Tron: Uprising

[sojourner]

Yeah, the season finally was pretty good. I thought someone said it had already been canceled though. The viewer ship numbers probably wouldn't have been so bad if it had aired at a reasonable hour instead of midnight on Sundays.

[Mr Light]

I kept through it to the end. The final episodes were very good, but most of the episodes before that felt a little shallow and time-wasting. I was hoping for a big elaboration on the world of the Grid, but it definitely suffered from small universe syndrome. Still, the graphics of the city and the technology were gorgeous!

Wikipedia says its canceled. Once they decided to burn off the rest of the episodes at midnight it was clearly dead already...

[flavaflav]

I thought the show was great. If it is indeed cancelled, that really stinks, but at least the last episode works as a finale. I would really have liked to see Disney air Tron Uprising after The Clone Wars once that switches channels. I think that would have helped Uprising's ratings tremendously.

[bullethead]

I don't think anyone is sure that the show is cancelled - at the Annie's (an animation award show), one of the staff gave a long speech about how they were still fighting to get the show done. Considering how Uprising could be used as a part of the Tron 3 marketing scheme, it seems like there's a possibility for it to survive. I'm not sure exactly how bad the ratings were, because I've heard conflicting maximum viewer numbers for Disney XD - on one hand, I've seen some of the live action stuff get 1 million+ viewers on rating sites, while on the other hand, I've heard that the total viewers for XD are around 400K, which makes Uprising's ratings much better.

As for Uprising, I felt that it ended pretty strongly, but there were a few aspects that were rushed, probably due to the odd episode count (18 for the season as opposed to 20). That said, I think the show did a good job of expanding the world through the visuals and making the characters pretty compelling, the latter being something live action genre shows have had a hard time doing lately. Between that and the way they serialized this show, I'm more inclined to come back to this over the latest crop of speculative fiction by other networks.

[Christopher]

The show did eventually win me over -- I hated its design style and jerky animation at first, but got used to them and became somewhat invested in the storytelling. But I think it was hampered in later episodes by a reluctance to modify the status quo. We got a bunch of episodes about Beck trying to recruit new members for the uprising and failing every single time. If you're going to put Uprising in the title of your show, you should include an actual uprising, which means a popular movement, not just one guy and his mentor. It would've worked better if we'd actually seen Beck build a following over the course of the season.

[Mr. Adventure]

Well to play the word origin game, uprising originally meant to rise from the grave or resurrection before it meant revolt so perhaps it's appropriate for this series after all. Additonally, the final act of rebellion in Tron is for one's disk to rise up and defeat the environment.

[bullethead]

Christopher wrote:

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The show did eventually win me over -- I hated its design style and jerky animation at first, but got used to them and became somewhat invested in the storytelling. But I think it was hampered in later episodes by a reluctance to modify the status quo. We got a bunch of episodes about Beck trying to recruit new members for the uprising and failing every single time. If you're going to put Uprising in the title of your show, you should include an actual uprising, which means a popular movement, not just one guy and his mentor. It would've worked better if we'd actually seen Beck build a following over the course of the season.

I can see where you're coming from, but I actually felt that was pretty clever and fit with one of the lines from the end of Beck's Beginning, where Tron's like "there'll be a lot of failures before we make progress." If there'd been a huge ground swell of support too early for what's essentially a one man rebellion, it would've cheapened the whole struggle to build the uprising, along with Beck's development. Beck's decision to not make Mara part of the uprising at the end of that episode showed that he was starting to mature as a leader, because he wasn't willing to risk the life of one of his most committed supporters (and friend) so early in the process, instead allowing her to keep on spreading the word and potentially swaying more programs to join the movement.

Plus I liked the fact that the good guys weren't really winning, just keeping their own against the occupation. It's a nice contrast with shows that go too far in having the good guys win too much or having them get shit on all the time. Having programs not join for their own personal reasons or just because they didn't have the right mindset also helped humanize the whole situation - honestly, how many people are really willing to give up their place in life in exchange for taking up a cause that could easily end in death? The fact that most potential recruits said "not for me" is a lot more realistic than having every one of them be totally into the cause from the moment they appeared.

[Christopher]

Mr. Adventure wrote:

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Well to play the word origin game, uprising originally meant to rise from the grave or resurrection before it meant revolt so perhaps it's appropriate for this series after all. Additonally, the final act of rebellion in Tron is for one's disk to rise up and defeat the environment.

But for the past four centuries and more -- the entire history of Modern English and then some -- it's meant an insurrection or revolt. And we know that's what the creators of the series explicitly intended, since they repeatedly used the word "uprising" to mean an insurrection in actual onscreen dialogue. We were told in as many words that Beck and Tron's goal was to recruit people to join an uprising against Tesler and ultimately Clu. That was the overt mission statement of the show, and yet they kept having Beck fail to make any progress at it whatsoever.

bullethead wrote:

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I can see where you're coming from, but I actually felt that was pretty clever and fit with one of the lines from the end of Beck's Beginning, where Tron's like "there'll be a lot of failures before we make progress." If there'd been a huge ground swell of support too early for what's essentially a one man rebellion, it would've cheapened the whole struggle to build the uprising, along with Beck's development. Beck's decision to not make Mara part of the uprising at the end of that episode showed that he was starting to mature as a leader, because he wasn't willing to risk the life of one of his most committed supporters (and friend) so early in the process, instead allowing her to keep on spreading the word and potentially swaying more programs to join the movement.

And it would've been fine if they'd started with that but then had him gradually have some success as the season went on. Then there would've been an arc. As it was, every one of his attempts to win recruits in the final third of the season ended up in failure, and the one character who turned out to have been allied with Tron all along was killed off -- so not only was Beck right back where he'd started, but he'd actually lost ground. And that just feels like the standard conceit of an episodic TV series that doesn't want to mess with the status quo. It felt like the way TV was done decades ago, when everything had to be reset at the end, when the quest wasn't a genuine arc but just an excuse to move the character from situation to situation.

[Praetor_Shinzon]

the last five or six episodes were really great. but i'd say the show is finished. they moved it to midnight and i don't think its even on the Disney XD schedule any longer.

[bullethead]

Christopher wrote:

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And it would've been fine if they'd started with that but then had him gradually have some success as the season went on. Then there would've been an arc. As it was, every one of his attempts to win recruits in the final third of the season ended up in failure, and the one character who turned out to have been allied with Tron all along was killed off -- so not only was Beck right back where he'd started, but he'd actually lost ground. And that just feels like the standard conceit of an episodic TV series that doesn't want to mess with the status quo. It felt like the way TV was done decades ago, when everything had to be reset at the end, when the quest wasn't a genuine arc but just an excuse to move the character from situation to situation.

The implication of the end of the finale (at least the part before Clu shows up) is that Able's garage crew (plus Bartik and Hopper) is now the core of a larger uprising, since they stood between Pavel and the Renegade, so for once, Beck got a clear victory, even though he lost a lot of people along the way. That said, I do agree that Beck probably should've had a few more successes along the way to balance things out, but I felt like his lack of success wasn't that big a negative since it fit the dark tone of the show.

[Christopher]

^Granted, my problem with the whole concept of the series is that we knew going in that the titular uprising was doomed to failure. It's kind of the same problem Star Wars: The Clone Wars has.