ComicCon - Day Three - Part One

Told you it was a long day.......

As I was one of those who volunteered to save seats for those who were working the Browncoat table before the Serenity Panel in Hall H, I got there at about 6:45am to find 20 or so people already ahead of me, but I was still the first to get there from our group (the others being the folks sans Keith and Ray out drinking with me the night before). I volunteered to help out but also I wanted to see the panels going on beforehand. They let us about 8:30pm and we score seats in the 10^th row of the 6,000-seat theatre.

At about 10:30, the panels start out with Superman Returns – as of now the movie I am most looking forward to next summer!! The scenes they showed were amazing and the concept of now “restarting” the franchise like Batman but to continue it from the first Christopher Reeve film is a excellent move. The next panel was for Aeon Flux with Charlize Theron. She was beautiful on stage, but the film? Bah.

Next was one of my personal highlights – Kevin Smith!! He was vulgar and hilarious riffing on everything from religion to ragging on himself for making “Jersey Girl”. My only regret is that he didn’t have the time to tell stories about the films, comics and life that he tells so well.

Then comes the moment most of us were waiting for – the Slither panel!! Actually, for some reason, Universal split the Serenity panel with this other film cutting the time in half for the cast we all were waiting to see although the other film does have Nathan Fillion in it as well, so we get him the full hour. The panel with Joss and the cast goes by way too fast, but it was a joy to see them all sans Alan (who is on Broadway). I was gonna stay for the remainder of the day’s panels, but my butt was getting numb and I’m sure people at the table needed some relief. In a way I wish I did stay because I missed seeing Jamie Foxx and Jack Black among others.

When I got to the table it was a total frenzy!! We got a lot of folks coming from the panel to the table to see all that was Firefly and there were a lot of people looking for tickets to tonight’s screening. It seems that the night before the Serenity Web site announced the screening in advance and that tickets will be available at the Browncoat table. So, of course, HUNDREDS of people invaded the table first thing and after giving out 2/3s of the tickets the crowd got so bad that security had to come and turn people away to avoid a fire hazard. The rest of the tickets ended up being given out by lottery. Luckily all got the table volunteers got tickets but we had to keep it on the low so as we didn’t cause a riot. Universal also brought over thousands of sample CDs of the film’s soundtrack to give away.

All of the chaos really made me realize what a tremendous job the SF did on this fan table it was by far the best fan table I have ever seen in the 20+ years I have been going to conventions. Everything was pulled off so well that Universal trusted the fans to sell the movie instead of having their own display or booth like several other film studios had in the exhibit hall. That kind of faith is almost unheard of.

By the closing of the con for the day a few hours later, all the tickets were distributed and most of the CDs were gone and everyone just wanted to collapse. But the day was far from over......