TRON: UPRISING Animated Series Updates Reveal Connection to TRON Movies

Tron: Legacy writers Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz offered up some details on Tron: Uprising which will air on Disney XD. The show is set to debut in the summer of 2012, featuring an all-star voice cast.

Charlie Bean of Samurai Jack fame will write and direct the series which was announced in early November. Elijah Wood (playing a rebel leader character named Beck), Emmanuelle Chriqui, Mandy Moore, Paul Reubens, Nate Corddry and Lance Henriksen are set to lend their voices for the show and Bruce Boxleitner will reprise his role as TRON. Kitsis and Horowitz, who will serve as creative consultants, revealed that the events of the show will take place in between the events of TRON and TRON: Legacy.

"This animated show will take place from when Flynn is in a safe house. It's from when Clu takes over the grid to before when Sam comes in. So if you were wondering what was the grid like before that, then watch the show."

"To give you an example of how we approached storytelling sometimes is like when you're in the End of Line club, when we first meet Castor and he's being berated by one of the patrons saying, ‘I want an audience with Zuse.' His name is Bartik, and there's an entire back story we have for him. The guy with him, his name is Hopper, there's a whole thing between the two of them, what they are doing in there, and how they got there. It's like over the years of developing this movie, we developed all these mythologies and all these back stories and all little tangential things."

In Tron: Uprising many peripheral characters will take center stage allowing the writers to flesh their stories out and give them a richer mythology to draw upon for future stories.

"Did we have time to do the Bartik story? No. But now maybe the Bartik story is in the animated series —you know, he's got a huge scar on his face. I want to know how he got that scar. We couldn't sit down and write that there's a guy with a scar on his face without knowing what the scar was. So we hope it adds to the depth of the movie. Our intention is to try and make something that is more than just, let's go get something. We treat TRON very, very seriously and as writers we try to have a reason and a world for everything and not all of it gets to be shown because in this particular movie, we only had two hours."

Disney XD in the meantime will be airing a 10-part TRON micro-series this coming Summer. More details to come on Tron: Uprising when they're available.