Shannon vs. Tron

[kungfuwaynewho]

Thursday - that's four days ago now - nhpw told me that Tron (1982) was up on YouTube.  Now, I have not seen Tron since I was a tiny little kid.  I don't actually remember anything about it.  I have been trying to watch Tron since June - right around the time I got obsessed really into Babylon 5 and wanted to see more of Bruce Boxleitner.  So, as you can imagine, I was pretty excited.

I was even more excited when I clicked the link and saw that it was a really, really high quality upload.  I decided to download the movie from YouTube.  First of all, I was afraid it would get yanked, and I didn't want to risk missing it now that it was so close.  Second, I didn't want to watch it on my crappy old computer monitor.  No, I would convert the mp4s to AVIs, merge them into one file, and watch the movie on my nice big actual TV.

Thursday I downloaded.  Friday I converted.  Friday night!  Tron night!  A night for which to watch Tron!  Except...I couldn't get the mp4s to convert.  And when I finally did, I couldn't get the files to merge.  It's now Saturday.  I'm still working on it.  Reading FAQs.  Downloading new programs.  Finally my sister asks why I don't just download the movie from megaupload or something.  That is a great idea!  Why I have never thought of this!

So I did.  A great big AVI file.  It was shiny.  Happy, beaming, maybe crying a little, I burned it onto a DVD and pranced to the TV.  I loaded the DVD.  It...did not play.  

Hmm.  So I downloaded another one.  This time I just put it on a flash drive - make sure it works first.  I was troubled when a prompt came up telling me that some file properties couldn't be transferred, but I was still hopeful at this point.  But no.  It didn't play, either.

Sunday morning...

If the charm is dubbed in Spanish! 

At this point I just threw up my hands and laughed helplessly.  I tried one last time, Sunday afternoon wearing away into evening, time running out.  Failure. 

Shannon 0, Tron 1.  Which is appropriate, I guess.

So now I've resigned myself to just watching it on my computer, like I could have done days ago, but now probably won't be able to do until this Friday.  It's okay, though!  I'm trying to look at it as though I've got that many more days to anticipate and get excited about it, and maybe I'll buy some Ben and Jerry's, or some hard cider, or both.

Comments

[kungfuwaynewho.livejournal.com]

Oh, man, this isn't even the half of it. It started back in June, when I tried to check it out from the library. It was in the catalog, but never on the shelf. I remember making a blog post at one point like JESUS CHRIST I WILL START KILLING BITCHES IF THEY DON'T STOP CHECKING OUT TRON. I finally asked the A/V librarian, who looked it up and saw that it hadn't been checked out since 2001 and was likely missing.

Then I thought, oh, I'll buy it used off Amazon. My sister buys used movies all the time, they're always cheap (and sometimes essentially free, just shipping and handling), no problem. I'd forgotten that Tron was a Disney movie, and that Disney only makes 100 DVDs at a time, in a crypt underneath Disneyworld, just some dude, hand-engraving each DVD with like his own teeth or something. Tron was totally actually like $35 used. USED. I pretty much gave up then, and figured that some network would show it before the new movie. Right? Wouldn't that make sense? Wouldn't you think?

It's okay. This way I can cap and make icons.