Tron was the tip of the iceberg

I was lucky enough to have worked with Cindy Morgan briefly during early 1981, just before she landed the job as female lead on Tron. I was a fledgling actor at the time and was working on a pilot for a new TV show called "Mitchell and Woods", starring Cindy Morgan and Jane Kennedy. This show was designed to be a female cop show spin-off of the popular "CHiPS" TV series of the late 70's.

Ironically, it was shortly after the shoot one day that I saw Cindy looking extremely excited as she was talking to someone on a pay phone which was on location of the set not far from Los Angeles (recall we didn't have cell phones in those days). I can't be certain, but I would swear that this was the phone call where she learned that she had landed the part on the movie Tron. The "Mitchell and Woods" TV series folded the very next day and soon afterwards Cindy was busy at work on the movie Tron.

As sorry as I was that our pilot was cancelled, I was also exteremely psyched about the Tron movie. Tron flirted with many similar plots in what film historians will likely someday assign as an entire genre of computer sci fi. Novels such as Neuromancer, Snowcrash, and movies such as Blade Runner and Max Headroom all began to emerge in the early 80's timeframe, just as the computer industry was beginning to transform from the relatively cloistered "main-frame", to the minis, and ultimately to the personal computer realms. Just as computers began to bring cyberspace to the masses, so too were movies such as Tron just beginning to capture the wild imaginings of cyberworld dreamers.

Tron was only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to cyber stories of this type. Cyberspace is truly the final frontier of the imagination.

Dave McLure (aka "dav0")