How BIG are Recognizers, actually? Every time I try to look it up, there seems to be no established size. Even on the wikis, there’s no exact measurement.
I feel like it varies between grids too. Encom/82, Flynn’s grid, Dillinger’s grid… All different
Alrighty, I may have fallen asleep before I could finish this last night, but I got some numbers crunched today and the actual result is absolutely not what I expected! So let me break down what exactly I did to get the heights that I did, which involved inventing placeholder units based on actor proxies to get a better sense of scale.
This will be the first of at least two (likely three) reblogs due to limits on images per reblog. It’ll take me a little time, but they will all be up soon!
[Disclaimers: the results are a ballpark estimate. There are complicating factors for getting an exact height for each of them, but the results I yielded are at least pretty damn close. I also did not include the Recognizers from Uprising due to lacking a measurable real proxy to compare them to.]
First: the ‘82 Recognizers
The first thing I did for each Recognizer iteration was to find good screencaps to use. I ended up needing more for '82 than the latter two versions combined, since we don’t get a single shot with a lone Program (or Flynn) and a full Recognizer in frame. That posed a bit of a problem, so I started by looking at these two images:
On one hand, we can see that the physical set and digital model don’t match 100 percent. The ledge above their heads in the second image is absent in the first, where the 'roofline’ slopes down to about the height of where the bottom of the ledge should be. Close enough for us to figure out what the height of that area should be for the digital model.
And alas, poor Ram. But what’s helpful here is Flynn, since he’s standing mostly upright in the entrance to the cockpit. Were he fully upright and at the exact top of the slope, it would be safe to guess that his height would more or less equal the height from the floor to the bottom of the ledge just above the entrance. Hence, the unit I used for this one was Kevins.
Then, we have this image, which is the clearest head-on shot of a Recognizer in the movie:
… the only problem being, though, that it’s shown from behind. Compare that to this shot from the front, which is slightly more skewed and blurrier:
Yeah, not the most helpful on its own.
But layer the two as closely as possible?
Now we’re getting somewhere. We can put in a unit line (one Kevin) from floor height to the bottom of the ledge, and start duplicating from there.
Ultimately, the '82 Recognizer was 70.5 Kevins tall. But how tall is a Kevin, anyway?
We’ll round a smidge and call that 6 feet. Then it’s just a matter of converting Kevins to feet, which gets us…
423 feet. Absolutely massive!
Sigh, I fully had the second rb ready to go and then the site crashed on me when I tried to actually rb it, so let’s try this again…
Second: the Legacy Recognizers
This one was by far the easiest to figure out, in part thanks to this great shot:
… and the fact that these are seemingly the Weenie Hut Jrs. of Recognizers.
Logically, the unit for this one is Sams. It’s hard to see exactly where the top of his head is, but we can get close given that the top of the head aligns roughly with the elbow with an arm raised like this. And how tall is a Sam?
We’ll round again to 6'3", or 6.25 feet.
So how tall is this itty bitty little Recognizer? Just 6.75 Sams, or in other words…
'Only’ about 42 feet!
Third: Ares Recognizers
This one wasn’t as quick to do as Legacy’s, but still fairly easy. There’s a good wide shot of Athena’s Recognizer:
It’s hard to tell exactly where she’s standing at first glance. A closer shot shows that where she’s standing as she pilots it places her feet level to the entry floor, and her head a little below her screens.
Going back to the first image, we can get a one-Athena unit for scale.
Now there is a tiny bit of the bottom of the Recognizer’s legs that’s cut off in this image, so the bottom line for measuring needs to be cheated a tad low. Still, we can yield a pretty good number of 26 Athenas, or in other words…
About 150 feet!
I absolutely was not expecting for the '82 version to be so incredibly gigantic compared to the others. To get a better sense of scale, here are all three together:
And here they are with the Pyramids of Giza for comparison, the tallest of which at 430 feet is just seven feet taller than the '82 Recognizer!
I wasn’t kidding when I said the Legacy version is the Weenie Hut Jr. edition. As imposing as they looked in the movie, they’re dinky as hell compared to the others.
THIS WAS AN AWESOME READ!! Thank you for this amazing addition and your brave adventure into researching! 🫡
Thank you! Interestingly enough, I’ve already found one correction to make: as it turns out, there’s actually a fourth size!
Someone asked me if these numbers meant we could figure out how big the light cycles are. So, using the same methods as before (with a lot of layer overlaying), this time using the 6'2" Tron as a proxy unit, I was able to pin their dimensions down to about 4’ tall by 10’ long by 2.5’ wide.
That was actually my second attempt at working it out, though. I initially worked out that the width of each 'foot’ of Flynn’s Recognizer is 120 feet, and when that was compared to another couple of shots it yielded a height of 17 feet for the light cycle. Yeah, no.
After figuring out the light cycle dimensions as seen above (which definitely look a hell of a lot more correct), I went back and worked out the size of the typical '82 Recognizers. Since I’d already figured out each foot was seven times wider than the light cycle is high, it was a simple matter of just plugging in the right multiplier.
28 feet, which looks right!
Then it was time to just do a little bit of ratio work since the proportions of all the '82 Recognizers are the same.
The standard, non-Flynn-used Recognizers are about 100 feet tall!
And voila: an updated size comparison!
(Putting the heights down here again so you don’t have to scroll all the way back up: Legacy is ~42 feet, standard '82s are ~100 feet, Ares is ~150 feet, and Flynn’s behemoth is ~420 feet.)
It certainly raises questions I can’t answer with math, though. Namely, why the hell was Flynn’s digital garbage dump jalopy of a Recognizer so damn big compared to normal???
The scene of “Flynn brings back the dead Recognizer multiple times its size” is a foil to the later scene of “MCP brings back the dead Sark multiple times his size”
