While the male lead has not yet been cast, Coming Soon is reporting that Bruce Boxleitner will be joining Jeff Bridges as members of the original cast making appearances in the new movie.

Bridges (who played the dual roles of Flynn and Clu) appeared in test footage that was screened earlier this year at Comic-Con, so his involvement has been presumed, but it’s good to hear that Boxleitner, who played the title character as well as the “user” Alan Bradley, is also attached.

Not much is known of the film’s plot, other than it will be true sequel, not a re-imagining. Shooting is slated to begin in the spring for a 2011 release.

I’m not a super adventurous eater, so I don’t eat Japanese food very often but I have had the occasional bento. However, I have never had anything so elaborate. It seems that character bento started as a way to get Japanese children more interested in their food and has grown into a bona fide art form. I’m not sure why it is that I suddenly seem to be seeing so much more of it, but it is fun to see the variety and creativity of these edible masterpieces.

The Wall-E bento above was created by Anna the Red, whose blog details her amazing bento creations along with other food-related how-tos, such as this Wall-E sandwich.

Toys R Evil is, itself, and interesting site, and not one I had visited before. It gathers news on toys that you are not likely to see in a more mainstream context, such as these creations from a company called OhNo!Doom.

Tron 2 film confirmed.

Intrigued, I did some digging and came across an article on IGN that described a trailer that was shown unexpectedly on Thursday at the end of the Walt Disney Pictures panel. It shows a light cycle chase and much more sinister-looking Flynn (again played by Jeff Bridges) before ending up with the number 2 in the Tron logo font as the letters T, R, and N appear around it (to form TR2N) and then fade back out.

This morning there was a Slashdot article that in turn pointed to articles on Gizmodo and Filmstalker with a bootleg video of the trailer (presented below Update 7/28: I grabbed the embed from the Filmstalker article, but as you can see, it’s been pulled. The Gizmodo article still has a non-embeddable version for the time being. Update 7/29: Someone did a pretty decent job cleaning up the video and posted it to YouTube, so it’s back.). The quality is poor as no videotaping is supposed to be going on during the video segments, but it’s good enough to get a feel for what’s going on. Hopefully, an official version of the trailer will be released soon.

Talk of a sequel has been slowly building momentum for some time now. At one one point it was rumored that Pixar wanted to do a remake or a sequel. Around the time of the film’s 20th anniversary, writer and director Steven Lisberger, talked about his interest and ideas for a possible sequel. However, Disney didn’t seem to show any interest in continuing the franchise until it released the game Tron 2.0 in 2003. A first-person shooter set in the computer world, it cleverly extended the metaphors originated in the movie to include modern computing technology such as firewalls, PDAs, and the internet. It was said that the game was going to be used to gauge interest in a sequel, but nothing more was really heard until 2005 when Disney hired a pair of writers to come up with a script for a sequel. It would be two more years before Disney would hire Joseph Kosinski to direct the film (now being written by a writing team from the show Lost). The Hollywood Reporter article detailing this most recent bit of news included this tidbit:

…sources said one of the things Kosinski will be doing is working on a sequence involving the movie’s Light Cycles to work out his vision for the movie.

It would appear that the footage shown at Comic-Con is the culmination of that work. It’s exciting to see that actual progress is being made and that (at least visually) it seems to be faithful to the spirit of the original, but I’m going to try to stay cautiously optimistic until more concrete details are available.

I’ve heard he’ll be making the rounds of the talk show circuit to promote the movie. He should also be making appearances in Disney theme parks no doubt giving Push a run for his money.

Engadget also had a story from Maker Faire about Ultimate Wall-E that included a video (from Techie Diva, embedded below). This video better showcases Wall-E’s range of motion, including his head, arms, and eyes. The rep also demonstrates his collision avoidance and directional sound sensors. And while not implemented in that prototype, the rep explained that he’ll also respond to small number of voice commands.

After seeing this new video, I can’t wait to get my hands on one of these.

Update: A friend pointed out that video changed at some point. It would appear that the embed code I got from Engadget points to the most recent Techie Diva video instead of this particular one. (Incidentally, the original Techie Diva story is showing the same incorrect video) You can find the original video at Blip.tv.

Related Post

Disneyland celebrated its 50th birthday on July 17th, 2005, however my story actually begins the day before. Disney was letting as many people as they could fit into Disney’s California Adventure stay the night in that park with the promise that they would be allowed into Disneyland before everyone else the following morning.

I had spent most of Saturday in San Diego at Comic-Con, but I got back to Anaheim in time to check into a nearby hotel room under the assumption that I would get a few hours of sleep before heading over to the resort to get in line. Not surprisingly, I couldn’t really sleep so I made my way to the parking lot tram and hotel shuttle loading area east of the esplanade. When I got there about 2:00am, the line was considerable, snaking back and forth filling about half of the tram/shuttle area. By the time they started letting us in, the area was completely full.

As we passed through DCA’s turnstiles, each person was given a colored wristband roughly denoting the time they entered and a pair of golden Mickey ears with the date stitched on the back before being sent off to search for the end of the line. For me, that was Paradise Pier where California Screamin’ crosses the walkway between the Maliboomer and The Orange Stinger. A few hours later when it was time to move us over to Disneyland, the line was bunched up into groups based on wristband color, and wave after wave of people were directed out the DCA main gate into a cordoned off path that led straight to the Disneyland main gate on the stroller rental side.

Once inside Disneyland, we could see the main gate cast members getting ready for opening. There were considerably more of them than usual since they had to give out those golden ears to everyone that came through. There were a bunch more CMs lined up on the sidewalk from the Opera House to about halfway up Main Street cheering, high-fiving us, and shaking our hands as they welcomed us home.

Upon reaching the hub, there was a choice to go left through Frontierland up to Big Thunder Ranch where the anniversary merchandise was being sold or to right into Tomorrowland to ride Space Mountain. I opted to head into Tomorrowland to get something to eat at Tomorrowland Terrace before making my way back to Main Street to find my friends.

The big ceremony was to begin at 10:00am and there were video screens set up all over the park so that everyone would have a chance to see what was going on. We found a spot in front of Coke Corner before all of Main Street became a sea of of golden Mickey ears. The ceremony began with Art Linkletter recalling time he spent with Walt Disney and ended with Walt’s daughter, Diane Disney Miller, reading his dedication speech from opening day. Bob Iger, Michael Eisner, and Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger also made appearances along the way, but those were the best parts.

Afterward, as the massive crowd slowly thinned, I received a very pleasant surprise. A woman emerged from the crowd and threw her arms around me almost before I recognized who it was. It was my friend S. She’s the kind of person who hugs you like she means it and a hug from her right at that moment, when the energy of the day seemed to be at its height, was the perfect complement to whole experience and is at the heart of my memories of that day.

The rest of the day is a bit of a blur. There was the MousePlanet meet-up at Hungry Bear in the afternoon, trying to nap in the Opera House, fireworks, a group ride on Space Mountain, and the cupcakes. Way too many cupcakes.

Looking back on that day, that Sunday in Disneyland, and that hug from S, I’m reminded of all the Sundays that I’ve spent there and all the people I’ve met on those Sundays. Some have been acquaintances confined to those Sunday visits, while others have become close friends and important parts of my life. Never would I have thought that an introvert such as myself would be surrounded by such wonderful people.

For example, some friends have a voice activated R2-D2—a Wall-E version of that seems like a no-brainer. Well, last night I came across this Gearlog story (by way of Engadget) that would appear to be just that.

Ultimate Wall-E is a programmable robot with 10 separate motors and sensors that will let him react to his surroundings. He’ll be out sometime this summer for $190 but will be introduced to the public at Maker Faire this weekend (not the 29th as mentioned in the Engadget story).

From the Yahoo! News article:

“Oswald is definitely worth more than a fourth-round draft choice,” Michaels said, referring to what the Kansas City Chiefs gave the New York Jets as compensation for releasing coach Herm Edwards from his contract. “I’m going to be a trivia answer someday.”

…

“When Bob was named CEO, he told me he wanted to bring Oswald back to Disney, and I appreciate that he is a man of his word,” Walt Disney’s daughter Diane Disney Miller said in a statement. “Having Oswald around again is going to be a lot of fun.”

What happened to Oswald and how that led directly to the creation of Mickey Mouse is one of the great Disney anecdotes. So it’s pretty cool that after all these years he has been brought back under the Disney umbrella.

Cut to earlier this week. Eisner is now out of the picture and Iger has been courting Steve Jobs and Pixar so aggressively that he has managed to secure the purchase of the animation studio. One of the first things that John Lasseter and Ed Catmull did in their new roles with Disney Feature Animation was to suspend production on Toy Story 3 as reported by a post over at the Animation Nation message board:

John Lasseter and Ed Catmill announced to Feature Animation employees today that the “Toy Story 3″ production will end effectively today. They said that sequels should only be made if there is a really great story that demands it, and should be the domain of those who created the original film.

The next day a Reuter’s article confirmed this and added that Pixar itself would develop the sequel:

The Walt Disney Co. will scrap production of the latest “Toy Story” sequel and hand the project over to Pixar Animation Studios Inc. as part of its deal to acquire Pixar, sources familiar with the situation said on Thursday.

…

“It was really important to me that the people who made the films originally … get a shot at making any films that were derivative,” Iger told analysts on a conference call earlier this week.

Disney gets a top-notch animation studio, Pixar keeps control of its creations, and fans can stop wondering how bad those sequels would have been. So it seems like a win for everyone. Except for Circle 7, that is. Their fate is unclear at this point, but it is likely that they could be absorbed into Pixar to some degree.