Last Friday, the great journalist Walter Cronkite passed away at the age of 92. With his soothing baritone voice conveying the right mix of warmth and gravitas, Cronkite reported to America not only the biggest of the century, but his coverage of the space program documented some of the most important moments in all of human history.
But despite his position as “The Most Trusted Man In America,” many of the retrospectives about the anchor that aired this past weekend pointed out the anchor’s playful side, a side that peeks out in the embedded clip below. It is from a news report that must have aired shortly before the release of Disney’s groundbreaking 1982 film Tron. And while he had reported on many history changing events, I wonder if even he realized at the time the revolution he was reporting on.
In the short piece, Cronkite introduces viewers to the still in its infancy field of computer-generated visual effects and the joins with the film’s visual effects supervisor Harrison Ellenshaw, who places him into the film’s world-within-a-computer. The video quality of the clip isn’t the greatest, but presumably CBS has a cleaner version that could perhaps one day be included on a future DVD or Blu-Ray release.
