Disney had a rough couple decades after the untimely death of its founder and namesake, Walt Disney, in 1966. Deprived of Disney’s leadership and vision, the company floundered, unable to adapt to rapidly changing tastes and audience sensibilities. Nowhere was this more apparent than in their response to the era-defining success of Star Warsin 1977. Disney’s first effort to recapture the magic of a galaxy far, far away (long before they resorted to just buying it) was 1979’s The Black Hole, a costly sci-fi epic that left a plethora of toys, games, and other tie-in products languishing on retail shelves. As one decade ended and another began, the science fiction craze showed no signs of slowing down. At the same time, a sci-fi technology that had once been dismissed as a fad was also beginning to look like it might stick around: video games. Refusing to be put off by the failure of The Black Hole (Disney had, after all, always taught his creatives to “keep moving forward“), the company dusted off a long-gestating pitch from a first-time filmmaker: Tron.
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Steven Lisberger’s pitch for Tron, a film set literally insidethe world of video games, had been dismissed by virtually every major studio before Disney optioned his script in 1980. After completing test footage for Tron, Disney saw in its neon, computer world the potential for a spectacle to rival Star Wars. Ahead of Tron‘s 1982 release, that was exactly how the film was sold to potential licensors. And despite the still-lingering Black Holetoys lining clearance aisles, licensors saw that same potential, and a whole line of Tronaction figures from Tomy were ready for fans when the film opened. Though Tron, like The Black Hole, was only a modest hit at the box office, it had a leg-up on The Black Holein one major way: the toys. Tronmay not have been the Star Wars-sized hit Disney hoped for, but it created a loyal cult fanbase. Then and now, those fans couldn’t get enough of Tomy’s Tronaction figures, some of the best and most elaborate movie tie-in toys of the decade. Next week, Hakes is set to auction four figures from the line, and that cult fanbase has already turned out to bid, turning the listings into some of the hottest items in the auction.
How Tomy Turned Tron‘s Iconic Look Into Some of the 80s Coolest Toys
Image courtesy of disney.
As any kid — or anyone who wasa kid — will tell you, there are very few things that make a toy cooler than casting it in translucent plastic. For their Tronaction figure line, that’s exactly what Tomy did: all four of the figures they produced were cast in single-color translucent plastic, supplemented with opaque white paint highlights for detail. It was an ingenious solution to the problem of recreating Tron‘s unique visual language, which combined “backlit animation” (a process using black and white photography and interposed positive and negative images, alongside other cinematographer inside baseball), mattes, rotoscoping, and early computer generated graphics. Just as the film’s visuals set it apart from its contemporaries, the toy’s aesthetics set them apart from everything else in the toy aisle. While the overall look recalls Mego’s earlier Micronauts, circa 1982, nothing on shelves looked quite like Tomy’s Tronline.
Four figures were produced for the line: heroes Flynn (Jeff Bridges) and Tron (Bruce Boxleitner), along with the villainous Sark (David Warner) and a generic “Warrior” henchman. Cindy Morgan’s Yori was excluded despite being central character, another casualty of the era’s prejudice against action figures of female characters. However, the most memorable part of the line wasn’t its figures: it was the vehicles. Tomy let kids recreate Tron‘s iconic lightcycle scene with rip-cord powered lightcycle vehicles, fondly remembered by any who collected or played with the line back in the day. The most impressive thing about the toys was that Tomy engineered them with an opening canopy that could actually house one of the action figures, a brilliant piece of cross-compatibility that helped sell both toys.
Besides the Tomy line, Tron‘s most iconic piece of tie-in merchandise was its arcade game from Bally Midway. The game progressed through four distinct stages, each recreating key sequences from the film. The first stage lets player characters control a tank in battle against others like it, along with later levels that introduced the “Recognizer” vehicles from the film as an additional adversary. The second stage featured the lightcycles, which proved just as fun to race digitally as in action figure form. The last stages let the players take control of the heroic Tron, battling Grid Bugs before infiltrating and destroying the evil Master Control Program’s core. The game is one of the best movie tie-in arcade games of the era, and highly worth a couple quarters if you happen to come across one — though be warned, it requires some of Flynn’s gaming skills to beat the notoriously tough later stages.
Why Tomy’s Action Figures Still Define TronMerchandise More Than Forty Years Later
Image courtesy of disney.
Across the decade, several companies have re-issued or paid tribute to Tomy’s original Tronline. In 2002, NECA released faithful reproductions of all of the Tomy line for the film’s twentieth anniversary. Chase variants were released of Flynn, Tron, and Sark, cast in black plastic rather than red or blue. Twenty years later, Diamond Select would reissue their seven-inch, collector-oriented Tronfigures on Tomy-inspired cardbacks. Most recently, Super 7 partnered with the Disney Parks to release an exclusive new line of 3.75″ Tronaction figures, available exclusively at Walt Disney World. These were first released in 2023, part of the launch of the Magic Kingdom’s Tron: Lightcycle Run roller coaster. For this line, Super 7 became the first company to produce additional characters from the original film, finally giving Yori her first action figure, as well as lightcycle racer Ram (Roy Kleinberg), released in a two-pack with his light-cycle. The Super 7 lightcycles retained the working cockpit feature from the Tomy line, though they chose to go without the rip-cord, likely in the interest of preserving a movie-accurate profile for the vehicles.
Most recently, Hasbro attempted to launch a collector-focused 3.75″ Tronline through its Haslab program. The line failed to reach the minimum backer threshold for production, but the company’s decision to test the waters for expanded 3.75″ offerings is demonstrative of its lasting appeal for collectors — even if this effort was unsuccessful. Hasbro’s Tronfigures may be akin to Disney’s Tronsequels: they overestimate the demand of what is, ultimately, a cult property. The audience for Tronmay be too small to sustain large-scale investment in new media and mass market merchandise, but it is passionate enough to compensate, given the right format. In this case, that format is the collector after-market for the original line, with these graded samples on auction at Heritage poised to sell for hundreds of dollars apiece. The price might even be higher for heroes Tron and Flynn, with the bidding price above $600 for each of these figures. With almost a week left to bid, there’s no telling how high nostalgia will carry the final price of these fan favorite action figures.
Do you collect Tronaction figures? Leave a comment below and join the conversation now in the ComicBook Forum!
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