"Part of the charm" is either nostalgia on overload or excusing it as "so bad it's good." Different strokes, but be honest. If you saw it for the first time today, with no knowledge of the history, no nostalgia connected to it, no nothing, would you really think it was charming?
I like plenty of terrible garbage, plenty of things that are objectively worse than Tron, so I'm not blasting you for that. But get out of here with that "why don't you like good things" shit.
Because I think it's good as a whole in spite of it's poor quality dialogue and line delivery (for everyone not named Jeff Bridges and David Warner anyways, they were great). I also give it grace under the context of how it was filmed, which was basically actors on some very sparse black and white sets with barely anything to actually interact with physically. It's always an enjoyable watch whenever I rarely bust it out. Does nostalgia play into it? Absolutely, but there's a reason why so many people still love and adore it, and it isn't all nostalgia.
Would I objectively love it as much if I saw it for the first time now? Probably not. Could say that about anything from that era. We're all old and cynical bastards now that are difficult to impress. Would I dislike it though? I doubt it, because I enjoy retro tech stuff and again, flaws being part of something's charm as long as they're not super cringe.
I think if Disney made it 10 years later even with the exact same effects, it would be two thousand percent better. People forget how shit live action Disney used to be. Somewhere, there was a change in management or something and they turned a corner. But Disney live action in the 1970s and 1980s was all relentlessly vanilla and corny stuff you could show for the kids on a projector after Sunday sevice at a Methodist church. Whatever any filmmakers were attempting to do, the studio notes must have been brutal. Tone it down type of stuff.
Tron was supposed to be their "turn the corner" movie as they were pretty self aware that their live action stuff wasn't doing well, nor well made. In a lot of ways, it did. It put them back on the map for live action productions, was a technical marvel, and warts and all gained a huge audience amongst kids, teenagers, and young adults. Doesn't hurt that a good amount of critics liked it too.
Would it have been better 10 years later? That's really hard to say. There was still plenty of cheesy, corny, cliched stuff then, arguably more than there was in the very early 80s.
Not all 80's Disney movies were vanilla and corny. Return to Oz a few years after Tron was anything but. It completely embraced the "dark" children's movie trend to the point that some critics gave it negative reviews for going too far with it. Scared the crap out of me as a kid. Still one of my favorites of that decade.
