Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Tron: Legacy score arranger and Brilliant Minds composer Joseph Trapanese’s “Beck’s Theme – Lightbike Battle” from the animated Tron: Uprising.

Tron: Ares opens tomorrow. It’s Disney’s second and latest attempt to revive on the big screen Tron, the studio’s 1982 cult favorite, in a post-Matrix action cinema landscape, but this time Disney figured out a way to alienate me by saying, “Hmm, let’s get Jared Leto to play the lead.” A Tron sequel starring the guy who’s currently facing sexual misconduct allegations from nine women and is perhaps the worst out of the few present-day Hollywood actors who still cling to method acting and use it as an excuse to be an asshole to people on film sets? No fucking thanks.

Instead of wasting $32 on Ares, I recommend a marathon of the best thing that ever came out of the Tron franchise: Uprising, a one-season wonder that functioned as a Tron: Legacy prequel about the teenagers who are among the programs—the Tron universe’s term for the inhabitants of the Grid, the digital world that was freed from despotic rule at the end of Legacy—in Argon City, a metropolis in the Grid, and their fight against military occupation. Even though I don’t subscribe to Disney+, the streamer’s current inclusion of Uprising’s only season—which is also, due to Ares’s release, now airing on Disney XD, the same cable channel that caused Uprising’s 2013 demise by making it hard for viewers to find the show—is one of the best things about Disney+.

Developed by Legacy screenwriters Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz and showrun by Charlie Bean, who directed every episode except one, Uprising doesn’t have Greta Lee, Evan Peters, Gillian Anderson, Jodie Turner-Smith, Arturo Castro, or Jeff Bridges reprising his role from the other two Tron movies as Kevin Flynn, the software genius who created the Grid. (Bridges was unavailable during the making of Uprising, so Fred Tatasciore, who later voiced Lieutenant Shaxs on Star Trek: Lower Decks, took over Bridges’s roles as both Flynn, who rarely resurfaced on Uprising, and the more prominent CLU, Flynn’s evil digital clone. On Lower Decks, Tatasciore memorably asserted that fighting fascism is a full-time job. On Uprising, Tatasciore was enacting fascism.) But what Uprising does have are terrific voice work (particularly by the late Paul Reubens, Lance Henriksen, John Glover, and future Andor semi-regular Kathryn Hunter as villainous characters who were created for the show), a visually stunning combination of 2D animation and 3D animation by the Japanese studio Polygon Pictures (the same studio that’s currently working on Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man), and an intriguing depiction of life in an authoritarian state that’s more relevant now than it was in 2012.

Uprising has been the subject of a bunch of YouTube essays about the injustice of Disney XD’s burial of a nicely animated and surprisingly mature show. Some of these essays are good, while a non-binary essayist posted two different essays about the high quality of Uprising but kept erroneously saying that the director of Legacy—which they said was one of their favorite movies—was J.J. Abrams. Uh, he didn’t direct Legacy. Joseph Kosinski, who later directed Top Gun: Maverick, did. It annoyed me so much that I refused to watch the rest of the second essay. This happens a lot on YouTube: Too many essayists are allergic to doing some fucking research.

The first Tron—another movie Abrams had nothing to do with—was a gladiator movie that took place inside a computer. (Despite thinly drawn characters, the 1982 movie has its charms.) Legacy, excellently scored by Daft Punk and Trapanese and heavily influenced by both the Matrix franchise and Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, was a Matrix-ian blockbuster about a young hacker’s attempt to rescue his long-lost and imprisoned dad—Flynn—from Dad’s evil doppleganger, whose name is an acronym for “Codified Likeness Utility.” (Despite a few script punch-ups by Brad Bird and Toy Story 3 screenwriter Michael Arndt, it was still style over substance just like the first movie. However, Legacy’s theatrical version remains my favorite IMAX 3D experience.)

Meanwhile, Uprising was basically The Mask of Zorro, but with Bruce Boxleitner as Anthony Hopkins and Elijah Wood as Antonio Banderas. Building the show around a mentor/protégé relationship between Tron the reclusive and battle-scarred warrior, who had way more personality in this animated series than he did in the first two movies, and a younger program named Beck was a wise decision. It was one of the things that made the show sustainable, even though it lasted for only 19 episodes. A 22-minute gladiator movie every week—Beck would be forced to fight a bunch of tough programs in the ring, he would almost get derezzed but then he would survive, Rinzler and repeat—would have gotten old really quickly.

I reviewed many of Uprising’s episodes for my Blogspot blog when the show first aired. I was surprised by how great Uprising—which began with Beck, a garage mechanic, wanting revenge against CLU and his forces for the death of his best friend at the garage, so he suited up as a helmeted freedom fighter known only as the Renegade—was for most of its only season.

If you ask a Disney animation nerd what their favorite era of Disney animation is, they would probably bring up the days of Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston or the era when Mary Blair was the color stylist for Cinderella and Alice in Wonderland.

I was never wild about Disney. I was always more of a Warner Bros. Animation guy. But my favorite era of Disney animation has to be the really short period when Robert Valley—an animator who worked on several Gorillaz music videos and directed a three-part series of brilliant 2013 DC Nation Wonder Woman shorts where he reimagined Diana Prince as a gearhead in a muscle car that is capable of invisibility—did nifty-looking character designs for both Uprising and Motorcity, the first collaboration between Disney and Titmouse, Inc., Lower Decks’s animation studio. (Disney and Titmouse’s current collabo is StuGo, a Disney Channel cartoon starring Lorraine Toussaint, my favorite ’90s Law & Order semi-regular, as the voice of a mad scientist who tricked a bunch of middle-school kids into helping her with her dangerous experiments on a Caribbean island.) Someone in a YouTube comments section quipped that each of the characters Valley designed for Uprising was 80% legs.

Uprising and Motorcity—which both happen to be about teen freedom fighters rebelling against dystopian dictatorships—are still a visual delight. “The Stranger,” a trippy episode featuring Aaron Paul as the voice of Cyrus, an imprisoned madman who preceded Beck as the first program who suited up as the Renegade, was full of psychedelic imagery that won Spanish animator Alberto Mielgo both an Emmy and an Annie for art direction. (Mielgo went on to work on both Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Love, Death & Robots. He won an Oscar in 2022 for his 2021 animated short The Windshield Wiper, which featured Uprising’s showrunner as the voice of one of the men in a café.)

Beck’s action-packed business as Tron’s protégé was always beautifully animated and solidly written. But an even more impressive part of Uprising was its depiction of the power struggle between the two top lieutenants in the team led by General Tesler (Henriksen’s character, whom CLU placed in charge of the occupation of Argon City): Pavel, Reubens’s power-hungry character, and Paige, an equally ambitious soldier who wants to take down the Renegade without the slightly older Pavel getting in her way.

Pavel is sycophantic towards Tesler, but the general is actually, just like Paige, another program Pavel wants to oust. It was fun to hear Reubens voicing a schemer who was nothing like Pee-wee Herman and was more like Francis Buxton, while Paige was voiced by Emmanuelle Chriqui, who was solid in the role of a tragically flawed antagonist who has been fighting for the wrong side. (Chriqui later played Lana Lang on Superman & Lois.)

Whenever I’d hear about the power struggles and the high staff turnover that took place in the White House from 2016 to 2020, I’d think to myself, “Those fascist fucks are so much like Pavel vs. Paige.”

The most compelling scenes in Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus weren’t any of Kirk Douglas’s scenes as the leader of the slave revolt. They were instead all the scenes that took place in the Roman Senate, where Peter Ustinov rewrote most of his own lines (and won an Oscar for his delivery of those lines) and Charles Laughton and Laurence Olivier, who hated each other’s guts, brought their off-screen disdain for each other into their scenes as senators. I felt the same way about Uprising: The feuding between Tesler’s lieutenants and the inner conflict Paige experienced while Tesler granted her more power and assigned bigger tasks to her were actually more interesting than the teen superhero stuff.

Uprising’s best episode wasn’t centered on Beck or Tron: It was “Isolated,” which revealed in extended flashbacks that Paige was, before Tesler recruited her, a hospital medic. She protected both Quorra—Olivia Wilde’s warrior character from Legacy and one of the ISOs (short for “isomorphic algorithms”), a race of beings who were accidentally created within the Grid by Flynn, who views the ISOs as a scientific miracle—and another ISO (voiced by Parminder Nagra) from CLU’s persecution and genocide of the ISOs, who were derezzed because of their intelligence and ability to think for themselves. (Wilde and Boxleitner were the only performers from Legacy who reprised their roles for Uprising.)

In each of the first two Tron movies, a human was sucked into the Grid, and he functioned as the audience surrogate. But on Uprising, no humans were ever transported into the Grid. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Uprising was that it got us to care about Beck, Tron, Mara (a garage mechanic voiced by Mandy Moore), Able (Beck and Mara’s boss, voiced by Reginald VelJohnson), and—especially in “Isolated”—Paige, even though none of them were human characters.

The amount of depth “Isolated” brought to Chriqui’s character and the episode’s downbeat depiction of a young medic being indoctrinated into fascism and xenophobia were the work of writer André Bormanis. A ’90s Star Trek science consultant who penned several episodes of Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Enterprise, Bormanis infused Trek’s knack for using sci-fi to intelligently address past and present real-world issues into “Isolated.”

A Trek-style story about the hypocrisy that permeates fascism, the tragedy of somebody suppressing their artistic side to concentrate on being a cog in the military machine, and the consequences of state-sanctioned misinformation was the last thing I expected to see from the Tron franchise. Bormanis’s episode proved that Uprising was more than just nostalgia for light cycles and light discs and that it didn’t deserve to be jerked around the schedule by Disney XD. Today’s prompt is: Was there a show that was on the wrong network—it felt out of place on, for example, CBS or Showtime—and its Uprising-like demise pissed you off?

Uprising was the type of show that belonged on Cartoon Network’s cyberpunky Toonami block, not the sitcom-oriented Disney XD. According to Uprising staff writer Bill Wolkoff, who went on to co-write such Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episodes as “Shuttle to Kenfori” and the hilarious crossover with Lower Decks, in an interview earlier this year with Slashfilm, Uprising was “never marketed in a way to connect with the audience that would’ve embraced and loved our show,” and that led to Uprising being derezzed. ABC Family’s The Middleman, Javier Grillo-Marxuach’s brainy and zany adaptation of his Viper Comics series of the same name, was another example of “great show, wrong network.” It should have been an original series for Syfy, where it would have found a bigger audience. It didn’t belong on ABC Family, the not-so-brainy channel that once asininely promoted Batman Begins as a Richard Curtis-esque romp about a guy who “fights for family and lives for love!”