This is a continuation of my earlier article in which I broke down the events of what transpired at last weekend's Wonder Con up in San Francisco. This article covers the events of Saturday, the busiest day of the con by far. So let's get this thing going.
Here we go.
Saturday @ 11:00am: I arrive at the convention center early so I can join my friend Mike in attending the Watchmen movie panel. I've already seen the film, so I don't really care about seeing any trailers or scenes from the film, but Zack Snyder and most of the cast of the film are on hand to do a Q&A which I did want to see. However, upon arriving I see a giant line heading out from the Esplanade Ballroom and I follow it outside and around the side of the convention center all the way to the end. The line is crazy long and I seriously start having second thoughts about whether or not I really want to go see this panel.
Unsure what to do, I call my fellow Geek-tastic contributor Matt Jeffrey and ask him what he's up to. He convinces me to get out of line and go with him to see a panel called Comic Book Heaven that's supposed to be really good. He's seen the panel before at SDCC last year and he's been talking about it for months. In the panel, basically, the host presents a slide show of silly or bizarre comic book covers or panels from the golden age of comics and then makes fun of them in witty and sarcastic ways. From what I've heard, it's hilarious. I call my friend Mike and tell him I'm skipping out on the Watchmen panel and I will meet him afterwards. He, being the gracious person he is, says "No problem."
Saturday @ 11:15am: Matt and his girlfriend Lee and I walk into room 236/238 a little early to get good seats to the panel. It's supposed to start at 11:30am. Upon walking in, someone from the Wonder Con staff asks us if we are the guys who are going to be putting the panel on. We tell him no, we're just here to see the panel and then we ask why he asked us his question. He then explains to us that the host of the panel hasn't shown up yet and no one has heard from him. They don't know if he's going to make it or not. We tell the staffer that we'll just hang out anyways and see if he shows up and he says "cool". We then spend the next ten minutes or so chatting with him about his job and what he does as the room slowly fills up.
Saturday @ 11:25am: Still no sign of the panel's host. The Wonder Con staffer heads out of the room to see if anyone else knows what's going on.
Saturday @ 11:30am: The panel is supposed to be starting now, the room is about three quarters full, but we still don't have a host. I start half jokingly talking to Matt about taking over the panel if the guy doesn't show up by 11:40.
Saturday @ 11:35am: Still no sign of the host. At this point I am very seriously considering just hopping up on stage and entertaining the crowd until the guy shows up. I figure at the very least, maybe I can tell the people in the room a little about Geek-tastic.com before everyone leaves the room.
Saturday @11:40am: The Wonder Con staffer comes back into the room looking annoyed. When he comes by us I ask him what's going on with the panel's host and he says it looks like he's probably not showing up. Figuring I'll get told no, but thinking it doesn't hurt to ask, I inquire as to whether or not he'd be ok if Matt and I hopped up on stage and entertained the crowd until the guy showed up. He paused to think about it for a second and then said, "Sure. I don't see why not, but if the guy shows up you'll have to get off the stage."
Matt and I both tell him that's not a problem at all and thank him for letting us do this. Then, with no pre-planning of any kind, Matt and I proceed to walk onto the stage, sit down at the microphones and begin to introduce ourselves to the people in the room. We tell them we are not the guy from Comic Book Heaven but are actually from a website called Geek-tastic.com and that we're taking over the panel until the actual host shows up. Amused, the audience laughs a bit and listens to us as we explain what the site is about and how we do a podcast and a web comic and some other stuff. Lee was even super cool and handed out the new Geek-tastic business cards to some of the people in the room.
Saturday @ 11:47am: A different Wonder Con staffer walks onto the stage and whispers into Matt's ear. Expecting that we're getting kicked off stage, I start getting ready to leave. Matt then leans over to me and tells me the guy just said to him that it has been confirmed the Comic Book Heaven guy isn't showing up and that if we want, we can use his whole hour to talk to the crowd. We inform the crowd of this, and about a third of them get up and leave, but that still leaves the room half full. So Matt and I continue with our impromptu panel and spend the next 45 minutes or so chatting with the crowd.
Our panel covered a wide range of topics. It continued the GeekRoundTable panel's earlier discussion of what is the greatest animated show of all time. We also got into a debate over what exactly makes a zombie a zombie. Are fast zombies really zombies? Do infected people count, or do only the living dead qualify? Is 28 days later really a zombie film or not? Stuff like that. Finally, there was some discussion of the awesomeness that was the film Punisher: War Zone and how disappointed we were that no comic fans had gone to see it.
Overall, I was really happy with how things went. The vast majority of the people in the room stuck with us for the whole panel, even though we were totally making it up as we went. We got some good debating going with the audience, and generally I think we managed to keep people entertained. I couldn't have been happier. At the end of the panel, more people came up to us and complimented us on a fun panel and we gave out some more business cards. By the time I walked out of the room I was positively glowing. This was by far and away the highlight of the con for me. I really want to thank Matt for joining me on stage. I want to thank Lee for helping out and passing out cards. And finally, I'd love to say a sincere thank you to everyone who stayed in the room after two random dudes they didn't know took the stage and started talking about random shit for 45 minutes. You guys were awesome, and we were so happy that you stuck with us. Thank you so much!!!
Saturday @ 12:30pm: After leaving the impromptu Geek-tastic panel I met up with Mike and Wandered the exhibit hall for a bit. Saturday was much more like the typical comic con experience as I'm used to it nowadays. The floor was packed with people, and it was almost impossible to get through certain ailes and walkways. To avoid the crowd, we headed out and got lunch.
The Floor of Wonder Con on SaturdaySaturday @ 1:30pm: Heading back from lunch, Mike and I head back into the Esplanade Ballroom a bit early to check out the Star Trek movie panel. The program guide was promising a "special guest you won't want to miss". I was hoping it was Leonard Nimoy, but I was going to go to the panel anyways since I'm a huge Star Trek fan regardless and I'm really excited to see this film.
The room for this panel is absolutely packed, and unfortunately the best seats Mike and I could get were at the very back of the room. As a result, I apologize for the poorness of the photos I took in this panel. I just wasn't close enough to the stage to get any decent shots.
Sunday @ 2:00pm: The panel starts and director JJ Abrams comes out to start things off. We are treated to the new trailer for the film that will be screened before Watchmen this weekend. The new trailer does show a lot of what we've already seen, but there's a bunch of new stuff in there too, including some more of the film's plot. The coolest new thing though was seeing James T. Kirk taking the command chair for the first time. It was an awesome moment to see, and I bet it will be even cooler when seen in the context of the film.
Director JJ Abrams talking about how cool it was to get to make the new Star Trek filmAfter the trailer, JJ Abrams brought out some of the stars of the film, including Chris Pine (James Kirk), Zachary Quinto (Spock) and Zoe Saldana (Uhura). They spent the next 45 minutes or so doing Q&A with the audience. They discussed how it felt to make the film, what a great director JJ Abrams is, how daunting it was to take over the roles of Kirk and Spock, and how really awesome Leonard Nimoy was to work with. Zachary Quinto said he didn't really watch too many episodes of the original series while preparing for his role as Spock because Leonard Nimoy made himself so available to him for guidance that he just spent all his time working with him in preparing the role. If I was him, I would have done the same thing.
Chris Pine (left) and Zachary Quinto discussing their roles in the new Star Trek MovieSaturday @ 3:00pm: After the panel I headed back down to the exhibit floor for a while to see what was going on down there. Mike stuck around in the Esplanade room though and caught the panels for the movie 9 as well as Pixar's new film entitled Up. If you'd like to check out his reviews of those panels, you can find them here.
Saturday @ 4:30pm: I made sure to get back up to the Esplanade Ballroom early for the Terminator: Salvation panel. I've had mixed feelings about this film to be honest and I wanted to see what director McG had to say for himself in front of a full room of Terminator fans. I'm glad to say though that the man did not disappoint.
Of all the panels I went to over the weekend (with the exception of my own impromptu panel of course), the Terminator: Salvation panel was by far the most entertaining. McG was a really charismatic speaker and was engaging and funny to listen to. You could honestly feel he was excited about the film he is making and was truly eager to show it to the audience and gauge their reactions to it. He also cusses like a sailor and was doing an amazing job of riling the crowd up for the film.
Director McG entertaining a very lively crowd during the Terminator: Salvation panelRight before he showed the trailer, he started talking about how the films star Christian Bale never wants to come to these convention things and how he was really annoyed by this. Bale (as McG kept referring to him) was impossible to convince to get him to show up to these things, and so to get back at him he was going to call Bale right then and there and we were all going to leave a voicemail on his phone because the guy never answers his phone. He pulls out what looked like a Blackberry, dialed a number and then held the phone up to the microphone so we could all hear it ring. Upon pickup, an automated voice message played and then McG started talking into the phone.
"Bale!" he said. "You're fucking dead to me! Why don't you ever come to these events? All these people here want to see you!" He then held the phone out to the audience so we could all yell and scream and go crazy. It was a very funny, very endearing moment and I think it did a lot to sway the crowd towards liking McG.
Then, McG brought out some cast members from the film including Anton Yelchin, Common, Bryce Dallas Howard and Moon Bloodgood. Once everyone was introduced, they played us the new trailer that, just like Star Trek's, will also be playing before The Watchmen this weekend. Right before the trailer was played though, McG told us to prepare ourselves though. He said this trailer was about to, and I quote, "Kick your fucking balls up your ass!"
I will say this about McG, he did not lie. Here's the trailer.
After the trailer (which the audience went crazy for, by the way) the cast did some Q&A with the audience. McG even pulled one or two fans up on stage and made them official parts of the panel, which I thought was really cool. They also showed us some scenes from the film that hadn't been completely finished yet, which was a real treat. We saw more of the motorcycle Terminator chase scene, and a fight scene between some water based machines and a helicopter crew. The special effects weren't quite finished in these scenes yet, but that didn't stop them from still being incredibly cool sequences. I think it speaks very highly of this film that even uncompleted scenes can manage to make a full room of skeptical comic book geeks still go crazy and cheer after they're played.
As I said earlier, I walked into this panel with a lot of skepticism and some worries about the film, but I walked out really excited to see it. Terminator: Salvation is looking really awesome. This is now a must see on my summer movie list.
Oh, one last thing. Apparently there is some discord between the film's director and Warner Brothers over a nude scene in the film. During one scene in the film they apparently filmed a scene in which we see Moon Bloodgood's boobs. This scene however is causing the film to potentially get an R rating, and the WB wants the film to have a PG-13 rating. McG asked the audience at one point who did and did not want to see Moon's boobs in the film. A small group of people (mostly women) did not want to see her boobs. Almost everyone else in the room though thunderously cheered for being able to see Moon's boobs in the film. I highly doubt that this will sway the suits over at WB to change their mind on this scene, but maybe if we're lucky we'll get to see a rated R cut of the film that has this scene (and maybe others) included on a future release of the film.
Saturday @ 5:30pm: I stuck around in the Esplanade Ballroom after the Terminator panel to check out a Star Wars panel entitled "Celebrate a decade of Star Wars: Where were you in '99?" Typically, I avoid Star Wars panels nowadays as I've learned over the years that almost nothing exciting ever happens in them. They're usually just about Steve Sansweet (Lucasfilm's PR guy) talking to the audinence about what's coming up next for Star Wars. In my opinion, they tend to be very dry and dull panels, and I've learned to just check out Star Wars' website the day after a convention to see any footage they may have played during the con.
However, this panel's title interested me. This being the 10th anniversary of Episode One, I thought maybe they'd shake things up a bit and do some cool looking back over the last ten years sort of thing. Sadly, I was very wrong.
Aside from playing the original Episode One trailer at the start of the panel, followed by a short video of how the Star Wars fan empire has grown over the last decade, the rest of the panel had absolutely nothing to do with the events of 1999 and never were we asked the question of where we were during that time. Instead, the panel was devoted to the animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars and what was going to happen during the next few episodes. They showed some footage from the episodes in a sort of trailer format, and they introduced a new bounty hunter who admittedly looks pretty cool, but overall the panel was the typical Star Wars dullness I've come to expect over the years.
Steve Sansweet, boring as usualSuffice it to say, I was highly dissapointed.
Saturday @ 6:30pm: After the Star Wars panel, Wonder Con was done for the day. I didn't really feel like hitting up the Masquerade as it was Saturday night and I had friends in San Francisco I wanted to hang out whom I never get to see, so instead of sticking around I wandered off into the city. I met up with my friends and we went bar hopping and did a little dancing. I had a goodly amount of vodka that night too. Good times were had, but I would definitely be feeling it the next morning
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That's it for Saturday folks. Be sure to check back soon as I'll have Sunday (the final day of the con) up soon.
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