weasel-king
Registered Trader,
**Some of this could have gone in the Comic section, but I didn't want to create two threads**
My wife, son, and I arrived at the Knoxville Hilton on Friday afternoon. After unpacking we went ahead and headed over to the convention center. It was a lot smaller than I would have imagined, but there were still a ton of booths, toys, movie posters, and fans around.
My wife was disappointed to find out that Kevin Sorbo was not going to make it, due to a "filming conflict", or so they said. We made an initial run through the floor, then decided that after the ~6 hour drive we were pooped. My son was about to doze off, so we went ahead and got Michael Biehn out of the way. Ahead of time we tried to think of questions to ask, rather than just plunk down the auto ticket and move on. Biehn had several photos to choose from, all from the 4 following films: Terminator, Tombstone, Aliens, and I think Navy Seals. I asked the generic "Which film did you have the most fun making". He said that though he had no control over which pictures had been brought for signing (agent, perhaps?), he was most proud of those four, but had the most fun on The Rock. We got the photo personalized to my son and the pic to go with it:
We were going to get Shawnee Smith, but the line was longer than we were willing to wait for as tired as we were. We should have learned... I also grabbed a couple of free signed prints from Tom Nguyen and Jamal Igle before we headed out (I cropped the Igle poorly when scanning).
The next day we got there around 11a. They had a costume contest at noon for the 14-and-under crowd, so we had to get my son registered. We both went in costume (myself as Zane from the Wonder Twins, my son as Gleek), but unfortunately my wife's costume was not done in time for the trip. Us getting dressed:
At the show a reporter from a local television station asked if he could interview me and follow me around for a little. Sure, why not. We ended up on the news Sunday afternoon for a Father's Day segment which was pretty cool (it's also on their website).
We then headed up for the contest. There were about 20 entrants, but there was no winner chosen as everyone got a prize. Lincoln wanted a Superman lunchbox, so we picked that.
Us up on the stage. I later found out that there was some light-blue face paint from my son on my crotch:
There are plenty more pics of us both, but frankly those are embarrassing enough!
Some random participants:
We went back to the hotel and I changed (since the spandex was hot), and Lincoln needed a nap. I went back to the show. I am a huge Lost fan, so I had to get Andrew Divoff's auto since the schedule didn't have him listed after that afternoon or Sunday. I told him my son was napping and that I wanted a picture with them both. He said to come back at any time and he'd be happy to. The auto was also for Lincoln:
I told Andrew that I assumed he couldn't tell us if he was headed back to Hawaii for Lost (the writers are notoriously secretive about the plot and who will show up when). He said he would tell me if he knew, but that even in Season 3 he didn't have much advance notice himself. I asked him how he felt about being on trading cards. He said it was funny, because some guy at another show brought him a card from the Highlander TV series, which he didn't even know existed. He said it was very interesting to see what the fans would dig up sometimes. I mentioned how I was building all the Lost sets from Inkworks; he said the Inkworks rep was with him the day before, and that people pay a lot for the Lost cards. When I mentioned I paid a good amount for his auto'd Pieceworks card, he nodded, winked and said "Good!". Cool guy.
Taking a stroll through Artists' Alley, I stumbled across Brian Shearer's booth. After flipping through some prints and seeing some of his Marvel cards, I noticed his "commission" sign. I asked if he could draw me a pic of Rhino, and he said sure. I checked in later--not too happy with it, so I guess I'll just call it a souvenir and learn my lesson! He was working on a Phoenix drawing that was amazing when I got there, so that may have suckered me in. It's a big 9"x12" print, so it's generously cropped:
At Arthur Suydam's table (Marvel Zombies) I picked up a print and a comic solely because I really liked the cover (sorry for the lazy scan):
The print is too big to scan, but it's the Green Goblin/Spidey one.
I also nabbed a signed GI Joe print from Michael Golden:
Unfortunately I missed out on prints from Mark Texeira, Andy Smith, and Joe Staton.
There was also a local artist there. My wife likes Wolverine (well, from the movies), and we're starting to pick up some Iron Man stuff for my son, so I got these:
Finally I got an auto'd photo of Samantha Newark. When I was much, much younger I had a cartoon crush on Jem from Jem and the Holograms. I admitted that to her as I waited for her to finish signing, and she said "You know, you'd be surprised how many guys say that". Guess I'm not that odd. She also had a delightful British accent, so clearly she only did the singing for Jem. And her mom was acting as her banker and tried to get me to buy a CD as well. This one was personalized to me and not my son, for a change:
I headed back to the hotel and changed back into my purple mess since the adult/group contest was about to start. Registration was at 3:30, but we had already registered. It wasn't supposed to start until 4p, so we got there about 3:45 or so. When we got there several others were outside the room walking around,so we figured that we were ok. It turns out that they apparently moved the schedule up because those people had already been on stage and the judges were already tallying the votes. Oh well, quite a dissapointment. These were some of the random entrants:
Afterwards we went down to the show and changed. We got Rowdy Roddy Piper's auto. I asked him if people would randomly ask him to do his bubblegum line from "They Live". He said he was overseas somewhere walking down the street and someone yelled it from a car, so yeah. He then told us that it was a non-scripted line, something that he blurted out because they were about to cut anyway. He didn't think anything of it and then it shows up in the final cut. He mumbled a lot and kept referring to Lincoln as "she" and "her" but he was pleasant:
Both my son and Roddy were quite animated, so they're a little blurry.
We were going to get Shawnee Smith, but she was just wrapping up for the day. So we missed her a second time.
Sunday starts, and we wanted to get there quickly to get Ernie Hudson's auto. Lincoln was already cranky so I stood in line and my wife rolled him around in the stroller. What should have been about 5-minutes was about 35-minutes because Ernie had some makeup photos to take with the Ecto-1. In the auto line people were bringing all sorts of things for Ernie to sign. A person in line ahead of me brought 5 things. Strange that he was apparently the most popular signer so far. The guy directly in front of me had a figure from Congo and a Ghostbusters poster (that Ernie wasn't even on). When he was about to sign it, Ernie said "Well, since I'm not on this one I'll just sign on [Bill] Murray's head. Nah, if you want the other guys you can probably catch them playing golf somewhere!" Apparently he has done a lot of voiceover work lately for video games and has been keeping busy. He was also recently at a Ghostbusters "reunion" party with some of the castmates and Ray Parker Jr., and he said they played the GB theme song for 55-minutes. He commented on how tired of it he was (then had a well-placed chuckle, perhaps on an attempt to play it off):
We swung by and got the photo of Divoff as he promised. Still a nice guy. He had actually stayed in the same hotel as us, and he rode the elevator down with Lincoln and my wife earlier. So when he saw them he said "Oh, hello again".
Shawnee was not there, and we were about done, so we were Shawnee-less. Doug Jones was still there, and in an act of charity (and because I still had a red auto ticket left) we succumbed and went to his table. He actually turned out to be the most pleasant person we spoke with. He had photos from a number of films, and even the Buffy episode Hush. I commented to him (he's tall and very skinny) that he always seemed to play very lean, lithe characters, and wondered if he had ever donned a fat suit. He said "Actually, yes, about 100-pounds for a forgettable but fun, straight-to-DVD--well, VHS, children's film called Galgameth." He then described it as if he shot it yesterday (it came out in '96), the allegory behind it, how torturous the fat suit was, and all. We talked about how crazy Buffy fans were (he said "I know, they seem to some out of nowhere at these shows sometimes"), as well as the original Cabinet of Dr. Caligari that came out in 1920 (he was in a remake recently). He had some very kind words to say about my son, commented on his "powerful" name, and we chatted for a few minutes about some random things.
And the group shot:
Definitely the best person we spoke to. It's a shame knowing that I could have missed him had Shawnee Smith been there.
So that's it. Go try and find Galgameth on VHS--I have one coming in soon!
My wife, son, and I arrived at the Knoxville Hilton on Friday afternoon. After unpacking we went ahead and headed over to the convention center. It was a lot smaller than I would have imagined, but there were still a ton of booths, toys, movie posters, and fans around.
My wife was disappointed to find out that Kevin Sorbo was not going to make it, due to a "filming conflict", or so they said. We made an initial run through the floor, then decided that after the ~6 hour drive we were pooped. My son was about to doze off, so we went ahead and got Michael Biehn out of the way. Ahead of time we tried to think of questions to ask, rather than just plunk down the auto ticket and move on. Biehn had several photos to choose from, all from the 4 following films: Terminator, Tombstone, Aliens, and I think Navy Seals. I asked the generic "Which film did you have the most fun making". He said that though he had no control over which pictures had been brought for signing (agent, perhaps?), he was most proud of those four, but had the most fun on The Rock. We got the photo personalized to my son and the pic to go with it:
We were going to get Shawnee Smith, but the line was longer than we were willing to wait for as tired as we were. We should have learned... I also grabbed a couple of free signed prints from Tom Nguyen and Jamal Igle before we headed out (I cropped the Igle poorly when scanning).
The next day we got there around 11a. They had a costume contest at noon for the 14-and-under crowd, so we had to get my son registered. We both went in costume (myself as Zane from the Wonder Twins, my son as Gleek), but unfortunately my wife's costume was not done in time for the trip. Us getting dressed:
At the show a reporter from a local television station asked if he could interview me and follow me around for a little. Sure, why not. We ended up on the news Sunday afternoon for a Father's Day segment which was pretty cool (it's also on their website).
We then headed up for the contest. There were about 20 entrants, but there was no winner chosen as everyone got a prize. Lincoln wanted a Superman lunchbox, so we picked that.
Us up on the stage. I later found out that there was some light-blue face paint from my son on my crotch:
There are plenty more pics of us both, but frankly those are embarrassing enough!
Some random participants:
We went back to the hotel and I changed (since the spandex was hot), and Lincoln needed a nap. I went back to the show. I am a huge Lost fan, so I had to get Andrew Divoff's auto since the schedule didn't have him listed after that afternoon or Sunday. I told him my son was napping and that I wanted a picture with them both. He said to come back at any time and he'd be happy to. The auto was also for Lincoln:
I told Andrew that I assumed he couldn't tell us if he was headed back to Hawaii for Lost (the writers are notoriously secretive about the plot and who will show up when). He said he would tell me if he knew, but that even in Season 3 he didn't have much advance notice himself. I asked him how he felt about being on trading cards. He said it was funny, because some guy at another show brought him a card from the Highlander TV series, which he didn't even know existed. He said it was very interesting to see what the fans would dig up sometimes. I mentioned how I was building all the Lost sets from Inkworks; he said the Inkworks rep was with him the day before, and that people pay a lot for the Lost cards. When I mentioned I paid a good amount for his auto'd Pieceworks card, he nodded, winked and said "Good!". Cool guy.
Taking a stroll through Artists' Alley, I stumbled across Brian Shearer's booth. After flipping through some prints and seeing some of his Marvel cards, I noticed his "commission" sign. I asked if he could draw me a pic of Rhino, and he said sure. I checked in later--not too happy with it, so I guess I'll just call it a souvenir and learn my lesson! He was working on a Phoenix drawing that was amazing when I got there, so that may have suckered me in. It's a big 9"x12" print, so it's generously cropped:
At Arthur Suydam's table (Marvel Zombies) I picked up a print and a comic solely because I really liked the cover (sorry for the lazy scan):
The print is too big to scan, but it's the Green Goblin/Spidey one.
I also nabbed a signed GI Joe print from Michael Golden:
Unfortunately I missed out on prints from Mark Texeira, Andy Smith, and Joe Staton.
There was also a local artist there. My wife likes Wolverine (well, from the movies), and we're starting to pick up some Iron Man stuff for my son, so I got these:
Finally I got an auto'd photo of Samantha Newark. When I was much, much younger I had a cartoon crush on Jem from Jem and the Holograms. I admitted that to her as I waited for her to finish signing, and she said "You know, you'd be surprised how many guys say that". Guess I'm not that odd. She also had a delightful British accent, so clearly she only did the singing for Jem. And her mom was acting as her banker and tried to get me to buy a CD as well. This one was personalized to me and not my son, for a change:
I headed back to the hotel and changed back into my purple mess since the adult/group contest was about to start. Registration was at 3:30, but we had already registered. It wasn't supposed to start until 4p, so we got there about 3:45 or so. When we got there several others were outside the room walking around,so we figured that we were ok. It turns out that they apparently moved the schedule up because those people had already been on stage and the judges were already tallying the votes. Oh well, quite a dissapointment. These were some of the random entrants:
Afterwards we went down to the show and changed. We got Rowdy Roddy Piper's auto. I asked him if people would randomly ask him to do his bubblegum line from "They Live". He said he was overseas somewhere walking down the street and someone yelled it from a car, so yeah. He then told us that it was a non-scripted line, something that he blurted out because they were about to cut anyway. He didn't think anything of it and then it shows up in the final cut. He mumbled a lot and kept referring to Lincoln as "she" and "her" but he was pleasant:
Both my son and Roddy were quite animated, so they're a little blurry.
We were going to get Shawnee Smith, but she was just wrapping up for the day. So we missed her a second time.
Sunday starts, and we wanted to get there quickly to get Ernie Hudson's auto. Lincoln was already cranky so I stood in line and my wife rolled him around in the stroller. What should have been about 5-minutes was about 35-minutes because Ernie had some makeup photos to take with the Ecto-1. In the auto line people were bringing all sorts of things for Ernie to sign. A person in line ahead of me brought 5 things. Strange that he was apparently the most popular signer so far. The guy directly in front of me had a figure from Congo and a Ghostbusters poster (that Ernie wasn't even on). When he was about to sign it, Ernie said "Well, since I'm not on this one I'll just sign on [Bill] Murray's head. Nah, if you want the other guys you can probably catch them playing golf somewhere!" Apparently he has done a lot of voiceover work lately for video games and has been keeping busy. He was also recently at a Ghostbusters "reunion" party with some of the castmates and Ray Parker Jr., and he said they played the GB theme song for 55-minutes. He commented on how tired of it he was (then had a well-placed chuckle, perhaps on an attempt to play it off):
We swung by and got the photo of Divoff as he promised. Still a nice guy. He had actually stayed in the same hotel as us, and he rode the elevator down with Lincoln and my wife earlier. So when he saw them he said "Oh, hello again".
Shawnee was not there, and we were about done, so we were Shawnee-less. Doug Jones was still there, and in an act of charity (and because I still had a red auto ticket left) we succumbed and went to his table. He actually turned out to be the most pleasant person we spoke with. He had photos from a number of films, and even the Buffy episode Hush. I commented to him (he's tall and very skinny) that he always seemed to play very lean, lithe characters, and wondered if he had ever donned a fat suit. He said "Actually, yes, about 100-pounds for a forgettable but fun, straight-to-DVD--well, VHS, children's film called Galgameth." He then described it as if he shot it yesterday (it came out in '96), the allegory behind it, how torturous the fat suit was, and all. We talked about how crazy Buffy fans were (he said "I know, they seem to some out of nowhere at these shows sometimes"), as well as the original Cabinet of Dr. Caligari that came out in 1920 (he was in a remake recently). He had some very kind words to say about my son, commented on his "powerful" name, and we chatted for a few minutes about some random things.
And the group shot:
Definitely the best person we spoke to. It's a shame knowing that I could have missed him had Shawnee Smith been there.
So that's it. Go try and find Galgameth on VHS--I have one coming in soon!
