Now Free Online: The Soundtrack For The Film That Never Was – 'Tron, Rise of the Virals'

posted by Jett Loe

Jul 24, 1999 – CNET News Story – Pixar and Disney Collaborating on a new Tron film:

Pixar Studios to remake Disney’s Tron?

It set the scene for a generation of hi-tech sci-fi movies and, arguably, inspired some of the best films of the genre. Tron, the legendary Disney movie loved by the thirty-something generation, is rumored to be in the re-make room with some very serious backers, including Steve Jobs.

Jobs, on stage this week with the iBook, also has another day job, running Pixar Animation Studios (Nasdaq:PIXR), maker of “Toy Story” and “A Bug’s Life.” According to one source, Pixar may be working on a remake of the classic ’80s sci-fi film.

The source, who asked not to be identified, said Pixar is trying to decide whether to remake the original or create a sequel. It will begin work on the project once Toy Story II hits the theaters November 24. John Lasseter, Toy Story’s director, will head the production.

November 1st, 2009 – The ‘Tron’ sequel never sees the light of day – we don’t know why.  But now comes word that work on the film was far further along than anyone suspected.  A soundtrack was commissioned.  Now, 10 years after conception, that soundtrack has been released, free for all in multiple formats:

Tron Rise of the Virals

In late 1998, I was commissioned to compile and produce the soundtrack for a sequel to the film “Tron”. A draft of the story had already been written and early filming had begun (as reported by ZDNet on July 27, 1999). As I understand it, the film was kept in great confidence with the producers as Pixar was still in negotiations with Disney about the responsibilities of the production teams.

“Rise Of The Virals” was a fantastic, but much darker storyline from the original — different from the “Into The Machine” pitch made to Disney by another party. It involved updating the ENCOM universe to a networked system (thanks to the Internet), but also created a darker world — full of programs abandoned as buggy systems (or “mutants”) and abused by corrupt users as viral systems. Furthermore, the story included the death of Flynn and presented questions about the digital life of programs lasting beyond the mortality of their creators — the users.

My task was to compile great underground artists to create a new soundtrack for this darker world of Tron. After the completion of the initial tracklist and first production draft of the soundtrack, it seemed as if negotiations between Pixar and Disney had broken down. Funding for the project was eventually pulled.

- – -

I don’t know how much, if any, of the above quote is true.  But what does it matter?  What is meaningful here is the music.  It’s being pitched as the soundtrack for a lost film – and as such while listening one cannot separate oneself from the sense of the elegiac; from a sense of nostalgia for a future that never was.  A world of the future from 1999 – in which we’d strap in/plug in to a virtual reality that promised…what?  Now, instead of escaping into a virtual world, the virtual world has seeped into real life.  We’re beginning to craft a virtual world around us using the hive mind technologies of Twitterbook and the like.

So are we, in fact, moving into the ‘inverse future’ of what would have been promised by ‘Rise of the Virals’?  And, if it had been made, how would it have changed how we use and view technology today?  We can’t know – but listen to the music.  You can just about feel it – as if you had a fleeting, hazy glimpse of a some parallel universe that just might be around us, all the time.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter if we can’t reach that parallel world – maybe in memory an unfinished film can become more present to us than it ever would have been if it had been completed.  If ‘Rise of the Virals’ had been made we’d have digital copies of it in whatever format we wanted at any time we wanted.  But how can digital be something real, real to us as analog creatures; how could it be something remembered?  Digital copies are exact – there is no change in the information, 1 is always 1, forever – this isn’t memory – memory degrades – digital is something else.

Memory is analog – memory moves and resculpts and disappears.

Strange ramblings I know on a late Sunday night this November 1st – but that’s what the ‘Viral’s’ soundtrack stirs in me.  It’s the future we never had.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 1st, 2009 at 11:00 pm. It is filed under Animation, Blog, Cult, Experimental, Jett Loe, Science Fiction, Sequels, Technology, Who Knows?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.