I recently re-watched the 1998 movie “Pleasantville.” For those unaware, this starred a pre-Spiderman Tobey McGuire as a kid who’s a fan of the fictional 1950’s black and white TV show “Pleasantville,” sort of a cliche of the bland, utopian family shows of the time. It turns into a fantasy when Don Knotts shows up as a TV repairman who gives Tobey’s character a magical remote that zaps Tobey and his sister, played by Reese Witherspoon, into an episode of “Pleasantville.” There everything is in black and white, the world is *extremely* limited, and the other people are devoid of curiosity or initiative, just fulfilling their roles. The two new people begin to add a note of chaos to things, and in the process the characters begin to have awakenings… and color seeps into the environment. A flower here, a tongue there, and soon signs, trees, cars and whole people are appearing in glorious technicolor as they realize that there’s more to life than their roles. It’s an amusing fantasy that I first saw in the late 90’s, and last saw probably more than 20 years ago.
But upon rewatching it… I’ve decided it’s not just some lighthearted fantasy. It’s a sequel to “Tron.”
The “TV show” is a simulation based on the old TV show. The characters are actual NPCs, nonsentient avatars just going through their programmed motions. The “magic remote” is a much more advanced version of the laser “scanner” from “Tron,” and it uploads the two new users into the Pleasantville grid. The simulation is capable of learning and growth, and the non-sentient NPC slowly, and sometimes quickly, come to awareness. And when characters or objects get a resolution increase, they go from black and white to color. At the end, the simulation expands: previously, when you went to the end of Main Street, you found yourself at the beginning of Main Street: the simulated universe was at best a few miles across. but now there is a college in the town of Springfield, 12 miles away. The simulation is growing.
I assume Don Knotts is a former employee of Encom, likely a friend and co-worker of Kevin Flynn. In “Tron: Legacy” Flynn is stated to have disappeared in 1989, and we find out that he’d been stuck in a simulation of his own ever since. In 1982’s “Tron,” the laser scanner was the size of a building; by 1989 it was portable enough to be installed in a basement. I guess Knotts, who was clearly enough of a fan of the old “Pleasantville” show to have created a simulation based on it, had continued development to the point where the scanner was now hand-held. Throughout the course of the movie it’s shown that he stays in a “TV Repair” van outside the real-world house of the two experimental subjects; perhaps the scanner is connected to the actual simulation hardware contained within the van through a wifi system.
At the end of the movie, Tobey returns to the real world, while his mean-girl, vapid and slutty sister stays behind: she does so because she, too has come to an awakening, and is now going to the college that appears at the end of the movie. Since several days had passed within the simulation while less than and hour had passed in the real world, the sister should be able to get a fair education in relatively short real-world time; of course, the education will be uncredentialed. But it’s better to be educated than not, regardless of whether you can prove it with paperwork. On the other hand… at the end Knotts drives away, presumably taking the simulation with him. How will Tobey get back into it? How will his sister get out? How will they communicate? These are left unanswered
