Tron: Uprising

Discussion in 'Science Fiction & Fantasy' started by marillion, May 14, 2012.

  1. Mr. Adventure

    Mr. Adventure Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    On Jimmy Kimmel's show last night they had Paul Reubens on plugging Tron Uprising. You don't usually see cartoons getting pushed outside of the prime time comedies.
     
  2. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    Kimmel's show is on ABC, which is owned by Disney, which produces Tron: Uprising. So basically they're just shilling for their corporate masters. The one thing Disney has elevated into its highest art form isn't animation, it's self-promotion.
     
  3. bullethead

    bullethead Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    It's just a shame that the show is on Disney XD, because I doubt people are willing to shell out the money to get that channel (then again, it's a basic channel on some cable/satellite packages) or go to iTunes to buy the show without actually watching it before hand. I've seen the ratings for Tron Uprising and they're not really all that great, even taking into account the whole premium channel thing and the time slot changes.
     
  4. Dick Whitman

    Dick Whitman Commodore Commodore

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    That does not surprise me. The show is buried in a low profile channel. Also it would probably have done better if released within a year after the movie came out.

    I think this show is OK at most. My opinion of it is similar to Legacy. I like it but it's hard to get involved. Some of the things I liked about the original was the visual design and the parallels with the real world. Without the programs representing users it hard to care about them.
     
  5. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    Actually, after catching a missed episode via my cable provider's On Demand channels, I'm thinking I might prefer to watch the whole series that way from now on. I have to wait longer to get new episodes, but I can watch them properly letterboxed, commercial-free, and without those huge annoying animated graphics promoting the shows coming up next.
     
  6. marillion

    marillion Vice Admiral Admiral

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    I missed the episode with Qorra, dammit... And On Demand is frustratingly inconsistent with the episodes they make available... I've got to make a better effort to set the DVR.
     
  7. sojourner

    sojourner Admiral In Memoriam

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    Disney XD's promo's during the episodes really turn the obnoxious factor to 11 don't they? When the onscreen graphic becomes so large that it's blocking major plot points from being seen, they've gone to far.
     
  8. bullethead

    bullethead Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    Yeah, it's even worse in HD, where it's a bit larger. Not sure why they couldn't use something smaller or just do line up bumpers during the commercials like Toonami does.
     
  9. Mr. Adventure

    Mr. Adventure Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    This series hasn't done much for me but I thought I'd try to catch that one and yeah, they don't make it easy. Couldn't see it in the repeats or on demand listings. It seems the toons aren't as ubiquitous as they once were on the channel.
     
  10. The Nth Doctor

    The Nth Doctor Infinite Possibilities... Premium Member

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    Has anyone else kept up with this? The final episodes finally aired and came to a great conclusion. While the season ends on a cliffhanger, the show can easily stand on its own if this is the end of the run. I definitely want to see more but it sounds like the viewership numbers are terrible.
     
  11. sojourner

    sojourner Admiral In Memoriam

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    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.
     
  12. Mr Light

    Mr Light Admiral Admiral

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    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...
     
  13. Booji

    Booji Commodore Premium Member

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    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.
     
  14. bullethead

    bullethead Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    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.
     
  15. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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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.
     
  16. Mr. Adventure

    Mr. Adventure Fleet Admiral Admiral

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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. :)
     
  17. bullethead

    bullethead Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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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.

    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.
     
  18. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    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.


    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.
     
  19. Saga

    Saga Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    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.
     
  20. bullethead

    bullethead Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    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.