Tron (1982)

Nobody likes having their hard work stolen, and sometimes getting it back means going places you never imagined. Steven Lisberger's "Tron," a Disney production, stars Jeff Bridges as Kevin Flynn, a brilliant programmer and arcade owner determined to prove that corporate executive Ed Dillinger (David Warner) stole his video game designs and used them to rise to the top of the computer company Encom. Teaming up with his former girlfriend, Lora (Cindy Morgan), and her colleague Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner), Flynn breaks into the company's system. But the all-powerful Master Control Program, an artificial intelligence that has grown power-hungry, zaps him with an experimental laser and pulls him into the computer itself. Trapped in a dazzling, neon-lit world of cyberspace, where programs look like the users who created them, Flynn is forced to compete in deadly gladiatorial games, including the famous light cycle race. He teams up with the heroic security program Tron (Boxleitner) to battle their way through deadly games and take down the Master Control Program and its brutal enforcer, Sark (Warner). One of the first films to use extensive computer-generated imagery, it was a visual landmark, with a score by Wendy Carlos. It earned Oscar nominations for costume design and sound and inspired the sequel "Tron: Legacy."