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Tron: Uprising first episode online

David Pescovitz at 3:16 pm Fri, May 25, 2012

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Tron: Uprising premiers on June 7 on Disney XD. They've posted the first episode, titled "Beck's Beginning, in its entirety to YouTube. I think Alberto Mieglo's fantastic art direction is in the tradition of Peter Chung's "Aeon Flux" and Bruce Timm's "Batman: The Animated Series." Mieglo posted some stunning production art on his personal blog.

David Pescovitz is Boing Boing's co-editor/managing partner. He's also a research director at Institute for the Future. On Instagram, he's @pesco.

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Ants and Stars: Bruce Sterling and Jasmina Tesanovic visit the Sardinia Radio Telescope in Italy

The Snowden Principle

  • http://twitter.com/jmtd Jonathan Dowland

    Not in the UK.

    • Lodewijk Gonggrijp

       Not in the Netherlands

  • Aaron Hildebrandt

    … and not in Canada.

    • Matt Moore

      … and not in Australia.

      • http://twitter.com/LostInBrittany Horacio Gonzalez

         …and not in France…

        • zarray

          … not without my daughter

          • http://downlode.org/ Hex

            And my axe!

            amidoinitrite

        • dasanjos

           And not in Estonia…

  • bluest_one

    >Not in the UK.
    >… and not in Canada.

    The obvious implication: Disney wants Brits and Canucks to pirate it.

  • http://russelljsmith.co.uk/ Russell James Smith

    Not in New Zealand

  • Guest

    I just watched the first few minutes, and I can safely say you’re better off with your early access to Dr. Who and Sherlock.

  • Atomicpanda

    Other than the disturbing lack of pelvises, that was pretty great. Certainly better than I assumed it would be. 

  • Mantissa128

    Man, I hate this DRM shit.

    For everyone not in the US: TunnelBear. It Just Works.

    Edit: For a 30-minute show, TunnelBear was taking too long, so I just torrented the damn thing. Mission accomplished. Now I’m too testy to watch it until later.

    • toyg

      It is indeed ridiculous. What, were they worried Commonwealth consumers would have choked their bandwidth? Does Disney hate the Queen? WTF, seriously.

      It “might” take three minutes to torrent it.

      • Shane Simmons

        Honestly, could we sell these people on the idea of Bittorrent as a DCDN or a distributed cloud?  I know those manager types like buzzwords and business-friendly terminology…

        “They can use Miro to view the video, which we will provide through a distributed CDN.  The great thing is that, by using Miro, we can defer the cost of a CDN by shifting the cost to the viewers!”

        Feel free to throw money at your monitor now.

      • Mantissa128

        It took five, but that’s cause Shaw throttles P2P after the first 30 seconds or so.

        I guess content is still tied to countries… the whole legal framework is mired in a world that increasingly no longer exists. When we all get on the internet, countries will become passé.

  • bcsizemo

    I caught the last half of this last night on the Disney channel..?  Is all of it going to be released on the 7th?  Either way it was pretty good.  Definitely has that Aeon Flux feel to it.

  • ChibiR

    Not in Germany, either.  For what it’s worth, the preview image looks nice, I guess…

  • Vladi DLR

    Open it up on YouTube
    Copy URL link from bar
    Paste it on http://www.hidemyass.com
    Click on hidemyass button
    Profit ……

    Oh! And I felt kind of a Batman Beyond vibe too…..

  • bcsizemo

    Or download it via a torrent I created, 720 youtube rip:
    https://thepiratebay.se/torrent/7300112

    I have suck upload, so I apologize in advance.

    • http://twitter.com/jmtd Jonathan Dowland

      Thanks folks.  To be honest I don’t have the energy/inclination to put any effort into watching this. I’m not sure whether Disney would prefer I didn’t rather than go to lengths to obtain it “illegitimately”, or not, but I might as well rent my eyeballs to someone who wants them.

  • mccrum

    Great voice talent though, those credits are exactly who they should be with Boxleitner and Henrikson.  Adding Elijah Wood’s not bad either.

  • internetcontrarian

    Man, I decided to watch a few minutes. Then I was like “But I know exactly where this is going and could write the dialogue.” And then I’d watched the whole goddamn thing. 

  • Nutrition Industry

    OMG (wow, first time I think I have ever typed that)

    The flashbacks to Aeon Flux and Batman Beyond were kind of fun, but it had its own weight, storyline and feel.  My biggest issue with heavy “science or science fiction” storylines is how much I complain when something in the plot line ignores physics, psychology, etc. and expects you to swallow it whole.  Blame me being a scientist myself.  Being on “The Grid,”  the writers could have expected us to swallow some whales (but the sea bass wasn’t too bad).

    My mouth was moving complaining that interrupting the train’s energy rail could be done with better timing right as he cut down the pylon (a method established in cutting down the statue head – which seemed an imperfect but reasonable solution).  The psychology of Beck’s interrogation by Tron is weak, but reasonably structured for an amateur trying to establish if someone is an ally.  Why most of the guards walked away from the train wreck escapes me though.

    So, for a habitual “scientist not liking bad science” audience, I liked it.

    • Peter Petroff

      Being an IT guy rather than a scientist and a long-time TRON fan…

      … I’m afraid I had much bigger problems with it; the same problems I had with Legacy. For me, the writing is absolutely destroying it, terribly. As a piece of science-fiction, it’s really poor – it’s just turned into a Generic Fantasy Universe, rather than using the features of a universe-in-a-computer that would make this as mind-blowing as the original was for its time. It’d be like a season of “Doctor Who” without time travel, “Star Wars” without a Jedi or a spaceship or “Stargate” without a stargate.

      I mean, look at Beck – he works as a mechanic. In a universe where a light-cycle is a program. And all the citizens are also Programs. Has anybody considered the ability to repair a lightcycle or hack a pair of handcuffs would also mean being able to repair TRON?

      And all the Clone Wars/Aeon Flux animated wire-fu, when not even the original uber-warrior TRON ever did any such thing, but some jumped up mechanic can do this? Can we have some kind of writing to explain why General Tesler has the Mr Fantastic hands?

      Not to mention the issue that plagues every prequel: why did we never see the new prequelled characters / vehicles (of which K&H are so proud) / features in the later movie?

      As an old-school TRON fan… it really hurts to see that 20+ years of waiting has just turned into more kiddie-fodder.

      • Andrew Pam

         Dr. Who without time travel – you do know that most of Season 7 in the Jon Pertwee era was exactly that?

        • Peter Petroff

           In the context of, him being deliberately exiled. Part of the storyline; and at least there were appearances by Time Lords. He was almost always working on fixing the circuit the Time Lords sabotaged. There were still elements of the “Doctor Who” canon coming through the entire season.

          Whereas “the Grid” has just become Generic Disney Fantasy Universe #12B.

  • Edward Pearse

    Great going Disney with the geolocking DRM crap.

    Seems Flynn is not the only one who is “cluless”.

  • http://tomleo.com/ Tom Leo

    Yeah I was getting a Batman Beyond vibe too, especially this episode. Really looking forward to the rest of the series!

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Spimon-Fu/1051728062 Spimon Fu

    Pee Wee Herman is in this thing? YEah

  • oasisob1

    Fantastic! Stupid our non-US friends are having so much trouble watching.

  • EichaelThe0ne

    I started watching this prequel on the Disney channel a few days ago and said to myself I’d come back to it online.

    Way more sick with dub tunez. I had cranked up Symbl- Crunkbot on Dubthugz radio right before hitting play. When Tron is fighting Beck (the engineer) during the interrogation, Evil Bastards – Crushing You came in. I know people have heard of lots of music patternicity comments on blogs, but I love that the dialogue for the song is working for this moment right now.

      “You ever feel you that couldn’t breathe, that your tongue’s thick in your mouth, your throat is hoarse, your lungs are bursting for air, it seems as if the walls of your room are closing in on you…crushing you, crowding you, sealing you off from the rest of the world?”

    Given that Tron and Matrix share a lot of overtones about our possible future digital existence, the interrogation reminds me of Morpheus trying to awaken Neo in their first dojo fight. (Devin Martin – Blue Crystal works for the launch of their doom train. Sorry. Can’t stop. And no, I’m not high on drugs.)

    This is a visually spectacular episodic show, the best I’ve ever seen. Doesn’t even need dialogue. It’s nice to see that the slo-mo effect, along with other visual effects, translated well to this medium.

    Ps. Maybe The Matrix is what comes after Tron, a much more “organic” allegory of the Tron-verse. And Aeon Flux is what happened after.

  • http://twitter.com/BadgerBeth Beth Cravens

    I saw it flipping through the channels and ended up watching the rest of it. Great stuff, and as others have pointed out, I definitely got the Aeon Flux and Batman from it. The action animation was really fun to watch.