My Dragon*Con Report (Part Two)
Continued from previous part here.
Again, there are a lot of pictures. More than in Part One.
Saturday was the Dragon*Con parade, which Kevin said he wasn't interested in. So he left to go to some panel he wanted to see and I stayed to watch the parade, and again I amused myself by taking pictures of the crowd while waiting. There were a lot of people lined up to see the parade.
The parade was very awesome, and I loved seeing all the costumes.
There were some of the contestants from "Who Wants to be a Superhero":
People dressed up as Ghostbusters:
300:
Harry Potter:
(and I didn't get a good picture of them, but there were these two people in the parade dressed up like Harry and Hermione who looked just like the actors that play them in the movies. Especially Hermione. I had to look twice to make sure it wasn't actually Emma Watson)
Lord of the Rings:
Monty Python:
A pretty big group of people dressed up like Doctor Who characters:
Indiana Jones and his dad were seen strolling along the street:
As was George Lucas:
A whole bunch of Stargate people:
Don't worry, Atlantis was represented, too:
The Stargate people even had a truck:
And a massive group devoted to Star Wars, including Darth Vader:
Some Jedi knights:
And a legion of stormtroopers:
Basically, Dragon*Con could be seen as one massive, bizarre crossover:
After the parade Kevin and I had lunch and then tried to make our way to our first panel at 1:00, a Q&A session with Claudia Black. The Hyatt was even more crowded than it was on Friday:
We went to the room where the panel was supposed to be, only to discover it had been moved to a larger room in the Hyatt. Again, we didn't realize how early we would have to be to these panels, so by the time we got to the Claudia Black thing we were shut out. Which was disappointing because it was the only panel she was doing. We made the best of it, though, and went to a Whedon Universe track panel with Ron Glass and Mark A. Sheppard which was going on at the same time and only about half full.
Sorry about the quality of the picture. The zoom on my camera is crappy and even though the room was only about half full, it was a huge room and we were still sitting in the last row of occupied seats. This is the clearest shot I have, and of course Mark Sheppard has his back to the camera.
Both Ron Glass and Mark Sheppard were very funny, and when asked about Book's past from Firefly, Ron Glass said something about him being a choreographer before he became a Shepherd, and that remained a running joke throughout the whole panel, including a suggestion that had Firefly lasted long enough Whedon would have probably gotten around to making a musical episode. It was a bit odd that pretty much every other question was about some aspect of Book's past, when after the first such question Ron Glass said that his character's past had never really been laid out and it wasn't something he had thought a lot on at the time because Joss Whedon was the writer and should be the one to come up with the character's backstory. But people kept insisting that Ron Glass had to have some knowledge of Book's past that the fans weren't aware of (which led to the choreographer joke). I'm not in Firefly fandom; I like the show fine and I'm sorry there wasn't more of it, but is this thing about Book's past that big of a deal to the fandom? I just wish there had been more of a variety of questions so that Ron Glass didn't have to keep repeating himself. I know, I know, if I want different questions I should get up and ask them. Still.
Afterwards, Kevin and I tried wandering to the Walk of Fame again because all the Stargate actors were supposed to be there. The Marriott was quite crowded as well:
And the lines for the Stargate actors were HUGE. To get people through the lines faster organizers were selling tickets: you had to stand in line to get to a table off to the side, tell them who you wanted to see and what you wanted (photo, autograph, etc.), pick out the picture you wanted signed if you didn't already have something, pay for everything there, and THEN go back and wait in the actual line to see the actor. For all the other signers there you just went up to the table, picked out a picture, paid, and got the autograph from the person right there. Even with this preselling thing going on with the Stargate actors to move people through faster the lines were out of control and even extended into the hallway outside the room at one point. Then they stopped selling tickets entirely because the line was so long there was no way everyone was going to get through it before the actors had to leave for a 5:30 panel (plus the line was so long it was reaching fire hazard status), so no one else was allowed to join the line.
By this time I was getting kind of paranoid about the lines and how everything was filling up so fast, so even though it was only around 3:15 at this point I decided to head up to my 4:00 panel. Until then I hadn't been able to decide if I wanted to go to the Doctor Who or Heroes panel, since they were at the same time, but I decided on Doctor Who because I already knew where the Brit Track room was and I didn't want to fight my way through even more crowds to find the Heroes panel.
In retrospect I kind of wish I had gone to the Heroes panel, because the Doctor Who panel was way overcrowded and not very interesting. Even though I got there 40 minutes before the panel started I was one of the last let in the door and apparently about 100 people were shut out. I ended up standing in a little cluster by the door that included at least four Tenth Doctors swapping stories on where they had found their pinstripe suits, which was amusing, but the panel itself seemed disorganized. There were a lot of the same people on the panel that had been there on Friday and they didn't seem to have anything new to say, and the season four spoilers were nothing but speculation and rumors that have been floating around online fandom for months (some of which were disproven a mere two days later with the BBC's most recent press release about the future of the show). I had wanted a little more discussion than there was, and the room was very uncomfortable - it was crowded way above capacity because they tried to get in as many people as possible before closing the panel, it was very hot, I had to stand the whole time because there was no room to even sit on the floor, and this really tall guy planted himself in front of me so that I couldn't see the front of the room at all (not that it mattered a whole lot because there wasn't much to see, but I also didn't like staring at the guy's back all hour). So a bit of a disappointing experience. Kevin, of course, had never even walked into the room, but had, under my instructions, gone off to wait in the line for the 5:30 Stargate panel.
Sigh. Stopping again. Part Three coming up.
And it's up!
Again, there are a lot of pictures. More than in Part One.
Saturday was the Dragon*Con parade, which Kevin said he wasn't interested in. So he left to go to some panel he wanted to see and I stayed to watch the parade, and again I amused myself by taking pictures of the crowd while waiting. There were a lot of people lined up to see the parade.
The parade was very awesome, and I loved seeing all the costumes.
There were some of the contestants from "Who Wants to be a Superhero":
People dressed up as Ghostbusters:
300:
Harry Potter:
(and I didn't get a good picture of them, but there were these two people in the parade dressed up like Harry and Hermione who looked just like the actors that play them in the movies. Especially Hermione. I had to look twice to make sure it wasn't actually Emma Watson)
Lord of the Rings:
Monty Python:
A pretty big group of people dressed up like Doctor Who characters:
Indiana Jones and his dad were seen strolling along the street:
As was George Lucas:
A whole bunch of Stargate people:
Don't worry, Atlantis was represented, too:
The Stargate people even had a truck:
And a massive group devoted to Star Wars, including Darth Vader:
Some Jedi knights:
And a legion of stormtroopers:
Basically, Dragon*Con could be seen as one massive, bizarre crossover:
After the parade Kevin and I had lunch and then tried to make our way to our first panel at 1:00, a Q&A session with Claudia Black. The Hyatt was even more crowded than it was on Friday:
We went to the room where the panel was supposed to be, only to discover it had been moved to a larger room in the Hyatt. Again, we didn't realize how early we would have to be to these panels, so by the time we got to the Claudia Black thing we were shut out. Which was disappointing because it was the only panel she was doing. We made the best of it, though, and went to a Whedon Universe track panel with Ron Glass and Mark A. Sheppard which was going on at the same time and only about half full.
Sorry about the quality of the picture. The zoom on my camera is crappy and even though the room was only about half full, it was a huge room and we were still sitting in the last row of occupied seats. This is the clearest shot I have, and of course Mark Sheppard has his back to the camera.
Both Ron Glass and Mark Sheppard were very funny, and when asked about Book's past from Firefly, Ron Glass said something about him being a choreographer before he became a Shepherd, and that remained a running joke throughout the whole panel, including a suggestion that had Firefly lasted long enough Whedon would have probably gotten around to making a musical episode. It was a bit odd that pretty much every other question was about some aspect of Book's past, when after the first such question Ron Glass said that his character's past had never really been laid out and it wasn't something he had thought a lot on at the time because Joss Whedon was the writer and should be the one to come up with the character's backstory. But people kept insisting that Ron Glass had to have some knowledge of Book's past that the fans weren't aware of (which led to the choreographer joke). I'm not in Firefly fandom; I like the show fine and I'm sorry there wasn't more of it, but is this thing about Book's past that big of a deal to the fandom? I just wish there had been more of a variety of questions so that Ron Glass didn't have to keep repeating himself. I know, I know, if I want different questions I should get up and ask them. Still.
Afterwards, Kevin and I tried wandering to the Walk of Fame again because all the Stargate actors were supposed to be there. The Marriott was quite crowded as well:
And the lines for the Stargate actors were HUGE. To get people through the lines faster organizers were selling tickets: you had to stand in line to get to a table off to the side, tell them who you wanted to see and what you wanted (photo, autograph, etc.), pick out the picture you wanted signed if you didn't already have something, pay for everything there, and THEN go back and wait in the actual line to see the actor. For all the other signers there you just went up to the table, picked out a picture, paid, and got the autograph from the person right there. Even with this preselling thing going on with the Stargate actors to move people through faster the lines were out of control and even extended into the hallway outside the room at one point. Then they stopped selling tickets entirely because the line was so long there was no way everyone was going to get through it before the actors had to leave for a 5:30 panel (plus the line was so long it was reaching fire hazard status), so no one else was allowed to join the line.
By this time I was getting kind of paranoid about the lines and how everything was filling up so fast, so even though it was only around 3:15 at this point I decided to head up to my 4:00 panel. Until then I hadn't been able to decide if I wanted to go to the Doctor Who or Heroes panel, since they were at the same time, but I decided on Doctor Who because I already knew where the Brit Track room was and I didn't want to fight my way through even more crowds to find the Heroes panel.
In retrospect I kind of wish I had gone to the Heroes panel, because the Doctor Who panel was way overcrowded and not very interesting. Even though I got there 40 minutes before the panel started I was one of the last let in the door and apparently about 100 people were shut out. I ended up standing in a little cluster by the door that included at least four Tenth Doctors swapping stories on where they had found their pinstripe suits, which was amusing, but the panel itself seemed disorganized. There were a lot of the same people on the panel that had been there on Friday and they didn't seem to have anything new to say, and the season four spoilers were nothing but speculation and rumors that have been floating around online fandom for months (some of which were disproven a mere two days later with the BBC's most recent press release about the future of the show). I had wanted a little more discussion than there was, and the room was very uncomfortable - it was crowded way above capacity because they tried to get in as many people as possible before closing the panel, it was very hot, I had to stand the whole time because there was no room to even sit on the floor, and this really tall guy planted himself in front of me so that I couldn't see the front of the room at all (not that it mattered a whole lot because there wasn't much to see, but I also didn't like staring at the guy's back all hour). So a bit of a disappointing experience. Kevin, of course, had never even walked into the room, but had, under my instructions, gone off to wait in the line for the 5:30 Stargate panel.
Sigh. Stopping again. Part Three coming up.
And it's up!