Alright! Today I am reviewing an underrated and forgotten show from 2012, the continuation of the Tron franchise on the small screen - Today, I am reviewing Tron: Uprising, a surprisingly excellent show about the world of Tron.
I have a rocky relationship with the Tron franchise. The first Tron is, in all honestly, not that good (No matter how revolutionary the graphics were). The second one, Tron: Legacy, is one of my favorite movies of all time. Not because it's good or anything, it's just that the graphs are absolutely amazing. The characters and dialogue are unbelievably trite and generic.
Tron: Uprising strikes the perfect balance between character-driven and visual storyteling. Despite the strange animation style, some of the shots look almost lifelike, which is really impressive for a hand-drawn program. The movement of the light cycles looks amazing, and the fight choreography is well choreographed.
The animation for the human characters is also great, even if I wasn't totally on board with their proportions. All of the humans have legs that are twice as long as their shortened torsos, so that was weird. But it's a style and I respect it. It wasn't a huge detractor or anything, and it was my only complaint about the show, basically.
The characters here are all, strangely, really thought out and well developed. Nearly every character has an arc and struggles with events within the show. It was really nice to see how much work was pumped into a random show about Tron.
We also receive some surprisingly good voice work via Elijah Wood's main character Beck, and Mandy Moore's Mara, which I didn't realize was the same voice actress for Rapunzel in Tangled until halfway through my viewing.
But where Uprising really shined was in the plot. Here we actually have Tron media that focuses on Tron the character! The gist of the series is that Tron recruits our main character Beck to lead a revolution against Clu as a new persona dubbed "The Renegade", starting with the city he lives in, Argon. While he tries to lead the revolution, he is hunted down by Clu's forces: General Tesler and his subordinate Paige.
Also refreshing was that the main female lead, Mara, isn't in a built-up relationship or a hopeless love triangle. This allowed Beck to just be the Renegade, with his one failing being that he keeps abandoning his friends to do Tron stuff.
Beck has a best friend named Zed, who starts out the series hating the Renegade and ends the series liking him. Tron has made mistakes that come back to haunt the characters, and we even get surprisingly deep hints at Paige's backstory and indications that she'll join the Revolution and start a relationship with Beck.
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| There was so much story left to tell! |
But unfortunately, we'll never get to see that. Disney canceled Tron: Uprising after just one season, which, in a strange way, reminds me of the recently canceled The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance. Both are prequels to cult classic films, and both end with the main characters starting a revolution against the oppressive ruling force.
It's a real shame. Not only were both of the series really, really good (Some of the best television I've ever seen), but they also had the potential to get really dark, which always cements a kids' program as legendary. Especially since Dark Crystal would've ended with all of the main characters dying and Uprising would've presumably ended with Tron dying and the main characters losing, since Clu is still alive and well by the time Tron: Legacy happens.
R.I.P. to these awesome shows. Both of them were stellar.
Overall, I give Tron: Uprising a 10/10. "Deftly blending action, character development, and world-building with stellar animation, Tron: Uprising is the definition of underrated."
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| Excellent show |
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