Nobody ever talks about the very first line of dialogue in Tron (1982).

now you might ask: why would anyone want to talk about it? It’s just some random unnamed extra, whose face we never see, starting up a game of Lightcycles and saying, “all right, give me room, here we go!”

And then promptly losing, delivering the movie’s first swearword (“Damn!”) within its first minute– as his avatar gets derezzed fighting for the Users against Sark, who’s playing the NPC while fighting for the MCP.

Just part of the setting, as we start to learn what goes on inside the computers here.

But… when has this movie ever been as simple as it looks?

Especially to my brain.

Side note: I just noticed that, in the mp4 version of the movie that I used for making my own spliced Full Cut– the credits don’t even include “Popcorn Coworker,” Alan’s cubicle neighbor who’s implied to have created Ram, and in later canon gets a more complete backstory and the name Roy Kleinberg. Where is he? Why’s he not in the credits? I could swear I saw Popcorn Coworker in the credits on my DVD!

Are there different versions of the credits on different editions of the movie? Was Popcorn Coworker only added in later on some of them? WTF. Gonna have to do some digging. But that’ll have to be another post.

Anyway:

This is literally all we get for actor and character names (in the credits I can see in my mp4 version.)

I don’t know how they decided who to include, and how to credit them. But clearly a lot gets left out.

ALT

The guy who says those first words? doesn’t get a name in the credits at all.

I think he’s probably the guy who’s credited as “Video Game Player.” (Even though there are, of course, lots of other video game players in the arcade scenes, including at least one other with a speaking role, who directs Alan and Lora to where Flynn is.) (I think, though can’t prove, that that one’s credited as one of the “boys in video game arcade.”)

(After “video game cowboy.” Who I think I have seen an explanation for in an interview– I think he– or maybe his program?– is the guy who tells Flynn “That’s Tron, he fights for the Users.”

and he’s called “cowboy” because he was a pal of Boxleitner’s who knew him from Westerns and/or working on a ranch IRL– and that was the guy BBox was hanging out with and roping people with lariats while other actors were playing arcade games.)

(Everyone on that set was being a ridiculous goofball. I know we probably only hear the best stories, but hell, I love almost everything I’ve heard about it.)

Anyway. I dunno.

It’s anybody’s guess what that first character’s backstory might be.

still.

To my obsessed mind, it… does kind of stand out, that the guy sounds quite a bit like Dan Shor.

Who later shows up playing Ram– as well as “Popcorn Coworker”.

Now. I know nothing about the decisions behind the casting in that scene. I’m definitely not saying the actor was Dan Shor, or that the character is intended to be Roy.

Hell, I’m not even sure why the voice sets off my recognition like that. I’m not a connoisseur of voices.

Bruce Boxleitner did once describe Dan Shor as having a Brooklyn accent. So…maybe that’s what I’m picking up on? But hell, there are tons of guys with Brooklyn accents. Could be anyone.

On a Doylist level this is almost certainly meaningless.

…But.

I have pretty much never approached fiction on a Doylist level. Or cared about intended meanings.

So why the hell should I start now.

Going by nothing more than what we see and hear on the screen, this is (to my VERY biased, overcrowded-plotbunny-warren mind!) sufficient grounds for a headcanon.

…in which Roy is there in that scene at the arcade, playing that Lightcycle game.

He doesn’t know that the videogame avatar fighting as his proxy is a living, feeling person– a sentient program– probably stolen from a job very much unlike this, terrified and out of his depth.

And he certainly doesn’t know that the program playing the computer side of the game is Sark– the administrative software written by Encom executive Ed Dillinger, who’s in league with the MCP to steal as much software and infiltrate as many competitors as possible, with the ultimate goal of world conquest.

Nor does he know that for some mysterious, never-explained reason, all the software in Encom and its affiliated arcade games is similarly alive.

Including his own creation– an actuarial calculator named Ram, who until recently was working at “a big insurance company”– apparently the end-users to whom Roy had sold him– but has now been kidnapped and brought back into Encom to be used like the MCP’s other victims.

A gladiator slave imprisoned alongside Tron, just as their creators are trapped in the corporate cubicle ounterpart of that world.

Perhaps in this same arcade, at the same moment, Ram too is fighting for his life.

The novelization goes into this more deeply, bringing up some fascinating questions on just how much a player and a living program might share control of the avatar in an arcade game. But much is still left to the imagination.

In this headcanon, does Ram sense how near his User is? Hear his voice, his thoughts, through their spiritual bond? Does he wish he could be fighting for Roy, instead of whoever else he’s fighting for at that moment?

And, does that nameless program who’s actually assigned to fight for Roy feel any sense of who he’s serving? Or any feelings about it?

Does he, too, think of his creator?

Or is he also a program written for end-Users, simply accepting the User he fights for now as his current deity?

The canon of the Tron world allows for a lot of leeway in just how strong the spiritual echo is, or whatever causes programs to mirror the lives of their users. How much can they sense each other?

It might depend on what kind of programs they are. I tend to headcanon that the bond between User and Program is different depending on whether the User custom-wrote the program for his own work (as Alan did with Tron) … or wrote the program to be distributed to end-users (as I think Roy did with Ram).

A program written for distribution might feel a more open-source type of bond, a “great feeling” from helping folks with their needs, no matter who they are or how they ended up using him.

Now, it’s a bit far-fetched to imagine that a program could actually hear the voice of his User.

…Or is it?

ALT

Just how literally is it meant to be taken, when the film shows programs communicating with their Users in speech? Dillinger and the MCP, certainly, have some sort of very-advanced-for-the-time voice synthesizer interface at their disposal. But Alan, speaking to Tron through the I/O Tower, surely must be just a translation of his computer commands, right?

And if so, then what are we to make of Flynn and Clu–seeming to have a full two-way spoken dialogue, though Flynn has no equipment but his computer and keyboard, and Clu has just whatever is in his tank?

I personally love one interpretation I’ve heard: that Flynn talks to his programs out loud while he types commands to them in computer language, pretending they’re alive even if he has no idea they really are.

And that Clu, simultaneously, does the same in reverse– mirroring Flynn’s programming quirks, in the same way he mirrors his position at his desk and his cup of coffee.

But…

what if the mirroring does go a little deeper?

Suppose programs really can hear the literal voice of their User, through some magic energy that we can accept as well as we accept any of the other silly premises of this movie…

And suppose that the unlucky program in that first scene is (as Sark seems to imply later) an “accounting cream puff,” a financial program, like Ram?

He might be similarly attuned to end-users.

He might also, in the haze of deadly combat, hear the Voice of the User he’s dying for.

(Imagine dying for your god, and the last word you hear is just him cussing to some other god further up the hierarchy. Damn.)

And now– on to my other headcanon about this specific program.

Because he appears again, later.

Well, the same actor appears. (Don’t think he even gets a separate line in the credits. WTF.) And sure, that doesn’t prove he’s the same character. But, in terms of 1982-specific canon, it’s about as much proof as we get for Roy being Ram’s programmer– so I’m gonna run with it.

Here you can compare his two appearances. First, the one that shows this guy in his Lightcycle, during that opening scene, alternating with a view of Sark in the Lightcycle about to derezz him…

and then the later one, from the battle involving Flynn and Tron and Ram. In this one, he’s the guy who gets trapped between his own jetwall and Tron’s, causing him to crash into the grid perimeter wall and be destroyed– opening up a crack in the process, through which the heroes later escape.

If you’ve got any facial recognition ability (which, granted, isn’t a super easy thing to have when watching this movie, but I had enough to see it here)– the guy’s recognizably the same.

Only difference is that in the first scene he’s got blue circuits and an orange Lightcycle, and in the later scene his bike is blue and his circuits are red.

In the MCP-controlled Grid, programs loyal to the MCP have red armor-circuits and blue Lightcycles. The fact that those colors don’t match is a quirk related to the filming– Lisberger changed his mind about the color scheme after the computer-animation of the Lightcycle scenes had been done already and was too late to change.

There are various fan theories for in-universe explanations. The one I personally came up with is:

• Things were all blue before MCP took over.
• MCP tried to change everything red to match him.
• Circuits accept color-change more readily than Lightcycles.
• So, the MCP’s attempts to change bikes red resulted in a lot of glitchy bikes, some red, some orange, some yellow, and some unstably changing colors all the time.
• And the MCP rejected those failed glitchcycles and assigned them to User-Believer conscripts, while keeping the superior, unchanged blue cycles for his own warriors.

….Anyway.

This is all tangential to the actual story I’m trying to focus on here, and writing this post is starting to make me feel like HBomberguy, so… Back to that nameless conscript and his sad little life.

Here’s the little fanfic my brain’s written about him.

(which, yeah, might become an actual fic, someday, if my brain ever bothers to cooperate on that. maybe.)

• Guy gets derezzed in fight with Sark.
• Sark’s opponents actually get derezzed into a cut-paste buffer, where Sark can decide what to do with them next.
• Sark decides this guy has some promise (maybe just as potentially malleable cannon-fodder, if not actual combat skill). So he pastes him, and gives him the choice.
• Die for your User right now, or accept the red armor and live to fight another day.
• Guy’s an accounting creampuff, not a warrior. Not quite brave enough to sacrifice himself right now for a User who hasn’t exactly been there for him in a while. He takes the deal.

And, in a poetic twist of fate that’s some weird, messed-up mixture of cruel and kind– that deal, eventually, leads to him being the one who accidentally helps the User and his followers escape the game grid and take down the MCP’s reign.

And, if he’s able to hear the chatter over the comms… some of the last things he hears might be the voices of the rebels.

Now, before his deresolution, I think all he would get to hear of that would have been Tron saying, “This is Gold-1 to Gold-2 and 3. Split up, take them one-on-one.”

But… if he hangs around a while afterwards, watching, like a helpless little ghost in the cut-paste buffer…

seeing the other red guy, his fellow-warrior, get derezzed by Tron and Ram’s deadly cooperative maneuver…

and, if he does remember that first battle…

and if he does remember having some sort ofmystical audio link to the User he was fighting for…

…and if that User really did sound that much like Roy…

then

he might just hear something disturbingly familiar in the voice that yells,

“So long, sucker!”