The Adventures of Patrick In Wonder Con - Sunday

 



 

Here we are folks.  The third, and final installment of my adventures at Wonder Con 2009.  After having stayed out way too late the night before and drinking more than I should have, I begin my day a little worse for wear . . . . .

 



Sunday @ 9:00am:  I wake up with a really nasty headache and am a bit hungover from the night before.  Why does booze have to be so tasty?  After taking a couple of Ibproufen, I take a long shower and finally make my way out of the hotel only to find the streets covered in water.  It started raining the night before and had been going ever since.  It was still raining as I headed out the door.  Luckily, the convention center is only a few blocks away.

 

Sunday @10:30am:  I arrive at the convention center only to find out that the exhibit hall doesn't open until 11am.  Annoyed that I could have slept for another 30 minutes, I head off to forage for food.  I ended up going across the street (once again in the rain) and decided on a place called Jollibee.  It was a weird sort of Asian version of McDonalds that served burgers, fried chicken and spaghetti.  The food was kind of bleh, but in my hungover state I was just happy to have something in my stomach.  What I couldn't get over though was the fact that their mascot, the Jollibee himself, eerily reminded me of the Bizzy Bee character from the Venture Brothers episode "The Incredible Mr. Brisby".  For those who haven't seen that episode, Bizzy Bee is a cute corporate mascot whose merchandising is used for mind control.  Here's a pic of Dean Venture holding a wallet with Bizzy Bee's image on it

 



 

And here's a picture of the Jollibee:

 



 

Maybe it's just me, but overly cute corporate mascots creep me out.

 

Sunday @ 11:00am:  After leaving the Jollibee and trying to get thoughts of corporate controlled brainwashing out of my head, I wandered around the convention floor for a while and did some shopping.  I didn't have any panels that I wanted to hit until later in the day, so I made the most of my time and bought some cool new t-shirts.  One was from one of my favorite online retailers who had a booth at the convention called Gama-Go.  The crowds were much smaller on Sunday too, which was nice.  It wasn't as dead as it had been on Friday, but there were definitely a lot less pople then there were on Saturday.  It made wandering the floor a pleasant experience.

 

Sunday @1:30pm:  I head back up to the Esplanade Ballroom once again to try to get an early seat for the Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles panel.  The program guide says Shirley Manson is going to be there, and seeing as how I've had a crush on her since I was about 15, I have to be there.  Plus, I'm also a fan of the Sarah Connor Chronicles, so that's cool too.

 

When I arrive in the room, the panel for the TV show Chuck is still going on.  I can't say that I've ever seen more than one or two episodes of Chuck, so I don't really know any of the characters or what's going on with the show, but the majority of the cast was on stage, and they were all really fun to listen to as they answered questions from the audience. 

 





 

I'll have to watch the show at some point, as it definitely sounds like something I'd enjoy.  Plus it has Adam Baldwin who I've loved in both Firefly and Angel, so it can't be that bad, right?

 

Sunday @ 2:00pm:  The Sarah Connor Chronicles panel starts.  One of the writers of the show comes out and they play some clips from the upcoming episodes of the show.  There were some pretty cool things to see in the montage of footage shown, including a lot of action scenes and a lot of guns getting shot off.  We also got to see scenes involving John Henry kidnapping Shirley Manson's kid as well as scenes of Cameron getting shot...a lot.  The big suprise though (but not really) was the final shot of the montage that showed John Connor and Cameron in bed together in what definitely looked like a post coital moment. 

 

I say that's not suprising because the show has really been sort of building towards that for a while now.  John and Cameron's characters have had a weird almost romantic tension thing going ever since Riley showed up, and I had sort of figured it was inevitable that they'd end up having sex.  Also, I don't know about you, but if I had a Terminator as my personal protector who looked like Summer Glau, I would have been sleeping with her from pretty much the day we met.  Wouldn't you?  Don't lie now.  You know you would.

 

Summer Glau.....The cutest Terminator ever.

 

The only really bad thing about the footage shown at the panel was the music they had set the shots too.  It was this annoying slow song about some dude who was missing his trousers.  It made no sense, and it actually got laughs from the people in attendence.  It was a poor choice of music, and when compared to the awesomeness of the Terminator: Salvation trailer from the day before that had Nine Inch Nails as its background music, this montage just came off feeling lame and amateurish in comparison...which is sad because as I said before, the footage itself was pretty cool to see.  IO9 has the trailer online for you to see.  You can check it out here.

 

Shirley Manson looking gorgeous, as usual.

 

After the footage was shown, Shirley Manson came out on stage (I swooned), and then suprisingly Summer Glau came out on stage too.  This was cool because she wasn't listed anywhere on the program.  She must have been a last minute addition to the panel.  The actresses and the writer then did a bit of Q&A with the moderator followed by some really dumb questions from the audience.  Not much info was given out really.  They mainly talked about what it was like to make the show and how fun it was to play their characters. 

 



 

Sunday @ 3:00pm:  After the Sarah Connor panel, I headed back down to the first floor and met up once again with my friend Mike from PopcornJunkies to attend the panel for Cartoon Network's new show, the League Of Super Evil (whose name stands for L.O.S.E.).  LOSE is a new CG kids show about a group of Z list super villains and the adventures they get up to.  I was only able to say for part of the panel, but I got to see two episodes of the show before I left and they were fairly entertaining.  In one episode the villains face off against a Voltron/Power Rangers like superhero team in a giant robot one of them had stolen from another villain in order to win a Slam Dunk Contest.  The heroes were a great mockery of the classic costumed team in giant robots and the episode had a few laugh out loud moments.  This is a show worth watching.  I'll have to be sure to keep up with it.

 



 

Sunday @3:30pm:  I head over to the Starship Smackdown panel for a few minutes to see what it's like before I have to head back upstairs.  Geek-tastic's contributors Matt and Wes have been talking about how much fun this panel is since last years San Diego Comic Con.  What happens in this panel is that a team of judges pick different starships from TV shows or movies and put them into a tournament style elimination game.  Sixteen ships are chosen total.  In each round two ships are set to face off against each other and the judges debate the relative strengths and weaknesses of each ship.  They then take a vote to determine who would win in a battle, and the winner moves on to the next round.  In the end, only one ship will be crowned champion.

 

The ships chosen can come from anywhere though (except cartoons), and the odd mixture of choices can create some interesting matchups.  Amongst some of the starships set to do battle at the panel was the Millennium Falcon, the Starship of the Imagination from Carl Sagan's old PBS series, the USS Enterprise NCC-1701-C, the V Mothership, the ships from Independence Day and the ship those kids made out of garbage in that old 80's movie The Explorers.

 

For the little bit of time I was at the panel, I must say it was really funny.  The panel judges were cracking some jokes and the audience was allowed to interact and shout out suggestions for additional ships.  I'll definitely be making time out of my schedule to hit this panel again at this years SD Comic Con.  But unfortunately, I had to head out early on this day because I had a date with a vampire slayer from Sunnydale.

 

Sunday @ 4:00pm:  I head up to the Esplanade Ballroom one last time so that I can attend my last panel of the con.  And what a fitting last panel it was.  Buffy The Vampire Slayer's Musical panel.  Put on by Wheadonopolis.com, the Buffy panel was a live audience screening of the cult classic musical episode of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series entitled Once More With Feeling.  Upon walking into the room, one of the volunteers from Wheadonopolis handed me this really kickass button that I absolutely love.

 



 

The volunteers also gave out fake vampire teeth, a Sunnydale parking ticket, and little finger puppet monsters to everyone in attendence.  The gifts were small, but they did a lot to add to the fun feel of the screening and they were much appreciated by pretty much everyone in the audience. 

 

During the episode's screening, some people sang along, cell phones were waved in the place of lighters during the slow ballads, and the girls always screamed whenever Spike appeared on screen.  My favorite part though was the audience yelling "NO!" during Dawn's first song when she asked if anyone ever noticed her or even cared.  It was hilarious and it's good to know I'm not alone in seriously hating the Dawn character.

 

Sunday@ 5:00pm:  As the Buffy panel came to a close, so did Wonder Con.  The exhibit hall closed at 5pm as well, so there wasn't really much left to do.  I got back onto the floor and hung out with my friends Matt and Lee for a bit as Matt helped to take down the TSG booth.  I'd never been on a convention floor as they started taking things down before.  It was strange to see all these booths I'd been walking amongst for the last three days get broken down and boxed up in the space of minutes.  It was sort of a sad feeling really, literally watching the convention come to an end. 

 

After a while I said bye to Matt and Lee and headed back to the hotel to upload pics from the day to Geek-tastic's flickr account.  And, of course, to have a drink or two.

 

In the end, I'd have to say that I really enjoyed my first time up at Wonder Con.  As a 16 year veteran of the San Diego Comic Con, this was something totally new, yet familiar.  It was a refreshing change of pace from the SD con, and it's something that I will most assuredly be endeavouring to attend again in the future.  It looks like I'll have two annual conventions that I'll have to be attending each year from now on.

 

I hope everyone enjoyed these timeline posts.  If not, let me know what you'd like to see instead when I cover events such as this.  I'd love to hear some of your thoughts or ideas.