Ten Minutes With the Tron Dude

By - Posted Oct 28, 2004

This Halloween, you’ll no doubt see many Imperial Storm Troopers, Starfleet captains, and assorted Agent Smiths running loose in the streets. But there is one science fiction hero who doesn’t have a ready-made (or ridiculously easy) costume available: The brave digital warrior TRON from the 1982 Disney film of the same name. Played by Bruce Boxleitner, TRON was actually a computer program designed to battle, uh, evil computer programs. Although it originally flopped at the box office, TRON was actually ahead of its time and has since gathered a cult following of tech geeks and nostalgic Gen-Xers. Paul Baumgaertner of Madison,Wis. discovered TRON as a computer science student, and decided to build his own glowing TRON Halloween outfit; a mention at Slashdot.org turned him into an Internet celebrity. A recent guest on The Screen Savers, Paul explains the world of TRON costume building.

How long have you been a TRON fan?

I don’t know if I initially saw it as a kid, and I sort of knew about the game but I wasn’t a huge fan. But then I sort of found it. There’s obviously a big cult thing, and I ended up watching the movie and thought it was incredibly visual: the light cycles, the glowing effects. The story itself was really lost on a 1982 audience, but when I ended up watching it for the first time, it really made a lot more sense. Because here I am a computer science major, and there’s this really deep story – it’s all very Matrix-y in a sense, but 15 years before. So when Halloween was coming around – which is a really big deal in Madison, Wis. at the university – I had to pick a costume. So TRON was old enough and unknown enough to make it very interesting. The great thing about a good Halloween costume is that maybe only 3 percent of people will recognize you, but that 3 percent will go crazy, they’ll love it. So that was really my goal with it, to have fun with it that way.

How did you make it?

I went down to a used sporting goods store and just started looking at all the gear. Obviously, I had to get the helmet first; it looks just like a hockey helmet, so I figured what the hell – get a hockey helmet. And then I found the chest plate, I think it’s for a baseball catcher, got some shin guards for soccer, some arm pads. You just look at everything and you starting thinking, “How can that integrate?” Before you know it, you’ve got a bunch of gear – obviously, the disc is just a Frisbee golf disc. So I got all the gear and it was just a matter of painting it down, doing the green base paint and then the glow-in-the-dark paint over the top.

How did you the patterns for the “circuit” design?

Oh, I got the DVD, did a couple of freeze frames, got a couple different locations. It was pretty easy. Some places are not true to the original because it’s just far too difficult. So I tried to keep with the general idea, the circuit-board look, and continued with that style.

What kind of reaction did you get the first time you wore it?

In Madison, Wisc. you walk down State Street on Halloween. You will see literally 10,000 people in an hour on four blocks of street. So every once in a while, I’d hear somebody who just walked past and just yell, “TRONNNN!” And all I could do is turn around, hold up the disc, and just give ‘em some love. It’s certainly the same reaction I would give to anyone. I mean, I’m usually walking down and I’m doing the same thing. If I see something awesome – like I saw a guy who was an awesome Optimus Prime a couple of years ago – it’s like, “I love that guy!” The ones that are a little more obscure, they make it so much better.

Any tips for people who want to create their own TRON costumes?

I went with glow-in-the-dark, which seems to be the rarity. There’s a TRON circle of people who do TRON gear, and they do it in all different styles. I went with glow in the dark because it was a lot easier, took a lot less time. I’d love to say that this thing took me weeks of labor, but I probably threw it together in a day and a half. So take your time, but don’t fret the small stuff – just get the general style. But a lot of people are doing electro-luminescent wire, which is the stuff from Indiglo watches. And that is awesome, but it would cost way too much to do the whole thing, so people will often do just the disc or just one part. I kind of shied away from that because it just detracts from the rest of the costume – so now it looks like one part is awesome and one part is just ehhh. So I figured just make the whole thing mediocre rather than doing one part unbelievably cool but show that you didn’t have the patience or the money to complete the dream.

So there is a community of people making these costumes?

Yeah, I didn’t know that until I made my own. There’s a TRON website with people talking about TRON every day, it’s incredible. So I said, “hey, I thought you guys might want to check out the costume I made for Halloween.” So they posted it up, and they ended up making a page and all these other people started posting their costumes. So all of a sudden, it was like, “Wow, lots of people have done this.” And then there’s this guy named Jay Maynard who appeared on the Jimmy Kimmel show in his TRON costume. He was on Slashdot like two weeks after the story I was in was posted. I have to give the guy props because he did a really good job, took his time, and he was proud of what he had. It’s great to see people who get ridiculed, but can say “Hey, I like my TRON costume – it’s fun, and why not?”

http://www.tron20.net/