The Best ‘Tron’ Sequel Is Still This ‘South Park’ Episode
A.I. is ruining the planet, and Jared Leto is an accused sexual predator — but combine the two and you get a $180 million Disney movie, apparently.
This weekend sees the release of Tron: Ares, the third installment in the franchise that taught ‘80s audiences that computer programs are basically just people in skintight fluorescent bodysuits.
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The original movie came out way back in 1982, and while it was a modest box-office success, it fell below industry expectations and “was considered a flop,” which would explain why one Simpsons “Treehouse of Horror” episode paused to point out the film’s complete cultural irrelevance.
In 2010, Tron got a belated sequel, Tron: Legacy. Apart from a banger of a Daft Punk soundtrack, Legacy is mostly terrible, and is perhaps best remembered as the movie that de-aged Jeff Bridges until he became a dead-eyed CGI Bill Maher.
But we actually did get a pretty great Tron follow-up in 2010. In fact, it came out several months before Tron: Legacy did. And it starred a bunch of foul-mouthed, two-dimensional 10-year-olds.
The fourth episode of South Park’s 14th season, “You Have 0 Friends,” found Stan being pressured into joining Facebook, back when Facebook was still a thing that young people cared about. But Stan becomes frustrated with the stresses of maintaining virtual “friends” and opts to delete his entire profile.
Unfortunately, this decision leads to him being sucked into Facebook, which is basically just the world of Tron, full of “profiles” of people from real life.
Once he’s imprisoned in Facebook, Stan is forced to compete in games, just like how the hero of Tron had to participate in the video games from Flynn’s Arcade. But instead of racing Light Cycles, Stan just has to play Yahtzee and also… no, it’s just Yahtzee.
Stan ultimately ends up battling his own Facebook profile (over a game of Yahtzee) after proclaiming that the commodification of friends needs to end.
The episode cleverly used the retro sci-fi trappings of Tron to tell a story that was very much about contemporary technology, which is more than we can say for Tron: Legacy. While arcades were mostly a thing of the past by 2010, much of the world was already addicted to Facebook. And the show adeptly illustrated how inane and pointless social media interactions can be.
Clearly Trey Parker and Matt Stone have a deep appreciation for Tron considering that, long before “You Have 0 Friends” aired, they made the unusual decision to depict Moses, the Biblical prophet, as the Master Control Program from Tron in Season Three’s "Jewbilee.”
Since Jesus returned to the show for Season 37, maybe South Park will bring back Moses/MCP someday soon.
