In Defense of Bad Movies

Let's get one thing out of the way right off. The original Disney film Tron (1982) was in many ways an awful movie. The stilted love triangle between Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), Lora (Cindy Morgan), and Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner) is nearly unwatchable. The electronic world that the film depicts, while visually stunning thanks more to the design work of Jean Giraud and Syd Mead than to any specialized production techniques, is hard to follow and internally inconsistent 1 . The Wendy Carlos score has its moments, but mostly it reflects the thinking of the '70s and early '80s that noodling on a synthesizer was all it took to make a movie sound futuristic 2 . Then there's that Journey single that we hear during the sequence at Flynn's Arcade, so cheesy that even by Journey's standards it wasn't good enough to go on one of their albums, all because Supertramp—fucking Supertramp—pulled out at the last minute. You can't even really make the case that desp...