SFTV ComicCon 2001 Report

The SFTV Comic-Con 2001 Report

SFTV ComicCon Photos and Images
Andromeda Report
Mutant X

The San Diego Comic-Con is one of, if not the, largest convention of it's type, taking over the San Diego Convention Center the weekend of July 18-22nd this year. It is more than just comics, with exhibitors from all sorts of areas. On the exhibit floor there are comic retailers, wholesalers, publishers, and artists, plus trading cards, toys, books, movie and TV companies and more. Attendance was somewhere over 50,000 this year over the five days.

In conjunction with the Comic-Con is a Comic Expo trade show which now runs part of the day on Sunday and all day Monday, which had previously taken place the two days before the public show. With the switch in days, the Comic-Con had a preview night on Wednesday night for three hours, giving pre-registered attendees a chance to check out the exhibit hall (and first crack at the booths) the night before the full show opens.

I was attending as both freelance press (for this web site and for the ConNotations regional print newszine I contribute to and organizing a booth to promote Arizona SF Conventions (we were at the far end of the exhibit hall, near Artists Alley, past the Time Machine and The Batmobile and next to the Los Angeles WesterCon booth). Due to some miscommunication I didn't have as many people to sit at the booth as I had expected, so I had to miss some things, most of which seem to have been covered in depth on other web sites. I'll have a link list to other reports from the con that cover things I missed or save me some typing at the end of this report.

Here's a quick rundown of things I saw or did:

Wednesday night - The show opens and we get our first look at some of the special exhibits and booths. The most impressive one is Dreamwork's exhibit for The Time Machine movie coming out in December. They have the full size Time Machine prop on display in the center of the area as well as a miniature version of it in one corner. Each corner of the booth has stuff set up depicting various settings from the movie as well as some behind the scenes videos running. During the weekend, they had many of the production crew present, including Stan Winston and director Simon Wells. They also had a set of promotional trading cards that were handed out one or two at a time during the weekend, which kept fans coming back.

A lot of the other exhibit oriented booths weren't doing anything major during the preview, but had staff on hand to answer questions. The major activity for most attendees was checking out the retail booths, hoping to find a good bargain on a special comic or collectible item.

Thursday - The show got into full swing with programming and a full day of the exhibit hall. This included the autograph area as well, including actors such as Virginia Hey from Farscape......

Around the hall for a quick booth tour of the SFTV oriented sites:

SciFi Channel - SciFi was back with their big monlithic display booth, complete with a few terminals to check out their web site (if you strayed you were asked to go back to it, so no lengthy checking of email, unfortunately). I'm surprised no one has set up a booth for people to access the web and email as a promotional thing like I've seen done at the various Trade shows. Throughout the weekend, they held raffles handing out t-shirts, Lexx videos and DVDs, Dune Novels and the Secrets of Dune book, SciFi light up pins and even a few Farscape hats. Other freebies handed out included SciFi pins, breath mints ("Taste the Future"), Chronicle pig noses and Lexx bumber stickers and Babylon 5: Legend of the Rangers post cards. They also had the participants from the two panels they put on at their booth after the panel, with Anthony Simcoe and Rockne S. O'Bannon from Farscape and the cast of the Invisible Man making long lines at the booth. At their opening raffle, Brinke Stevens kicked it off very enthusiastically, reminding people to watch Black Scorpion on SciFi (I guess no one has told her the show finished it's run already - More on Black Scorpion cast later...).

MGM - MGM had a booth set up to promote Stargate SG-1 and was selling lots of Stargate SG-1 merchandise. They were also promoting a signing with Michael Shanks on Saturday. To encourage merchandise sales, people who bought Stargate items got priority tickets for the autograph session. They did have a handout with information about the status of the sixth season that said that no decision has been made yet. The most newsworthy item in the MGM booth was a poster promoting Jeremiah, which will be airing on Showtime early next year. This is the series that Joe Straczynski is running for Showtime that he hadn't been able to say anything about because they hadn't made any formal announcement about the show. Due to the news of this poster reaching the moderated Babylon 5 newsgroup, Straczynski took the opportunity to say something about the series, details on the SFTV JMS page.

Top Cow - They had posters and postcards for WitchBlade at their booth and had Anthony Cistaro and Eric Etebari signing at the booth on Friday and Saturday. Fiona Avery also put in a couple of appearances promoting her comic. At their panel, they also had Anthony & ... present and they didn't yet have any news on more of the Witchblade TV series.

Paramount Domestic Television - There was a booth apparently paid for by Paramount Domestic Television to promote a new series on UPN. No, it wasn't for Enterprise, it was for Special Unit 2. One of the producers was there on Saturday (which I missed), but they did have pencils and a few t-shirts to hand out for freebies. They had hoped originally to have some of the cast there, but they are all in the process of moving to Vancouver where filming on the second season will start very soon.

FOX Video - FOX had a booth to promote the upcoming DVD release of the 1960's Batman movie starring Adam West and Burt Ward. To help get people's attention, they had The Batmobile and had a drawing to give out 25 od the DVDs when it comes out in the fall.

Thursday Panels - About the only panel I made it to on Thursday was the latter part of TheOneRing.net's Lord of the Ring presentation. They did an overview of the movie and did a slide show of all of the location pictures and such that they have accumulated for their web site and ended the presentation with the latest trailer (running off a computer, unfortunately).

Friday:

Watching the local morning news was a good indication of how well ComicCon's publicity goes down. Kevin Smith did interview bits on two different stations (on one of them, the interviewer had a clue and had even seen some of Kevin's movies while the other one was so clueless, it was painful). June Lockheart was on one of the stations while the other station had their "goofy location guy" on the scene doing interviews with people at the various booths for several segments, including some Klingons. Later in the weekend I talked with the Dark Horse publicist who was interviewed and she wanted them to spotlight some of their original titles but the TV people were only intererested in Buffy and Star Wars.
But that's publicity that is very hard to get TV stations to do for a local scifi convention.

Friday Panels:

SciFi's Farscape panel started at 11 am with Anthony Simcoe (D'Argo) and Creator/Producer Rockne S. O'Bannon. Producer David Kemper was not able to make it. The biggest news out of the panel is that it's likely we'll see Aeryn's father, Talyn, at some point. As for a fourth season, things are still in negotiation. SciFi obviously wants to keep it going, but the show hasn't done as well in other markets and is being produced at a loss by Henson and the other associated production companies. I wasn't able to stay for the panel and set up a camcorder and found out to late that it's battery hadn't charged properly and only got about 20 seconds of the panel.... I'm sure there's a couple of good reports out there that I can point to.

The big panel of the day was Kevin Smith, who did a three hour panel, talking about all of his stuff and promoting the "Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back" movie. I didn't actually make it, but I wanted to note how popular it was, with a packed room of 2,000+ and another 500 to 1,000 in line wanting to get in. They also handed out passes to a screening of the movie that night.

Andromeda/Mutant X - After the Kevin Smith crowd cleared out, there was still a decent sized crowd for the Andromeda panel. Present were Exec Producer Robert H. Wolfe, Writers Ethlie Ann Vare, Zach Stentz, Ashley Edward Miller, production designer Richard B. Lewis and Writer's Assistant Deric A. Hughes plus some Tribune representatives. Highlights of the panel were video presentations, the first a Tribune one promoting the series strong debut, the second a special one put together by Derick Hughes and his roommate previewing the second season (including shots of a shirtless James Marsters) and a preview video put together by Tribune which made it to the screen at the con after Henry Urick of Tribune arranged for a satellite uplink of it after Fed Ex failed to deliver it to them as promised. After the Andromeda panel, Tribune showed a promo reel for Mutant X and brought Howard Chaykin our to talk about the series. At the end, Tribune had Andromeda posters and promo cards for both Andromeda and Mutant X for the fans. More on both later.

At one point I did wonder up to the aurograph area and ran across B.T., Argyle on Black Scorpion. There were several other actors and actresses who had appeared on Black Scorpion. I asked B.T. about the New York Post article that had indicated they were already filming a second season that Roger Corman was going to act in. He hadn't heard anything about it and hadn't heard anything yet about a second season.

Saturday Panels

Saturday is the day where having a clone or two would come in handy. The exhibit floor is packed with people and the main programming rooms are packed as well. Opening the day was SciFi's Invisible Man panel, featuring the main cast as well as a few production people they dragged onto the stage. It was a lot of fun as always when you get the full cast of a show together. More details to come..

At the same time was a Futurama panel where they screen the Christmas episode that FOX refused to show. I heard it was very funny. Also at the same time was the Warner Bros. presentation where they showed the Smallville promo, a trailer for the Powerpuff Girls movie and Harry Potter film footage (and handed out a bunch of Harry Potter t-shirts).
At noon was a Space Ghost panel and a Lord of the Rings preview, neither of which I caught. Reports are that the LOTR was mostly a couple of behind the scenes featurettes which were interesting, but dissapointing to fans who were expecting more. If New Line had done something along the lines of what Dreamworks did for The Time Machine, they would have reached most of the attendees instead of the 2,000 that fit into the programming room.

At 12:30, Joss Whedon took the stage in the main hall. I elected to miss this one in person, since I've seen Joss in person a couple of times already, and with 500+ people in line wanting to get into the main room I figured I'd give someone else a chance to get in. Having a friend sitting front row center with his camcorder helped make that decision easier :)
There's several reports online about this panel.

After that in the main room were presentations on Planet of the Apes, From Hell, The One, Ghosts of Mars and SpiderMan, all of which have gotten coverage on AICN and other sites. After the movie panels, Cartoon networked previewed the Justice League series, which has good coverage elsewhere.

The other Saturday panel I wanted to see and got to see was an hour with Peter David. Peter read from several of his projects, including the Christmas Young Justice issue and the jousting segment from his new fantasy novel "Sir Apropos of Nothing" (which he just recently signed a contract for two more novels with Pocket). Peter mentioned that he had just written the novelization of the Spiderman movie and that he really liked the script (and the novel will have some fun additions to it, courtesy of Peter). Fans of Peter should note that Peter will be one of the main guests at the Comic Con next year. (I'd say it's about time!).

Robert Wise previewed the Star Trek: The Motion Picture Director's cut DVD. I didn't make the panel and haven't yet seen any reports on it.

Saturday night saw the Masquerade, with 49 total entries plus a repeat appearance by last year's audience favorite Mighty Mouse. There were some real good costumes, and lots of anime ones. The fan favorite, was number 42, which was the 2001 monolith which on one side had a big "42" on it. As prizes kept being given out with none going to it, finally Peter David (one of the judges) announced that they had a special prize of $42 for entry #42. If I had know they were going to do that, I would have offered to have the Magrathea/SFTV Page be an impromptu sponsor. Maybe I should do that next year - a $100 prize for best SciFi TV costume!

Sunday saw the final day of the convention and lots of fans looking for bargains and last minute purchases. In the programming arena, I didn't make it to any of them. Panels of note was a "Can They Save Star Trek" panel, with Mark Altman, Robert Meyer Burnett and others talking about the new series. From what I was told, they had a copy of the script for the Enterprise pilot and during part of the panel had audience members acting out scenes from it.

Over the convention, if you were kept alert there's no telling who you might run into on the show floor. There were reports of Gene Simmons, Elijah Wood, and other celebrities spotted on the show floor. Just sitting at the Arizona SF Conventions booth, we saw Weird Al Yankovic and his wife wander by a couple of times. Just across from our booth in Artist's Alley was Frank Kelly Freas and his wife Laura. Weird Al stopped to take a look at the artwork and Laura Freas recognized him. It appeared a lot of people recognized him as he went around. We also had some authors stop by to say hi, such as Michael Jan Friedman, Kevin J. Anderson, Rebecca Moesta, Julie Schwartz as well as Julie Caitlin Brown.