Just an observation that I’m sure someone else has elaborated on much better, but it did take me a bit to notice the most subtle tonal difference between Tron and Tron:Legacy, and that lies in the Grid.
One of my first thoughts when I watched the original was how the music during the solar sailor sequence sounded like the viewer ought to be watching a pastoral scene in a documentary, or a far more mystical movie. That confused me a little, but I just kind of wrote it off as “ Early 80s synth being early 80s synth.”
Only revisiting the movie made me realize that ‘82 Grid is a magical fantasy world, just in digital format. There’s literally glowing pools of drinkable ~~sparkle water~~ energy, and background characters that could easily be mistaken for members of the fae.
Like, Sark may as well be the snazzy headdress wearing evil wizard answering to a mystical overlord. Moebius certainly did design a few of those in his day.
Unlike Legacy, which took it’s view of the grid from how daily life might be replicated in a computer context, Tron took it more as an entirely different universe. I think you can oddly see it best in the deleted scene’s backdrop-
This looks like I’m about to see a mermaid swim by. I’m saying this with the understanding that the later Grid was modernized under the plot of Flynn replicating his reality, but here’s Legacy’s bedroom-
Tron was working from a fantasy context, and Legacy from what’s more accepted as sci-fi. I can’t even say it was working specifically with material from the 20 odd years between the two films, because the most obvious inspiration for Flynn’s abode was 2001: Space Odyssey, which predated Tron itself.
(It’s worth noting, too, that Tron has a ton of visual space that’s devoid of people, as if they didn’t want to distract from the view too much. Legacy, and by extension, Uprising, are packed city-scapes. It no longer has the sparse, almost liminal feeling of the original.)
Which leads me to something I never thought I’d say, which is…Tron was kind of the conceptual Avatar of it’s day, wasn’t it? Not so much in a “fern gully” way, but in a “look at this fantastical place” way?
(If only the ratings could’ve reflected that.)

Ooh!

Definitely. 82’s embracing of itself as a fantasy story with sci-fi themes is part of why I love it so much; to me it succeeds much better at that than Legacy did as the sci-fi that it was trying to be.

And Tron was definitely like Avatar, in the sense of being a pivotal work making use of brand new filming technology.

The same way that it was like The Wizard of Oz, which did the same for color filmmaking that Tron did for CGI and Avatar did for 3-D motion-capture.

(i think I saw an interview where Lisberger said the shift in aesthetics upon entering the computer world was deliberately intended to have a Wizard of Oz feel to it. Which my Pattern Recognizer found thrilling – because it points out so very many connections. All Flynn’s delightfully gay rainbow decorations in his apartment and arcade? That’s his way of singing Over The Rainbow! Meeting programs who should not have had any possible way of being alive and sentient and yet were? That’s the Tin Man’s heart and the Scarecrow’s brain, baby! The wizard is a giant red head instead of a giant green head, but how different is that, really?)

…And hey maybe it’s also a little bit like Avatar in the Fern Gully sense– if that means it’s about “a regular person who goes into a mysterious new world and really doesn’t understand it at first but eventually falls in love with it and helps save it.” Avatar and Tron and Fern Gully– and actually probably The Wizard of Oz too– all did that; it’s pretty much how the genre (isekai? Proto-isekai?) works.

And it’s beautiful.