that they actually end up getting married and have
been married.
Speaker 3: Really, yeah, that's fantastic.
Speaker 5: So they develop the script. They get rejected by a
great many studios who just don't get it, but they
ultimately get picked up by Disney.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so, in fairness, I didn't really get it in
nineteen eighty two either, but one company that did was Disney.
They decided to do it. Now, this is a time
when Disney is kind of feeling their way out of
the seventies. They're trying to branch out do more live
action stuff. They've swung and missed three times, like swung
hard and missed The Black Hole, Yeah, which I liked
as a kid, but it wasn't Star Wars.
Speaker 2: In fairness, nothing could be Star Wars but Hole. I
asked so many questions of my poor mom of astrophysics
and cosmology that eventually it did help inspire me to
actually study the physics.
Speaker 3: But okay, it was your mother a physicist or was
she just the person.
Speaker 5: In the room that knew more than you.
Speaker 2: She was just the poor person who had taken me
to the movie, and I expected her to know these things.
Speaker 3: Why is the robot in hell?
Speaker 5: Mom?
Speaker 3: What the heck is going on here? That movie scared
the crap out of me as a kid.
Speaker 2: That one scene, Maximilian still Ranks is one of the
really toughest robots they've ever created.
Speaker 3: Yeah, no doubt. So.
Speaker 5: It was a swing in the miss in the seventies,
but we still like it today. Yeah, okay, what else
you got? What are there other three?
Speaker 3: The other swing of miss is another movie called Midnight Madness.
I remember it, Chad, Nope, never heard of it, okay,
all right. And the other was a movie that I
actually saw the trailer for. I remember watching it in
the theater. It may have been when I saw a
black hole. It's called The Watcher in the Woods. Yeah,
well it kind of it is like a it's kind
of a ghost story for for Disney. Betty Davis was in.
I think it may have been her one of her
last movies. Anyway, all three of those tanked, and Disney
was still trying to find the way. So they say, okay, yeah,
we'll do your video game movie. That sounds cool. They
read the script, they punted it back to him and said, hey,
we like what you're doing here. There's some religious aspects
to this story. This is stuff I never picked up
on at the time, the idea of do you believe
in users? How would I get here if there's not
a user? So there's there's some spiritual aspects to this.
I talked about that, yeah, for sure, and Disney actually
wanted to emphasize those, right, So they punted it back
to him, says, bring more on this. They bring in
Wendy Carlos to do the music. Wendy Carlos had done
a clockwork Orange and the.
Speaker 5: Shining fantastic soundtrack like that may be the best feature
of the whole movie. That and the animation might be
the two top features of the movie.
Speaker 3: Well, and I know the music so well from the
video game. Right, you walk in an arcade, you can
hear Wendy Carlos down the hall. There's Tron way over there.
And then you also have two Journey songs on this soundtrack.
Speaker 5: That's right, They're barely there, but they're there.
Speaker 3: You know why the Journey was picked because Supertramp was unavailable.
I'm not kidding. I like Super Trimp, but this is
the most interesting thing to me. So you talked about
how they're when they shot this, they're in colorless bodysuits.
There's no blue glowing nothing. It's white and black, and
there's no life to it when they film it. And
they add all that of course later. But this was
originally scheduled for a Christmas nineteen eighty two release, okay,
but Don Bluth had left Disney and taken a bunch
of animators with them to go create this thing called
The Secret of Nim, right, and Disney was pissed about
that and said, let's go head to head and go
kick the Secret of Nim's butt, okay, and so they
moved it to the summer of eighty two. Well, the
problem was the summer of eighty two, and we've already
discussed it in a three part podcast that we did, right,
was you were up against Blade Runner, the Thing Star
Trek to the Rathakon Pultergeist, but really et Et and
that was sort of the death blow for all these
movies and really was not a brilliant move by Disney.
Speaker 2: Jason didn't didn't a lot of the Disney animators refuse
to work on this.
Speaker 3: That's interesting. What do you got for me on that?
Speaker 5: I don't know.
Speaker 2: Well, a lot of the animators didn't want to work
on it because, just like today, they thought that, well,
if you computerize everything, then we're out of jobs. So
you know, they viewed this just like we view AI
art nowadays as well, this is just really stealing our stuff.
And later on, of course, the Academy Awards refused to
even consider them for special effects because they said that
using computers for special effects is cheating.
Speaker 3: That's amazing, right.
Speaker 2: One other thing I can mention about black Hole was
that the opening credits for black Hole, where you see
the sort of grid system and everything, that was the
first use in a movie of computer animation.
Speaker 3: Really. Yeah, so Disney's pioneering this stuff. So no wonder
they're interested in tront.
Speaker 2: They did, they did have some experience with it.
Speaker 3: Wow, that makes me want to go back and watch
black Hole. Maybe we should cover the black Hole.
Speaker 5: We should cover the black Hole. I think that's a
great idea.
Speaker 3: Maximilian goes to Hill.
Speaker 1: Greetings yesterday same was interrupted, although primary go pass not
yet being achieved. Solution this near game time denapsed. That's
one dollars twelve minutes fifty seconds estimated time remaining two
as seventeen meets.
Speaker 2: Ten is the primary goal.
Speaker 1: To win the game.
Speaker 5: Okay, so they've gotten the green light for war games,
and so now they need a director. Lawrence Lasker knew
this guy from college named Martin Brest, Yes, happened to
be absolutely on fire at the moment as a new
upcoming director, and so he gives him a call. Martin
Brest says, I'm in, and they've got to go right.
They've got a fantastic director. The only problem is is
that Martin is wanting to take this script in a
much darker place than Lawrence and Walter had intended it
for to go. So yeah, so they end up arguing
quite a bit about what should be done with various things.
Martin is adding a lot to the script and manipul
relating a lot of things, and at some point they're
in an argument. Lawrence and Walter are in an argument
with Martin on the phone, back and forth, back and forth,
back and forth, and finally Martin is like, you know what,
it's okay, don't worry about it. It's good. We're all
good and they hang up the phone and they said, Walter
said to Lawrence, it's all done. I think we might
have just gotten fired. And sure enough, within the next
hour they get a call from their agent and they said,
you're off the picture. And so this is pretty hard blow.
I mean, they started this project in seventy nine, this
is eighty two. They put a lot of blood, sweat
and tears into developing this story and now they're completely
off of it. But it turns out that Martin was
not getting along with the studio either. Right now. What
he did contribute was that it was his idea to
put Ali in the second half of the movie. Like
the original concept was, she sends him the money and
he's just on his own after that. But they thought,
he needs somebody to talk You need somebody to talk to, right,
Are we gonna know what he's thinking if he doesn't
have somebody to talk to. So he puts her flying
in to meet David instead of just sending him money.
Now the studio is unhappy with this dark vision. It's
back and forth again, and eventually the studio says Martin,
I don't think we need you anymore, which is pretty rare,
but He's like, Okay, you know, I stands on his principles,
doesn't cower? I mean he's on fire at the point
at that moment, so why not? Right? So he tells
Ali and Matthew, I don't think I'm going to be
directing this movie anymore. And of course they're paying they
think they're gonna get fired, right, right, And so he
ends up doing Okay.
Speaker 3: He lands on Beverly Hills.
Speaker 5: Cop next like, which does you know two hundred and
fifty million dollars or something? He did? Okay, he did
it right for this, we don't need to worry about him, right,
But they're now without a director, and so who do
they go to? A guy that we've discussed before, a
guy named John Adam.
Speaker 3: John Badam. We talked about it on our Saturday Night
Fever episode. He's the guy who did that movie. Hey,
listen to the eighties of John Batham. Okay, yeah, listen
to this. He does, of course Saturday Night Fever. He
does war games. He does Blue Thunder in nineteen eighty
two Blue Thunder, remember that. He does Short Circuit Wow
with Johnny five and Steve Gutenberg and Ali Sheety.
Speaker 5: Yeah, he does Steak Out.
Speaker 3: In nineteen eighty seven, one of your favorites. I love Steakout.
It's one of my favorites, Emilio asked as Richard Dreyvis.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Uh, And then of course he does Bird on a
Wire with Mel Gibson and Goldie Haun. I think that's
nineteen ninety. But still, that's a string of great, sort
of fun movies.
Speaker 5: That's a string of sort of sort of sort of
sort of okay movies.
Speaker 3: You tell me you don't like Short Circuit.
Speaker 5: It was innovative for its time. I think if you
go back to watch it now, we will be less
impressed than we were when we were then.
Speaker 3: Might be true, that might be.
Speaker 2: But it does talk about a computer becoming self aware,
you know, Johnny.
Speaker 5: Five, great point there you go.
Speaker 3: Hi, Hey, Plus, you got have a helicopter going upside
down in Blue Thunder.
Speaker 5: So John Badam is thrown into this project. He starts
looking over what Martin Brest has done with the script,
and he calls up Lawrence and Walter and says, guys,
I'm looking at what I'm guessing is probably a three
hour long movie with the script. Do you guys have
anything that you'd like to send me that I might
be able to look at instead of this, and they said, yeah,
we wrote a second draft that like nobody has looked at.
He goes send it over and they're like, well, you know,
a guy down the hall has a copy. He goes,
I'd prefer if you came and gave it to me.
Speaker 3: Yeah, give it direct.
Speaker 5: At that moment, they're like, maybe we're back in. He
reads it. He says, this is the best script I've
read so far, and the writers are back in. They
no longer have to watch somebody else making love to
their girlfriend. They can enjoy making love to the girlfriend themselves.
So Badam brings on the one big chance other than
you know, going back to this second draft script, the
one big change that Batham brings is he brings on
mister Barry Corbin.
Speaker 2: Mister McKittrick.
Speaker 3: After very careful consideration, sir, I've come to conclusion that
your new defense system sucks. He steals every scene that
he's in.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, he was the best. I mean, he was based
on the real life Nora in general of the time
and basically ad lid his way through the whole movie
that came up with the most quotable lines of the
movie as well.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, they would come to him and they say, hey,
can you say something colorful right here? And he's like,
I'd piss on a spark plug if I thought of
doing a good that's all his stuff.
Speaker 5: A question might be what happened to the guy that
was originally cast in that part.
Speaker 3: You know, he was moved to like the side character.
Speaker 5: He's the guy I can't even imagine, like you've got
the general's role. New director comes on and he says, Okay,
you're now going to be the general's helper. Yeah. Who
doesn't say any And it's the actor's name is Michael
Ensign And I mean he's been in a ton of
stuff as well. Like when I saw him in the movie,
I'm like, he's a pretty famous actor. I wonder why
he's not saying anything. And I think at one point,
probably improvised, Barry Corbin goes, where is that guy? Oh?
There he is. I didn't see you there.
Speaker 3: That's good.
Speaker 2: By the way, guys, do you know what happened to
one of the versions of the original script that Alaska wrote?
Speaker 5: What tell me?
Speaker 2: Oh? He rewrote it and it became Sneakers the movie
in nineteen ninety two with Robert Redford and Ben Kinsgilly
oh Perfet. Wow.
Speaker 3: I love Sneakers the hacker movie, right, it is a
hacker movie perfect Redford, River, Phoenix City Potier, Dan Aykroyd.
Speaker 2: A lot of what Alaskar originally wanted to write about
he couldn't put into war Games, and so he took
all of that and years later rewrote it into Sneakers.
Speaker 5: Fantastic.
Speaker 3: Wow, that's incredible.
Speaker 5: By the way, if you don't recognize the name Michael Ensign,
he's the hotel clerk from Ghostbusters.
Speaker 3: Yes, he's also the guy in Titanic who's like, we're
dressed in our best and prepared to go down with
the ship.
Speaker 5: There you go. I know, you bring Titanic into it.
Speaker 3: I love Titanic. Well, I mean, let's talk first of all,
Matthew Broderick in the lead role. He was actually filming
Max Dugan Returns, which was his first movie at the time,
when he was hired to be in Wargames, and when
there's a change with the boss, he thought he was
going to get fired.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but they kept him.
Speaker 3: Of course. Ali Sheety where you know her from Breakfast
Club and Sante almost fire and short circuit.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean it's interesting. Obviously, John Hughes saw this
movie because he cast Ali Sheety in Breakfast Club, and
then he casts Matthew Brodrick in Paris Bueler's Day Off,
where again he is using a computer to change his
grades nine times.
Speaker 3: Grace, I'll tell you who the guy that I think
is the best in this movie. I mean, he's literally
the best in every movie. Dabney Coleman brings his A
game in this movie. He actually brings sense of authority.
You really feel like you're in trouble when he's talking
to you.
Speaker 5: It is a true contest. It is a true contest
of Will's whenever he is arguing with Barry Corbin. I mean,
those two guys are imminently confident and strong characters, and
those actors are the same way, and they both play
them as perfect contrast to each other.
Speaker 2: I loved it, and you really needed them at the
beginning of the movie because the second scene they do
a lot of trying to explain what's going on with
the whole command and control system of Nora in a
two minute scene, which is not easy. You know, you
could have exposition that would last for half an hour,
or you could have a twelve part series that would
talk about everything that they were mentioning. But it takes
actors like yeah, Dadney Coleman and Barry Corbin to go
through that. And that's when Corbin actually repeated one of
the lines that the General actually said to the writers
in the first place, Right, well, I sleep very well
at night knowing those boys are down there.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, of course he had to throw into how do
doty references?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I think the actual general said I sleep well
at night knowing I'm in charge. Yeah. Let me ask
this Chad, like, is this a debate or has it
ever been a debate among the wargame simulations of how
much control do we put in the hands of the
computers versus how much control do we put in the
ends of the humans?
Speaker 2: I think theoretically, yeah, But that means by theoretically, I
mean you're always going to have some academics or people
at the Rand Corporation saying, hey, maybe we could be
more efficient, we could have more control, right, But then
you end up getting the Walter Matthau character from Failsafe,
you know, rather than the people who who are actually
working at it. And so the military has always been
adamant no, no, we need men and no women, you know,
to be in the command and control that there has
to be a clear set of controls. And you got
to have the men with the brass keys because they're
the only ones who can stop it if they're.
Speaker 3: The keys, sir.
Speaker 5: By the way, early appearance by Michael Mattson and On Spencer, Yeah,
Matt's and beat popping a guy's ear off and reservoir
dogs in a few years and John Spencer's running the
West Wing.
Speaker 3: That's right, And that.
Speaker 2: Was Madison's first role. In fact, he auditioned for it
as a joke. He didn't think anything was going to
come with it, but yeah, he he really made that
first scene.
Speaker 3: And then you've got Art Lafleur, who's the third guy
in that scene. He's the guy who plays the babe
in Sandlot. He's kind of a.
Speaker 5: Guy, that guy, Yeah, who's talking to Yeah, talking to
him as they come in. I remember that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you've got some other guys, I mean so, I
mean John Wood goes on to do Lady Hawk with
Matthew Broderick. Yep, Okay, Barry Corbyn we talked about. He's
the general who comes up with all the colorful lines
he was in any which way, you can playing strip
poker with the old ladies, which I can't wait to
talk about with you.
Speaker 5: Right Eddie, see the way he yanked me out of
the car like that finger?
Speaker 3: You have Eddie Deeson, the guy who plays Malvin. He's
from Greece.
Speaker 1: Wow, what'd you get?
Speaker 3: I was trying to break into provision.
Speaker 1: I wanted to see the program for their new games.
Speaker 2: Wait, I'm not through yet. Remember you told me to
tell you when you were acting foodly and insensitively. Remember
that you're doing it right now.
Speaker 3: And then, of course you have William H. Macy as
the nor D officer.
Speaker 5: I missed. I missed that.
Speaker 3: He is just he's in the background.
Speaker 5: Wow, yeah, I missed that completely.
Speaker 3: One more name for you. You have James Tolkien, the
principle from Back to the Future. And the guy in
Top Gun who's gonna tell Maverick that he's gonna fly
a cargo ship full of rubber dog crab.
Speaker 5: Jeez, didn't that guy ever have hair? Yeah?
Speaker 3: There you go? How about that? The cast incredibly strong
in war games. Oh, one more name for you. Jason Bernard.
He plays the judge in Liar Larry, the kind of
the black officer.
Speaker 5: Oh yeah, yeah, I remember seeing him. I'm going Liar
Larry judge another guy. Yep. By the way, I don't
know that everybody knows this, but Wood wasn't just Stephen
Faukin character. He was also the voice of the computer.
So they realized that when text appears on a computer screen.
Unlike today where everybody's used to reading text on a
screen all the time, back then ninety percent of people
weren't reading whatever was up there. And so John Batham
came up with this idea, Well, why don't we have
why don't we give the computer a voice, a speaker
so that we can hear what it says. And by
the way, one of the most memorable parts of the movie,
I mean that voice is incredible. John Wood is the
guy who gives the voice for the computer. Yep. John
Badam comes to him and says, Okay, I want you
to read these lines, but I want you to read
them from right to left instead of left to right
and yeah, and John Wood is like, why would I
do that? He goes, well, because the computer would not
have the personality of speech that you have, and so
if you read them backwards, you've got to basically isolate
each word and it will sound like a computer where
each word has been pre recorded.
Speaker 3: So rather than shall we play a game, it's play
a game.
Speaker 5: Good try thing it.
Speaker 3: I'd have to have it written down for me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they they really had trouble even using the computers.
No one knew how to type, right, so they had
to come up with what is pretty common nowadays that
whatever key you press, it'll it'll write what's supposed to
be in the script. But at first they were trying
to do it with Matthew Broderick. He just didn't know
how to type, and so they were trying to give
him computers so we could practice. But of course they
also had to give him a Galago so we could
practice on that before the arcade scene.
Speaker 5: Focus a little more.
Speaker 3: On the gallery, I think, So I wish somebody had
given me a gallagant game and focus.
Speaker 5: Okay, so we're ready to talk casting on Tron.
Speaker 3: Then let's talk casting on tron all right. Okay, So
in the lead role of Kevin Flynn, we have Big
Lebowski himself, Jeff Bridges. Jeff Bridges of course has done
true grit against all odds. He's Obadiah Stain and Iron
Man Show in a Million Things. Glynn is Hans Solo.
He's the Gunslinger, He's the guy who breaks the rules.
He's the guy the girl really secretly likes. I'll make
the case that Riyori is Princess Lea. Tron is Luke,
and Sarcus Darth.
Speaker 5: Vader, who's Gold five five five Gold five is Gold five.
You if you watch this movie and are familiar in
the least with Star Wars, you gotta be going these
guys were Star Wars fans.
Speaker 3: Dumont was clearly Obi Wan Kenobi obviously Yep, yep. Bernard Hughes,
Bernard Hughes, who was also Berlin and the TV series,
and of course the grandpa on The Lost Boys. Ah.
The bad thing about this plays it's too many damn vampires,
all right. Bruce Boxleitner plays Tron.
Speaker 5: Yes.
Speaker 3: The only thing I know from him is that he
was in Babylon five. Yeah, shout out to our buddy
Van Allen Plexico. I've never seen Babylon five life, but
he runs a podcast on Babylon five. If you want
to know about that, go listen.
Speaker 5: To his stuff.
Speaker 3: Then, of course you have Cindy Morgan who plays Laura Baines.
She's Lacy underalls.
Speaker 5: From Lacy Underalls like I saw, I'm like, I feel
like there's a hot girl behind those glasses somewhere. So
I looked up the actress and sure enough, she's back there.
Speaker 2: Yes, it's great that you could go from being a high,
high class socialite to being a computer programmer and such
a short period of time.
Speaker 5: Well she wore the computer outfit, Well, yes she did.
Speaker 4: She did.
Speaker 3: By the way, the little dome thing that she had on.
I heard her talking about this, so they would like
glue it to her face in her head. It looks
like a like those little plastic things you put on
your head so you don't have to wash your hair.
Ladies wear the shower cap, shower caup.
Speaker 5: There you go.
Speaker 3: Hey, it's a shower cap. But they would kind of
glue it to her face, and then as she would
take it on and off, she began to get these
little blisters on her face. She's like, why can and
I have a freaking hockey helmet like the guys get
so towards the end of the movie, she actually is
wearing a more of a hockey style. All right, you
have David Warner who plays Ed Dillinger. He's also Sark. Yeah,
he's Darth Vader.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: David Warner just passed away last year.
Speaker 5: I think we talked about how good he is being
a bad guy. He's a bad guy from the time banded,
time banded bad guy in Titanic. He his favorite movie. Yes,
what was the other one? He was a bad guy
in another one too? Oh, he was. He was in
one of the Star Trek in one of the Star Treks.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was discovered country is Star Trek six.
Speaker 5: Yeah. Yeah, he's good at being a bad guy, and
he's a good bad guy in this one too.
Speaker 3: By the way, Peter O'Toole was approached to play Sark
in this movie. Peter O'Toole Lawrence of Arabia.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Right, he read the script and he's like, hey, guys,
this is really good.
Speaker 5: I want to play Tron.
Speaker 3: And they're like, ah, you're not really what we had
in mind for Tron. Yeah, and he really tried to
sell them on the idea that he could play Tron.
So he ended up getting neither.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so he got my favorite year.
Speaker 3: Yes, also for the role of Yori, they wanted Debbie
Harry of Blondie.
Speaker 5: Well, they had a similar look. I mean, they definitely
have a similar similar look.
Speaker 3: I can see that both would look good in the
you know, form fitting electronic suit argument.
Speaker 2: I think Blondie music would have gone well in place
of Journey.
Speaker 3: That would have been easy, flip in, flip out.
Speaker 5: Right, sure, Yeah, I feel like Flynn would have been
a bigger Blondie fan than he would have been a
Journey fan. Yeah.
Speaker 3: And then of course Bernard Hughes Uncle Grandpa from The
Lost Boys, as Dumont call him Uncle Grandpa, Uncle Grandpa,
don't dodge my oreos, Okay, And that's pretty much it
in Toronto. I mean, you got a couple other guys.
One guy plays Ram and one guy plays an accountant
who gets killed ten seconds. But you know, right, so
there's really not that much going on cast wise in Tron.
Speaker 5: Yeah, so let's talk about the movies themselves. I'm gonna
touch on Tron just a little bit. You mentioned that
there's obviously some significant theological questions and impacts going on here.
He's a guy who is comes from above, goes down
to the world below, and is a user incarnate and
the powers that be very strong similarity to the Roman
Empire and the games that they would have the peasants
and the other ladiators play all very similar and requires
them to renounce their belief in the silly superstition or
they're going to get the standard substandard training, or they
can renounce it and have the expert training right right.
And the guys even say, you know, do you really
believe in the users? And the guy says, yeah, I
mean if I don't have a user who created me,
So it's very It has a lot of those religious quotes. Sure,
what was kind of interesting to me and Chad you
touched on this just a little bit, But we all
kind of have from almost our inception a little personality
that belongs in the computer system. Like from the time
that we are born, we are immediately entered into a
computer database as a number, our social security number. Right.
Like I had this weird case where I was dealing
with a guy who, even though he was alive, he
appeared to be dead because somehow in the computer system,
they had decided he was dead and he had no
way to prove that he was alive because the computers
said he was dead. Huh. So it's a very interesting
concept that we really are these little guys running around
an avatar computer person that is us, that's there from
our birth until our death.
Speaker 2: And then you add the new technology of like Facebook
and social media, who are keeping track of everywhere we
go and what we buy and who our friends are,
and they have their own idea of who we are,
right and sometimes it's even a better idea. They know
what we want to buy, they know what we want
to see next. I think met is a little confused
over where I live.
Speaker 5: But that's probably true around a lot.
Speaker 2: But it's true those identities exist, right, and there are
other computers that keep track for our credit scores and
judges based upon that. And then there's a sort of
online identities. You know, you can even ask if you're
better known on the internet, and you can ask chat
GPT you know who is so and so, and then
they'll come up with an idea of well, this person right,
And if people do a search for my name, you
get really different results depending upon which keyword you use
with it, because there are other Chad Briggs is out there.
Speaker 5: And the media out there with your name as well
you'll lit you up.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So whenever you delete something from face, you have
a little man in the computer who throws a disc
at it and it blows up.
Speaker 5: All right, everybody that does it. For our first part
of the Tron Versus Wargames series, we are going to
be back next week. Chad, our expert guest, is going
to be with us and we are going to be
talking about real life wargames versus what we saw in
the movie and how close those might be.
Speaker 3: Please join us for that episode.
Speaker 5: Chad, as I mentioned before, not only is a super genius,
but also a Patreon subscriber, So if you want to
be like the other super geniuses in the world, be
sure and check out our Patreon page. It's patreon dot
com back slash Shirly podcast where you can sign up
for as little as five bucks a month, and like
Chad's favorite episode of Aha, take on Me, you get
to hear our analysis of various one hit wonders and
other random choices by Jason that the general public doesn't
get to hear, just star Patreon subscribers, so be sure
and check us out there. If you don't have the
funds to do that, do us a favor and hit
a review, hit a five star review, write us a review.
Speaker 3: We'll see you guys here next week. Chad you coming back,
I'll be here, awesome man, Bye, guys,