US Homeland Security classes TRON as ’sensitive’ - oh really?

Saturday, March 31st, 2007

Are we to believe that the US Department of Homeland Security has designated the 1982 film TRON as ’sensitive’, and has ordered Walt Disney Studios to turn over all copies of the film?

TRON is a science-fiction film where the adventure takes place within a computer’s circuitry. The character Kevin Flynn is pulled into the computer using a laser controlled by an evil Master Control Program.

I am having a very hard time believing this story. I first encountered it on Fusion Anamolog.

The US government does many stupid things. With a monkey in charge, an illegal occupation to balls up, evangelical Christians making insane commentaries and accusations every day, it’s hardly surprising. But while torture and other human rights abuses at Guantanamo Bay are sadly all too believable and known to take place, I’m very much aware that TRON is broadcast ad nauseum on the Sci-Fi Channel here in the UK and across the world. So. Balderdash. And it ain’t April Fool’s Day yet, either.

I find it stretches credulity that a film with, to modern eyes, decidedly ropey graphics throughout might possibly have the Department of Homeland Security in a tizz. If the story is true, not that it is, it would make the US government an international laughing stock while at the same time horrifying anyone who already believes the US has lost all perspective and grasp on reality. I mean, I think at times that the US government has, but I don’t think it’s quite that insane quite yet.

Official concern is reported by Kuro5hin to centre around part of the film’s live-action sequence filmed at Shiva, a nuclear fusion research facility created at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Built in 1977 for conducting research into fusion energy, the Shiva laser made use of a battery of enormous lasers to smash tiny pellets of deuterium and tritium. It was hoped the resulting compression and shock wave would reveal how fusion could be triggered in the elements. The facility was dismantled in 1981 after experiments were completed and its successor Nova was built. The reason the film is said to now be in trouble is because Shiva, as a government-funded nuclear research programme, was and is subject to certain national security guidelines.

Hmm. Really? Yet I can link in the above paragraph to a wikipedia.org entry about it. Lax security indeed.

If the story turns out to be genuine, I will hold my hand up and say I wasn’t a believer, I was wrong. But there’s more chance my left big toe will birth a pixie in the shower one morning before July. Another really telling point for me, besides the availabilty of Shiva stuff online, is this: an unnamed Disney employee is reported by Kuro5hin as having been assigned the task of locating copies of the film in the studio’s archives, and said that ‘they’–who, Homeland Security representatives?–said that ‘the [Shiva] scenes contained sensitive nuclear information’.

Rubbish. The film is quite boring and lame by today’s standards and is mostly composed of coloured lines on black backgrounds. The predominant colour is a luminescent green because in those days many computer screens used green text on black. Try as you might, watch it as often as you want, you will never come away from a viewing with nuclear secrets lodged inside your head.

Now, most everyone knows it isn’t going to be hard for Disney to get hold of any of the material the company has ever produced. I mean, Mickey Mouse’s very first adventure, Steamboat Willie, is available on DVD for the public to buy in all its black-and-white 1920s glory. So the original copies of TRON, comparatively recently produced, won’t exactly be hidden behind a box of old floppy disks in a cupboard somewhere, covered in dust and forgotten.

Here’s the rub. ‘I mean, the film’s been out for 25 years,’ we read the Disney employee as saying. ‘All of a sudden, there’s something wrong with it? It’s silly.’

Got that? The film’s been out for 25 years.

‘TRON is a landmark in film history. You can’t simply make it go away,’ said another Disney employee, apparently. Again, according to another Disney employee—lots of them seem to have lots to say, but no names—the fuss and bother is ‘believed to have started when the studio began preparations to digitally remaster TRON for theatrical and HD-DVD release’.

Viral marketing campaign, anyone? Way too early April Fool’s Day joke meaning the originator is the fool, not the readers duped by it? It could be either, or both. But it’s not true. That I am sure of.

categories: film & video