I spent the 50 dollars from winning Marvel on the Limited Edition of Deathsmiles, as the games dealer was mostly a retro dealer and didn't have any of the recent titles that were on my wishlist (I'm really curious about WWE All-Stars).
Most Dangerous Anime was a little different this year, in large part because this was likely the final panel and I wanted to empty the guns, so to speak. I emphasized short stuff, as in things we could watch in their entirety right then and there. It's a long panel (two hours!) so I run large swaths of material. Specifically, this year I experimented with playing little shorts between the footage. Ko had just been sharing entries from Niconico's Miku Miku Dance Cup, and so I bookended the anime with stuff like Volare and Love Angel Lucifer.
Attendance was respectable, as by now the panel has been building up a little following. The biggest laughs came from either Love Angel Lucifer, the Prince of Tennis fandub, or Charge Man Ken.
Putting aside the shorter clips, the titles for the general audience panel were:
Zaizen Jotaro
Abunai Sisters
Prince of Tennis (fandub)
Charge Man Ken
Azteckaiser
A lot of other stuff puffed out the panel as I went along, like SPACE LANCE and that Loudness hit Odin. One of the things I've learned from this panel is that even if I plan for two hours, I'll move too fast once the thing gets going, so I like to keep a surplus.
After MDA I was up with Mike on Dubs that Time Forgot (I was technically the “staff member” in the room, but I was also playing sidekick). This was the biggest AV failure of the weekend, as our equipment simply never arrived. At fifteen minutes late we were worried and I thought to whip out my own big-screen laptop. It took ten more minutes to actually get the files from one source to the other, so Mike had half an hour to run his panel, as the remaining audience (you guys really stuck it out, thanks!) crowded around the screen.
We were technically scheduled for a cosplay counter-programming panel, but nobody showed and we wound up just sitting in a room talking for two hours. No, seriously.
The 18+ panel, just like last time, was a standing-room-only hit before we even got going (and we got going late). Unlike the regular panel, anything you put 18+ on absolutely sells itself. Well, actually, it became a 17+ panel on the way into the schedule (I didn't find this out until a bunch of upset 17-year-olds plowed in and pointed it out). This shouldn't surprise, but it's worth noting: the crowd for this panel was not only significantly larger but significantly younger than that for the regular panel.
I consider this panel tricky to put together, which is funny because ultimately I made really easy choices for it. There's a whole slide at the beginning of the panel that tries to explain it with the image of an angry, topless hooker. I wanted to let the audience know straight out that it wasn't a porn panel: after all, those are overdone. It was merely kind of gross and tasteless.
And to back that up I ran Apocalypse Zero and Mad Bull 34. The crowd just wasn't ready for Apocalypse Zero: there were several people in the audience loudly begging me to stop after the first monster. No dice, guys. You were warned. People are always skeptical about the name of this panel, you know? They want me to prove it before the show even starts. A lot of people come up and ask me what they're going to see before the panel, and I absolutely refuse to tell them. They always think they've seen something more dangerous already. When I warn at the start of a panel, I really mean it!
Daryl from AWO (who I'm certain would enthusiastically approve of my programming choices) had asked me exactly how much of these shows I run at these panels to fill up two hours, and my answer was “a lot.” There was probably a half-hour of Apocalypse Zero and an hour's worth of Mad Bull as I ran through every single highlight. More than the other panel, this one is a case of stretching the material. That said, people really enjoyed it, especially Mad Bull. At the very end I ran the Dragon Ball Soulja Boy video followed by Klay-On and people just about died.
As usual at I-Con, Sunday was pretty much a dead day. I arrived late (we got caught with one thing after another, most amusingly a pack of enraged daddy's-money bros throwing a fit and being kicked out of the hotel after trashing their room) for the Super Robotology panel, which Mike was running for an audience of about five. Mike and I had been talking about this panel for a while, but the con snuck up on us and we only really had what video we could grab beforehand (which is quite a lot, these days). My contribution to the panel was a big ol' pile of 70s and 80s toy commercials. Around the time we got going on those, some parents brought an actual small child in, who loved and said “I WANT THAT!” to every ad. I'm really glad we were able to make that little moment for someone.
We had pizza on the way home and I was seriously astonished at how good the sausage roll at Manhattan Pizza, a little mini-mall joint not far from Stony Book, really was. I did not expect that at all, and I couldn't have been happier after putting down cafeteria food all weekend.
Where didja get CHARGE MAN KEN?? We should talk.
Posted by: dave merrill | May 31, 2011 at 10:59 PM
I simply ripped Charge Man Ken off Youtube. I recommend JDownloader for this.
Posted by: David Cabrera | June 01, 2011 at 12:05 PM