Last night I happened to be flipping through the channels and saw that Tron was on HDNET. Tron was a favorite when I was a kid, and I hadn’t seen it in a few years, so I flipped over.
After watching it for a little while, I’ve gotta tell you I was wowed by it. It honestly took me longer than I’d like to admit to myself to realize I was watching Tron in High Definition, and it looked awesome.
I’ve had my 50 inch 1080p DLP HD TV since the World Cup in 2006 (so that I could watch all the soccer games in High Definition), and while I have become an HD snob for TV shows and Sports, I haven’t yet put in the money to switch my movie watching to Blu-Ray and full HD. Part of that had to do with the Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD wars, and part of that is because I had an addiction to buying DVD’s from around 2003 – 2008 that took me a while to get over. (I’m doing good in the fact that I’ve only purchased one DVD for myself in the past 2 ½ years – Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and it was a used copy for cheap.)
This viewing of Tron reminded me how awesome HD can be. Now that I think about it, the only other HD movies I’ve watch are The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, and The Fifth Element, and I remember thinking those looked great too. But Tron is a little different because these computer graphics should be incredibly dated by now with the dawn of Avatar in 3D (Which on a sidenote, I’m over Avatar these days because it just looks like stuff we’ve seen in Final Fantasy games for years—that, and the overly clichéd story).
Instead of looking dated, Tron in HD looked really polished and cool. Sure it was hokey at parts, and the technology is simple polygons and such, but you tell me when you can watch Tron in HD and not want to create a custom Tron costume next Halloween.