Star Wars Celebration Blog 5/28

The parking situation on the first day was the worst one we had, not because it was far away, but because it was so expensive.  But the folks on Facebook said that parking at the actual convention center, while expensive, was cheaper, and you only had to walk another two blocks or so* more than the first day.  We couldn't find the car that night, though, when trying to leave, and discovered that we were in the wrong parking garage (the convention center has two), and had to spend nearly an hour waiting to get out of the building (the line was hundreds of cars long), but each day got a little better, as we figured out where the entrance was, and how we SHOULDN'T have approached it (the last day, we entered from the west, and eliminated ten or fifteen minutes of waiting we had put up with the other two days).

This was the day of the big "Mandalorian" Season 3 panel, so we went over as soon as we could, and didn't even try to get into the main stage where it was presented, but into one of the other two rooms to watch it there.  While the big lowpoint of the weekend was not getting into the Lucasfilm panel on the first day (despite having won the lottery for it), this was another lowpoint, as there was a young man (also named Ryan) at the end of the line who told us not to bother getting in the line, that the people at the back had "a zero chance of getting in.  In fact, you have a LESS than zero chance of getting in."  I didn't understand how you could have less than a zero chance, but he shrugged and said, "If you want to waste your time, go right ahead," but we were not getting in.

So (Cousin) Ryan and I went downstairs to tell Marshal the bad news (he had gone to the Twin Suns Stage to see if that line had been capped yet or not).  After an hour or so, the panel started, and I was disappointed to miss it (despite my reservations about the last episode, it has been a pretty excellent show).  Still am, but ah well.

On our way in, we saw a guy putting together what looked like a white Hulkbuster Iron Man costume (it took two other guys to assemble around him), and when we saw him walking around later, had to get a picture (or video) of him.  He had done an R2-D2 in Hulkbuster armor cosplay, and it was unbelievably impressive (heck, just a Hulkbuster alone would've been amazing).

We lined up to go to another panel in the same room as before, and I saw Ryan the Line Guy.  "Hey, I was one of the guys you told this morning had a less than zero chance of getting in," I said, "did any of those people end up getting into the panel?"  His face darkened and he said that ALL of the people in the line got in, and they let another hundred people go in after that.  He apologized profusely and said that he hadn't known how full it was, but had just been repeating what he was being told.

It taught me a lesson: just like the first panel of the first day (where Marshal saved seats for us, but they wouldn't let us in), there are spots available for the persistent, for those who wait by the doors even after the lines have been capped.  We didn't miss a single panel we wanted to go to after that conversation with Line Ryan.

We got to hear Doug Chang do his Powerpoint presentation, and even though I'm not a Prequels guy, I recognize how immensely talented the dude is, and enjoyed hearing him talk about designing various ships and environments, and how they were instructed to make Grogu smack in the middle between adorable and repugnant (what Jon Favreau had described as "Uglycute").  It's always a blast to look at the process behind design, and there were plenty of pictures.

When we were in the line for the Rancho Obi-Wan presentation, Marshal chatted with a middle-aged dude that was a huge collector of action figures, and boasted that he had over a thousand of what he called the ninety-five Star Wars figures, still in their original packages, which absolutely amazed me . . . until I realized that he wasn't referring to the original Kenner figures (sometimes counted as 91, sometimes as 92), but the 1995 Power of the Force figures.  Suddenly, his collection went from invaluable to pretty close to worthless.  But to each their own.

We had no problem getting in to see "I Am C-3PO" with Anthony Daniels.  Tony Daniels is an old school, vaudeville-type ham, putting on a performance just as big as any character in a space opera.  It was almost like a one man show (except he had a young guy that he played off, that would insult him and ask him questions and bicker with him in a way that wasn't quite natural but also didn't quite feel scripted), and he's gotten quite old somehow (I mean, jeez, STAR WARS only came out forty-five years ago, right?), but is still slim and so totally See Threepio.

We went to a presentation of "Tales of the Jedi," a new Dave Filoni animated series about past adventures of Prequel-era Jedi.  They showed the first episode, about the birth of Ahsoka Tano, and how her village discovered she had the Force, and it was pretty good stuff.  They also showed a bit of one they're doing about Count Dooku when he was younger, with Qui-Gon as his apprentice.  I felt some interest there, despite not being a fan of Dooku, but the thing that was surprising was the huge reaction the audience had when they showed Yaddle, a terribly-designed do-nothing character from PHANTOM MENACE, who was basically a female Yoda with no lines who disappeared after that first movie.  So weird.

As usual, there were people in amazing costumes walking around, and I took pictures of several of them, but there were plenty I didn't get photos of.  I neglected to mention that on the first morning, I saw a dude dressed in Padme's white outfit from EPISODE II, complete with the torn-out midriff.  But now that I'm typing this, it's coming back to me why I didn't mention it then.  Whoops.

They may have done this all four days, but on this particular day, out in front of the convention center, they had group photos taken of all the fans dressed as certain themes (such as Stormtroopers, X-wing Pilots, Fetts, Jedi, or Cindall Towanis).  We watched them line up while eating from the food trucks, and it was quite impressive.

I wanted a photo in front of a garrison of Snowtroopers, but I was too timid.  One lady, dressed as either Hoth Leia or Flo from the Awful Progressive Commercials, did get in with them and I took their picture.

The first day at the Kotobukiya booth, Ryan and I bought a Boba Fett statue, and a Chewbacca pin.  But every day after that, when we went there, they were sold out of the statue, and by Saturday, they were out of pins too.  They had a drawing to win the chance to buy a Yoda statue that was extraordinarily rare (only four were available, one for each day of the convention).**  We didn't enter the first couple of days, but I bugged the guys to enter today, even though Ryan said he doubted he'd buy it if he won, and Marshal said he'd rather smash the Yoda statue than pay money for it (apparently, Yoda's been known to say that "Idaho is just Alabama if you swap out burning crosses for potatoes," even though he claims that statement had been off the record).

You had to go back to the booth by 6:30pm with the winning ticket in order to "claim" your "prize" (ultimately, I decided both words merited quotation marks), and when we got there, it was 6:38, but sure enough, it was my number written on the board.  The girl in charge of the booth was a lovely Japanese girl, and she took my picture with the statue (after I'd paid for it) as though I'd won it.  I'm not going to complain about it (I COULD have chosen not to buy it), but I'm not sure what I'll do with the statue, and it does strike me as pretty irresponsible to have bought it when I did.  Maybe I'll mail it to Marshal as a mean prank.

Health-wise, this was the worst day for me, because I accidentally (no, that's not true, I CHOSE to eat them) ate a salad with carrots in it, and my food allergy combined with my head cold, and I felt pretty damned bad in the evening, my eyes turning red and my head quadrupling in weight.

Luckily, I always have allergy pills in my backpack, and I gobbled them down at an astonishing rate.  I didn't get much writing done at the end of the day, but having exercised or written every day this month, I wasn't about to let feeling like utter crap defeat me this close to the finish line.  I took both Sudafed and NyQuil before going to sleep, and felt quite a bit better when I awoke the next morning.

Writing or Exercise: Writing

*We did so much walking this weekend that, despite how much junkfood I ate, I actually weighed four pounds less than I had before we left.

**I'm not going to go into whether a contest where the winner gets to blow three hundred dollars on a statue is a valid contest or not, but I'm leaning toward not really.