Conan the Barbarian was, and is, a fantastic fantasy-action flick. We had no idea who Arnold Schwarzenegger was, and as far as we knew he was actually Conan. At the beginning, when his mom is killed (and what a gorgeous mom -- the German model Nadiuska), it is genuinely devastating, sickeningly so, as young Conan looks at his own hand that she'd just been holding. The sword-wielding killer, named Thulsa (muthafuckin') Doom and played by James Earl Jones [check out this Screenopolis tribute to him], has a frog-like sour smirk and weird-ass bangs that look like a child's Little Lord Fauntleroy haircut over a mean egg-shaped head. I hate him! But he's fascinating, and of course he has that James Earl Jones voice that seeps into the marrow of your ribcage.

I loved how Conan got super-strong just by pushing a Wheel of Pain. Then he runs off, kicks ass in a gladiator ring (way more decisively and fuck-yeah-ingly than Russell Crowe does in Gladiator), is used as a slave stud, and finally goes free and meets a woman in a hut who invites him in and jumps his bones in front of a fireplace. That's where the movie really gets wild. Piping-hot Cassandra Gava plays the woman, and when they get it on, she starts huffing and puffing like a wolf, then transforms into such a rabidly passionate (and howling) animal that Conan has to throw her right into the fire -- to cool her off! She explodes into a flaming light that bounces around the room and right out the door, launching over the landscape, leaving only sparks. This scene set the high bar for our later expectations about what constitutes great sex. (Something Porky's absolutely failed to do.)

We pre-teens really didn't understand, but we did recognize the witch woman as being similar to both the succubus and the will-o-the-wisp creatures in our Dungeons & Dragon Monster Manual. (Because we were geeky little nerd-o's, spending many a slumber party discussing the pros and cons of meeting up with a succubus.) 

Anyway, Conan just kept getting better and better, like when he gets drunk and punches a camel, or makes friends with some thieves, especially the super-leggy and graceful Sandahl Bergman, who becomes his girlfriend and pretty much the ideal woman for any barbarian, whether with a war-painted face slicing up giant snakes, or glistening from the afterlife. ("Do you wanna live forever?") How we did love thee, Sandahl Bergman. And thy long legs.

In "The Future Was Now," Chris Nashawaty writes at length about how Conan the Barbarian's script started off nearly three times as long and full of nutty stuff Oliver Stone wrote while taking who-knows-what drugs (and likely speculating that Thulsa Doom was on the grassy knoll), but John Milius (whose career was in a major slump after Big Wednesday) somehow pared it all down to the highly effective state it ended up in. They filmed a lot of Conan in Spain, got wonderful music by Basil Poledouris, and made a one-of-a-kind flick that still holds up. I watched it last year and it's like a Frank Frazetta painting come to life.

One of my favorite scenes is still the ambush at the end, with Conan taking on the final badguys, who had wiped out his village at the very beginning. The spring-loaded contraption he makes to defeat the Hammer Guy (who has no name, but does have a very large mallet), is oh so satisfying. If there's one thing I'd change about the movie, it's that I'd add the sound of bowling pins tumbling when Conan throws a decapitated head down a big staircase.

Okay, um, I think I wrote too much about Conan the Barbarian, so I'll be a little more terse about the next seven films that are in the book, "The Future Was Now."

But it's gonna be tough, because I love, love, love The Road Warrior.

The Road Warrior is also known as Mad Max 2, and even though it's a sequel to Mad Max, it's really the director, George Miller, trying to correct everything he didn't like about Mad Max. That film, released in 1979, was made in Australia on a budget of kangaroo pelts, wallaby IOUs, and canoe-sized-crocodile scales. George Miller, given the chance to make a film on a decent budget, went Wez-wild and crafted one of the best action films ever made.

You probably know all about it, if you saw or read about Furiosa in summer 2024. The review on this site covers it pretty thoroughly.

One of my favorite things about The Road Warrior is how it mashes up so many styles and cultural elements into something cohesive and distinct, and it's all filtered through a dusty, Australian-accented mindset that feels dangerous, crazy, and charming. The villains are pro-wrestler, Native American, football-padded, hockey-masked, gay S&M, prison rioting, punk/new-wave, vintage-car upgrading, crossbow-shooting freaks -- and they feel perfectly of-the-moment in 1982! How is that possible?

In spite of their utter stylistic confusion, these villains are highly organized and motivated. If you're a Mormon-missionary style cadre of refinery-protecting, headband-wearing, civilized but ragtag survivalists, you should worry. Your faded burlap smocks won't protect you.

As critic Pauline Kael pointed out in her review at the time, which sounds like she hated it but secretly loved it, the story leans a little too heavily into the "Hero With a Thousand Faces" archetypes of Joseph Campbell, with Mel Gibson's Max too obviously a loner-hero modeled on Alan Ladd's character in the Western Shane, and…..oh, shut up, Pauline.

The music score, by Brian May (no, not the Queen guitarist), is adrenaline-pumping and fun to play in one's car while white-knuckling it avoiding the idiots on modern-day freeways.

I could say so much more about The Road Warrior, like how the Warrior Woman (Virginia Hey) is almost as kickass as Valeria (Sandahl Bergman) from Conan the Barbarian. Or how the Feral Kid's (Emil Minty) steel boomerang lopping off a man's fingers is strangely one of the funniest scenes. Or how much the villain Wez (Vernon Wells) energizes his scenes, and when he's restrained by the Humungus it's as if to remind him not to steal the movie.

For many people, The Road Warrior represented their first awareness of Australia. Between that movie and the early albums by the band Midnight Oil, I assumed the continent consists mostly of trucks, dirt, and angry bald guys.

On to…

Poltergeist is a horror movie in the same way that a shark is a fish. It's really much more.

If you read "The Future Was Now," you realize that Poltergeist wouldn't exist if Harrison Ford hadn't been the main squeeze of Melissa Mathison. And they wouldn't have been together if Harrison Ford hadn't been in Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation, and… Yeah, there's a huge backstory to all of this.

Steven Spielberg had originally wanted to make a movie, called Night Skies, about evil aliens (based, in part, on his infatuation with the 1953 War of the Worlds, which he later just up and remade). Spielberg had enlisted screenwriter John Sayles to do a treatment, and Sayles wrote the evil-aliens script. It was all good except then Spielberg headed to Tunisia to make Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Harrison Ford brought Mathison, and she was really sweet and smart (and a terrific writer, who had penned The Black Stallion) and convinced Spielberg to make a movie about a nice alien instead of evil aliens. Okay.

That nice-alien movie became E.T. the Extra Terrestrial (see below!). But Spielberg still had all this material about evil aliens. He couldn't make both a nice-alien movie and an evil-aliens movie at the same time. You just don't do that. There are rules. So he changed the evil aliens into ghosts, borrowed a concept from the part of The Shining about the hotel being built over a burial ground, and set both movies in suburbia, another obsession of his (and a shrewd one, given that the demographics of post-Boomer America and the movie-ticket-buying public were skewing hard toward young people on the outskirts of cities).

Anyboo...

Poltergeist takes the idea of a horror movie and builds it into a popcorn flick. Spielberg hired Tobe Hooper to direct, but as the book points out, it was more of a joint-directing effort. Spielberg would drive back and forth between Paramount and Universal Studios directing (or shadow directing) Poltergeist and E.T., almost like he was showing off what a directing-genius, high-competence brat he was -- and oh, was he a brat. (Then he got extra-bratty in 1993, releasing both Jurassic Park and Schindler's List, that overachiever).

I watched Poltergeist recently, and it's such a hodge-podge -- a dumping ground of kooky ideas, barely held together with special-effects spit and Jo Beth Willliams's grounding performance as the mom, offsetting the effects with believable human emotion. It's one of the few Spielberg movies in suburbia where the parents aren't divorced or divorcing, but damn if the ghosts aren't trying to split everybody up. At the end they even turn Jo Beth Williams's hair into a copy of the Bride of Frankenstein. Like they're trying to break up their marriage by setting the mom up with Franksteinstein's monster.

Half-way through Poltergeist, this weird little gremlin woman, Zelda Rubinstein, comes out and almost takes over with the sheer force of concentrated quirk. But the special effects are game to compete, with strobe lights and a spindly goblin ghost in a doorway (WTF is that thing?). Then Spielberg puts the mom in a tumbler set like he did with Richard Dreyfuss in the truck scene from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Just the whole bag of tricks, anything goes.

One of my favorite bits is when the mom is running down the long hallway -- a dreamlike effect, and Spielberg (er....Hooper? Uh...) uses the same Vertigo-like camera shot (a dolly zoom) he'd already used in Jaws with Roy Schieder's shocked face, and also for some reason in a scene overlooking suburbia in E.T. Anyway, the hallway sprint is a great scene, just there for the fun of it.

Of course, everybody who saw Poltergeist got a case of Coulrophobia -- fear of clowns, if they didn't already have it. I loved when the boy beat the stuffing out of that clown. Die, clown! But why have such a clown in your bedroom to begin with? Why torture thyself?

It's interesting how the heart of Poltergeist's house and E.T.'s house is the children's bedroom closet. Because awww, kids. It's unsettling how the closet turns into a big uterus though. In the book "Horror for Weenies," writer Emily C. Hughes compares little Heather O'Rourke to Cindy Lou Who from "How the Grinch Stole Christmas." That's apt.

One thing the book "The Future Was Now" doesn't do is explore the actual movies' meanings; it's not analytical. Nor does it dig into finer details of scenes.

Like, I still want to know why, in the middle of Poltergeist, there is a massively disruptive edit that makes absolutely no sense. One moment the mom and dad (Craig T. Nelson) are reacting to the fact that the poltergeists can launch their daughter across the dining-room floor. Then, wham, they're in front of the neighbors' doorway asking if he's being attacked by mosquitos (as they are, slapping them from their necks). The transition is abrupt and perplexing. A key passage was chopped away -- and, it seems, the original screenplay no longer exists. Somebody needs to get to the bottom of this!

Also, a major blunder: At the beginning of the film, when the camera tracks through the house following the dog to the upstairs bedrooms, you can see the jeans-clad legs of a production assistant through a doorway, stepping out of the frame, but -- not fast enough. I just wanna know: Is that Steven Spielberg's goof-up, or Tobe Hooper's?

But the real mystery of Poltergeist is: What's the subtext with Dominique Dunne's character, Dana? There's something funny going on there: In early scenes she's always eating vegetables like in the early hungry stage of pregnancy, and when her mom mentions a nearby hotel Dana says "Oh, I know that one," as though she's a frequent hotel visitor. At the end of the movie, a guy in a muscle car drops her off and she sports a massive neck hickey before she screams at the sight of the house imploding.

My theory is that Dominique Dunne added all those character bits to spice up her limited screen time. She seemed such a witty person, likely the equal or funnier than her brother Griffin (as he suggests in "The Friday Afternoon Club"). If not for the actions of a pathetic person, Dominique Dunne probably would have ended up in some classic movie comedies. At least we get to see her in Poltergeist.

Dunne taught everybody how to give one of the sassiest, full-armed F.U.'s ever (to a leering construction worker).

So let's nerd it out a bit more, shall we? With…

Chris Nashawaty's book, "The Future Was Now," gives some of its most exhaustive and interesting backstory to the Star Trek chapters. The history of the Star Trek TV show is, on its own, already worthy of a detailed non-fiction work. Nashawaty covers a lot of ground setting up how The Wrath of Khan got made, and it's a tortuous route indeed.

One of the main take-aways is that, as legendary and creative as Gene Roddenberry once was, in creating the original Star Trek show in the 1960s, by the late 1970s and early '80s, he was a really cramping everybody's style. They basically had to stick him in a shed and throw money at him to keep him from ruining Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.

The sequel was also almost ruined by the Star Trek fans. As William Shatner would later say, in a joking-but-is-he-really-joking-really? sketch on Saturday Night Live, "Get a life!" ("You there… Have you ever kissed a girl?") The way the fans almost ruined it was by somehow getting ahold of an early copy of the screenplay as if Russian spies stealing atomic plans at Los Alamos, and running wild with anger, studio protesting, and outright harassment in reaction to learning that -- shudder -- the movie would be killing Spock.

And oh yeah, the movie was almost ruined by Spock, when Leonard Nimoy threatened not to show up at all, because he'd just written a book titled something like, "I Am Not Spock, Dammit, So Get It Through Your Skulls You Vulgar Little Vulcan-Fetish Groupies" (actually more like just "I Am Not Spock"), and he was lounging around in New York City in a turtleneck sweater with a giant chip on his shoulder (and no pointed ears to match), seething with insouciance at how not-Spock he was, and how not-Spocky he was determined to be forevermore.

So the director Nicholas Meyer had to seduce Spock back into Spocking, fan the flames of the fans, keep Gene Roddenberry in the corner holding his rod…denberry, and figure out how to make a movie so good that it singlehandedly saved the entire Star Trek enterprise (and its Enterprise) and launched it into several future decades of reboots and renewals and new shows and heaping photon-loads of profit.

And he had to do all of that while making William Shatner's hairpiece look unlike a dead rodent, and erase the public's memory of the ultra-boring first Star Trek motion picture, creatively titled Star Trek: The Motion Picture That Is a Movie on Film.

And he did it! Whoa! But how did he do it?

Enter Ricardo Montalban and his slick middle-aged chest. Montalban had been the chipper Mr. Rourke on TV's Fantasy Island. Nobody knew what he was hiding under those white leisure suit lapels. That man had the most magnetic heaving muscled man boobs since, well, Conan the Barbarian. Only trimmer, svelter, and fine like rich Corinthian leather.

Plus the story was actually very, very good. All the actors and characters had good scenes and performances. Even Chekov (Walter Koenig) got to turn a bit nasty, due to a giant disgusting slug that went inside his eardrum. Oh, god, that slug thing in the ear. Between that and the maggoty chicken wing in Poltergeist, all of America was about to hurl.

Almost any Star Trek fan will tell you that Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan was a turning point for the Star Trek legacy, and nerds everywhere rejoiced and split their fingers apart and decreed that the International Comic-Con in San Diego would become a massive party and that some day -- some day soon -- the party would have actual women at it. And they were right!

If you connect the dots far enough, you can even credit The Wrath of Khan for making the wonderful Galaxy Quest possible. ("By Grabthar's Hammer...")

That brings us to…

There's so much to say about E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, it's making my fingers all glow in unison. Ouch.

The movie really is a work of art, but I feel weird writing that, because it also made a ridiculous amount of money and because of its overwhelming success, a lot of people kinda hate it. You couldn't go for three days in 1982 without somebody tilting their head like Drew Barrymore while saying "Give me a break, " or cooing "I'll be right here" and pointing at your sternum. Then Neil Diamond came out with the song "Heartlight" and if you'd just eaten McDonald's and heard the song on the radio, it was all you could do not to projectile vomit a rainbow into the stratosphere.

Steven Spielberg made E.T. from the screenplay by Melissa Mathison, and Spielberg has said that he basically let go and used the force when he directed the film, allowing the storytelling to travel through him and around him, like a conduit of pure directing empathy. Or something like that. Spielberg dedicated himself to actuating Mathison's screenplay, and was open to everybody's suggestions during production. Even so, he was operating on all Spiel-inders. The movie's direction is inspired, holds back at the right times, lets the performances shine, has intuitive and natural harmony, and somehow makes its outlandish premise feel real, putting you inside these kids' emotions and sense of pain and so on. It's gooey and sappy and it freaking works. I love the film.

But I still gotta wonder: Is that opening scene, of the kids around the table playing Dungeons & Dragons, based on the painting of the Dogs Playing Poker? It looks like it.

Oh yeah, the John Williams music: Has he done anything so perfectly suited to an emotional through-line? The long composition that ends the film defines the word "soaring." Again, it's not like anybody needs to say any of this, since the movie made forty thousand bagillion dollars.

On the other hand, I always felt like E.T. cribbed a few scenes from Disney movies. The story itself reminds me of The Cat From Outer Space. (Seriously: Watch it and compare.) And the flying-bikes climax is straight out of Escape to Witch Mountain, with the flying Winnebago and Eddie Albert.

Fun fact: Did you know that some of E.T.'s lines were spoken by the actress Debra Winger? Did you know that the little girl in the save-the-frogs kissing scene grew up to be on Baywatch? (And emerge from the cake in Under Siege and, uh, nevermind.)  Did you know that Reese's Pieces were originally made of old crayons and dried shrimp bits? (Some fun facts may not actually be true.)

So that's E.T., the Extra Tarantula... Er, Testic... Er, Terrestrial!

Blade Runner is a deceptive title. There isn't a single knife in the film, and few of the men appear to have recently shaved. Also, nobody ever runs anywhere much (unless leaping across rooptops while holding a white pigeon counts). I'm not sure the toymaker guy can even walk all that well.

As "The Future Was Now" points out, Blade Runner's title is stolen from a William S. Burroughs book, and was originally based on a Philip K. Dick story called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Which would be a really goofy title for a movie, and sounds like something that would end up directed by Mike Nichols or Hal Ashby.

Reading about Blade Runner, it's evident that director Ridley Scott has always moved somewhat sideways through the industry, like a crab with exquisite knowledge of lenses. He's more a visualist than a director, coming from the world of advertising. The story behind Blade Runner is interesting but I'll leave the telling to the professionals. Suffice to say that Philip K. Dick was unhappy with the adaptation of his book, and the rights were being tossed around like a ragdoll while Dick got dick for his intellectual property.

I love Blade Runner and its immersive feel, especially given the neo-noir cyberpunk/tech Metropolis retro neon smoky Los Angeles models and the big kimono lady with her smiling face on a blimp that blares out a foghorn honk while a man talks about "off-world colonies" that the movie never shows us. I love the Vangelis music which is like taking a synthesizer milk bath after taking Percodan. I love how the lighting accentuates people's eyes, glinting with amber through their irises (and an owl's) to make them seem half-human (or half-owl), and Sean Young looks so good, like a noirish 1940s wax figure you want to slow-lick out of a uranium-glass pudding cup for dessert.

But the dirty little secret of Blade Runner is that it's kinda boring. My friends and I rented it on VHS one weekend (yes, on VHS, and mind you, VHS players were new!) and we enjoyed it for a while, and enjoyed Joanna Cassidy cleaning snake scales/sequins off in a techno-shower, but eventually said, "You know what? This is slow." It was only marginally more diverting than waving a flashlight through a jar of sea monkeys.

Which I know is sacrilege. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, and all that.

A couple more terrible opinions:

(1) There's a lot of chatter about whether the Director's Cut is better than the Theatrical Version, and whatever other versions are out there. Screw the Director's Cut! The Theatrical Version is the best. Yes, even with the clunky Harrison Ford narration. Ridley Scott tinkering with the movie isn't George Lucas-level bad, but it's a pain in the ass hearing the endless debates about it. People who say they prefer the Director's Cut are most likely lying out of their replicant bums. The detective procedural barely holds together as it is with narration, but without narration there's a whole lot of dead space, and the main reason people watching the Director's Cut can even follow the progression is because they already saw the Theatrical Version, which made most of the plot points clear. (Except maybe how the Esper machine can see around corners -- that still doesn't make sense.)

(2) The whole thing about Deckard being a replicant is stupid. In the Philip K. Dick story he's not a replicant. In the theatrical version he's never hinted as being a replicant. The unicorn dream is lifted from another movie (Legend) that didn't exist when Blade Runner was made, and doesn't fit the aesthetic of the movie. Edward James Olmos leaving origami critters around is poetic and strange on its own; making it part of a hint scheme cheapens it.

(3) If Deckard's job is to kill replicants that have an expiration date, then why doesn't he just stun 'em till their inner milk curdles? If he's protecting Tyrell from them, then why does Tyrell's overall security suck so badly? He couldn't anticipate replicants taking one of his associates hostage to get a ride up the elevator to his suite? Why, I'm getting so mad thinking about this, I'm about to let go of the white pigeons I grabbed while jumping between rooftops.

Oh man, I'm so in for it if Blade Runner fans ever find this article online. I'll bet some of them will want to go full Daryl Hannah and tumble at me and try to squeeze my head between their thighs (oh please, oh please).

Upon its release, The Thing was actually…. a failure? Whaaaa?

As "The Future Was Now" makes clear, the now-classic movie, one of John Carpenter's best, almost ruined his career.

One problem was that damned E.T. That little alien's movie was so popular that no movies that came out afterward could compete. Unlike E.T. himself, the movie had legs. ("What's E.T. short for?" / "Because he's got little legs.")

The other problem with The Thing was that the ending was so ambiguous. Audiences like happy endings, or happy-ish endings. Even with Blade Runner, you could say that at least Rutger Hauer got a nice final therapy session and got to talk about C-beams and the Tannhauser Gates and stuff. And Harrison Ford got to have romance (if you could call it that) with Sean Young.

What does The Thing have, though? [Find other takes about The Thing and Blade Runner in this article.]The Thing's monster didn't even have a face, and if it did, it would have summarily oozed off and grown legs and then skittered into the shadows.

Also, what a sausage party. Just a bunch of dudes out in the frozen Antarctic snow. Not much sexiness there, unless Kurt Russell playing computer chess is sexy (and it kinda is).

Audiences weren't in the mood for a slow-burn, who's-got-the-cooties story. At least not on a weekend when E.T. was playing nextdoor.

Years later, the movie holds up well, especially the wonderfully disgusting and unexpected creature deformations.

On the minus side, the movie's final act does cheat a bit. For most of the movie you can chart where the characters are, roughly, and chart which ones have had their bodies overtaken by The Things. At the end, though, there are elisions where you don't know the locations or actions of most of the remaining characters. It's spooky and paranoia-inducing, almost in a way prefiguring the sudden "WTF just happened?" ending of No Country for Old Men. So on that count, it works.

John Carpenter's career and reputation survived, eventually, and thankfully. His personal story is one of the book's more compelling ones, given his more outsider-ey style of Hollywood career.

Finally, let's go inside the computer to locate….

Tron is a wild little movie, and its story stands out more than the rest of the films in "The Future Was Now," because it's as much an animated film as it is a live-action one. It did something truly different, and even today, if you watch Tron, it's still radically different -- particularly visually -- from anything you'll see anywhere else.

Steven Lisberger designed the graphics in a company based on the East Coast. The journey to make Tron was long series of test screenings and presentations to Disney executives, who were reeling from the studio's long-term slide into obsolescence after the death of Roy Disney. The studio's films had been lower-budget kid films, and Disney hadn't made a big, successful animated movie in a long while. Their attempts to do so, such as The Black Cauldron, had been misguided attempts to approach the new movie era using old-fashioned methods.

Disney started to try new approaches, the first one resulting in The Black Hole, a very odd movie (which I kinda love anyway) that wanted to be like Star Wars but was a heck of a lot more like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Somebody said "Han Solo!" but the filmmakers heard "Captain Nemo?"

Tron is also pretty odd, but it's so very, very odd that it's something special. The visual effects are astonishingly beautiful, and to date nobody has been able to create anything like them, undoubtedly because to make Tron required numerous layers of processing, cel-coloring, green-screening, and texture-altering that involved shipping cels all over the world to be hand-colored and processed. For a movie that is based in the promise of a digital future, the entire thing took a ton of analog work to create.

Every frame of Tron has a low-key glow that fills your eyes with color. It's not neon, exactly. It's like film grain mixed with mesmerizing techno light. The characters look like they're in a 1920s film such as Metropolis, and indeed, the story feels like it's inspired by the futurism of 1927's Metropolis, but transported into a mini-totalitarian "society" of a virtual computer world that has been taken over by the OCP, a command program that wants to block, shut out and "de-rez" other programs based on the idea of transparency and open access for everybody.

I watched Tron recently and liked it even more than I did when it came out. When Tron came out I thought it was "neat," but also forgot it quickly. The characters are not that compelling, and their relationships seem directed at the service of getting them inside the computer world. The people aren't driving the story; the visuals are driving everything.

That said, the visuals are worth it. In terms of the art of what's on screen, Tron might be one of the most beautiful movies, start to finish, in cinema history. It's up there with The Wizard of Oz, Mary Poppins, and Fantasia in terms of eye-popping color, and it has a distinct palette I doubt could be replicated with just CGI. When Disney made a sequel, TRON: Legacy, in 2010, they made it look cool but it's nowhere near as distinct as Tron.

I also never noticed how much the visuals owe to Jean Giraud (Moebius), the French cartoonist who designed a lot of Tron's scenes. Having become more familiar with his work over the years, its appearance throughout Tron is unmistakable.

Though the characters are incidental, there are some strange things happening under the surface with Bruce Boxleitner (a dull on-screen presence compared to his co-star), Jeff Bridges, and Cindy Morgan, the latter of whom plays a digitizer whose work leads Jeff Bridges' character (a hotshot programmer) to get sucked inside the computer program.

What the threesome?: In the human story, Bruce and Cindy's characters are romantic partners, but she had a previous relationship with Jeff Bridges' character. Inside the Tron computer, though, Bridges' character ends up kissing Cindy's character, as if still in love with her. When the three of them eventually succeed and get out of the computer and back into real life, Cindy Morgan is in an angora sweater and seems to be equally cozy with both men -- as if the entire experience convinced the three of them to let loose and embrace a full polyamorous relationship. I guess the non-kinky version of the story was boring enough that I had to fabricate that alternative take, but I'm gonna run with it. Plus, I've heard stories that this is often how things go in the tech industry.

None of that crossed my mind as a kid. I think I ended up having more fun playing the Tron arcade videogame than watching the Tron movie. It was one of the more offbeat games at the arcade, with a big honkin' joystick (as if the MCP were saying "Mine is bigger") and four different types of gameplay. It was gratifying when you won and rose into the glowing electric lamplight, or whatever the heck that was. Much preferable to being de-rezzed.