Streamline Moderne

Disney's pioneering 1982 effort in computer animation has garnered a small but devoted cult audience, despite–or perhaps because of–its now-dated, rudimentary vid-game aesthetic. But while designers Jean Giraud and Syd Mead gave its visual design a certain streamline moderne panache, its musical score attempts a similar back-to-the-future fusion with somewhat more mixed results. Given the composer's often chilling, landmark synthesized score work a decade earlier on Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange, Wendy Carlos seemed like an apt choice for Tron. But without her previous collaborator's taste for Beethoven, Elgar, and Rossini, Carlos's instincts wend from atmospheric, 20th-century European modernism to cheesy '50s B-film melodramatics, with the sonic limitations of '80s synth technology sometimes a burden. Still, those fond of her solo work and collaboration with Kubrick on Orange (and The Shining) will find familiar charms in "Water, Music, and TRONaction," "TRONscherzo" and "Theme from TRON." But Journey's "Only Solutions" and now all-too-ironic "1990's Theme" further fix the score firmly in the '80s. This debut CD-release of the score also features three bonus tracks, the original "TRONaction" and two other unused cues, including a solo synth rendition of the film's anthem. –Jerry McCulley