Twenty years after Disney Studios financed and distributed the video-game fantasy Tron, the film looks both prescient and quaint. As a story about a handful of computer programmers endeavoring to ensure unrestricted access to the network they helped create, Tron foresaw the question that has gripped technology types since the popularization of the Internet: whether the advancements of the computer age offer an opportunity to uplift humanity, or to make a potload of money. That question is also rooted in the counterculture ethos of the decade preceding Tron, and aside from the Atari-inspired console video games, the film's fuzzy idealism is its most dated feature. The new double-disc DVD edition of Tron contains a 90-minute behind-the-scenes documentary detailing the movie's origins in a Massachusetts animation shop run by Steven Lisberger, a fantasy-minded gearhead who created the character of Tron in a Heavy Metal-esque promo clip to be used on TV commercials for rock radio stations. Lisberger and his team wanted to work with the developing art of computer animation, so they came up with an idea for a feature film about a game designer (ultimately played by Jeff Bridges) who gets digitized and sucked into the computer world, where he engages in gladiatorial combat and attempts to wrest control of the network from the restrictive Master Control Program. Disney bought the idea and released the heavily hyped Tron to mixed reviews and mild box office. Audiences of 1982 may have been somewhat turned off by the confusing cosmology of anthropomorphic "programs" with simplistic faith in their godlike "users"—a wannabe head-trip concept cribbed from the New Age-y science fiction of the '70s, and dressed up with Silicon Valley buzzwords. Seen today, Tron's thematic overtures have a certain silly charm, enhancing rather than detracting from its core virtues. What really makes Tron work is an astonishing sense of design, which converts the limitations of early-'80s computer graphics into blessings, much as Toy Story would do a generation later, by sticking with the shapes and textures that machines can render well. The computer world of Tron is shot in flickering black and white, overlaid with glowing grids of color that give the imagined environments a substance that more realistic special effects rarely achieve. Vivid colors and swooping point-of-view shots provide the remainder of the film's enduring qualities, played out in chase sequences and fight scenes that zip along, leaving beautiful trails in their wake.