Tron

[badlands]

I like the older v ersion but it didnt' do so hot in the movies I heard. People didn't like it nor did Critics. Malden say it deserved a four while the secret of nimh got a eight. I thought that movie was great,too. Tron did require a lot of imagination to understand it. It reminded me of 1984, the book and the book of revelations. A evil machine takes control of the world's computers. The Letter W in the hebrew bible is the six letter. So three www. means 666.

[august]

Originally Posted by badlands

it didnt' do so hot in the movies I heard. People didn't like it nor did Critics

You may want to reevaluate the reliability of whoever you heard that from. It was very popular with the under-25 audience, and made a decent profit at the box office, and got huge amounts of media coverage in Time, Rolling Stone, etc. Just as it came out, the cable and video market was beginning to become relevant, so it made infinitely more from those.

Critical reviews were mixed, but that's the norm for youth-oriented genre films. It did get two Oscar nominations though.

[RobRoy]

Also, the internet didn't open to commercial interests until 1988, and wouldn't gain any kind of public traction until the early 90s. Tron released in 1982, long before the internet even had a public face.

Your use of the Number of the Beast and link to the World Wide Web is rather humorous (and a favorite topic of mine). First, The Book of Revelation of John was written in Greek, not Hebrew. It always amazes me that people like to use Hebrew gematria on a Greek text, I get the connection, it’s what we have to work with, so we might as well push on, eh? Otherwise, we couldn’t equate hundreds or thousands of innocent people, objects or ideas as being “from the Devil”, and where’s the fun in that?!

The Hebrew gematria is actually a summing of a person’s name which is meant to link him/her to the Beast, not a simple mark of three 6’s emblazoned on a forehead as modern mythos would have us believe. If evil marked itself so readily, I would think it would have a harder time of being evil. Anyhow, the idea is that by summing the letters of a name we get a numeric value that is supposed to equal six-hundred-sixty-six. So, in regards to your use of w=6, in the gematria system we would get 18, not 666. Just for fun though, any number of names can sum to 666 in any number of ways, including Nero, almost every Pope or religious leader, and I’m pretty certain Barak Obama. You don’t even need to use the gematria system (although, once you stop using it, or use it as a cafeteria, the whole things breaks down); I recall when Ronald Wilson Reagan (6-6-6) was summed.

Taking this still further, there is issue with the correct translation of this particular passage. In some manuscripts, we do not get the 666 number, but rather 616. At least one of these manuscripts, Papyrus 115 from Oxyrhynchus, is considered a very good source, and better than most of the extent 666 manuscripts which are younger and have poor penmanship. Jokes aside, a poor copyist actually could have included a mistranslation of the number quite easily.

Finally, my favorite bit when the Hebrew gematria is pulled out, is that Hebrew does not have direct English letter equivalents. That is, it’s not as simple as a letter-for-letter replacement. In the case of your reference “w”, in fact the number 6 is the Hebrew vav or waw, and depending on how it is used, can refer to a Latin F, V, U, W, or Y. In Greek, waw equates to Digamma, which became the Latin F. Add a dot on top to waw, and in a certain position, and now we get an O or OO vowel!

Always a fun topic. Thanks for bringing it up.