Well, 2010 is shaping up to be one hell of a year. I’ve had some of my highest highs with personal projects and experienced some personal family tragedies that I had hoped never to live through. Though I still haven’t recovered from the latter, I don’t want to lose track of Branded, so I thought with the upcoming Tron Legacy sequel hitting theaters this weekend it’d be a good time to share some ephemera from the original film. So for the rest of this week I’ll be sharing my meager collection of Tron goodies.
Before I jump into that, I did want to make note of a milestone that Branded recently crossed as the site has had over one million distinct page views. When I set out to work on this project, the million page views mark was one of my personal goals, and I’ve made a promise to myself that once I reached it, I’d stop looking at stats and stuff. So next week, I’m going to shed the hit counter, dropping off an outdated bit of old school web design in the process. A very heartfelt thanks goes out to everyone who has ever stopped by to read some of my ramblings or to take a gander at some of the magazine, stickers, and advertising scans I’ve put up. I’m just glad this stuff has gotten out there.
Anyway, back to Tron. Today I’d like to share the complete Tron sticker card collection from the 1982 Donruss card set…
The sticker set only consisted of 8 cards, five featuring screenshots of the Tron video game, two images from the movie, and a pretty sweet logo sticker. Each of the five video game stickers also featured “tips” for the game on the back (as you can see below), though they aren’t so much as Nintendo-Power-esque game tips as they are straight up descriptions of the various levels in the game. I’m sure there was a legion of kids disappointed in these less than helpful descriptions.
I’m glad the Donruss design team included the game screen shots as stickers because I’ve never had the opportunity to play the Tron game and I at least get a sense of what the game looked like. I am kind of surprised that they didn’t make the sticker set a little bigger though including other scenes and characters from the flick. I’m glad we get a sticker featuring Tron and the lightcycles, but I would have loved to have some stickers featuring Sark and Flynn, and maybe even the ugly mug of the Master Control Program…
Though I’m sure there are a ton of sites providing commentary on the Tron legacy this week, I’d like to take a second and point to one of my favorite spots on the web, Neato Coolville. Run by Mayor Todd, Neato Coolville is featuring a whole week of posts with all sorts of great stuff including vintage magazine articles, artwork from the film, some of the regular trading cards from the 1982 Donruss set, and much more. If you get a second stop on by and tell him Branded sent ya…
