Otakon 2009 report [2/1]
On Saturday I took this picture:
I think that covers that.
Otakon’s panel department has been a little… unprepared for the last few years. One of Surat’s more extreme clip panels got shut down 15 minutes into its two hours, apparently because they can’t plan for anything in between “all-ages” and “18+”. And we ended up locked out of Mike Toole‘s old dubs panel because, although they’re apparently actually enforcing room space limits this year, they didn’t move any of the popular stuff out of too-small rooms first. It wasn’t really a huge problem – at least we actually got a chance to explore instead of sitting in a chair for a few more hours – but it looks kind of bad compared to other conventions I may or may not attend.
Also I got a poster signed by “Yamamoto☆Yutaka \(`-‘)/”.
Fred Schodt had a good panel Sunday morning, about Astro Boy and Tezuka, featuring this photo of him attending a CFO meeting with a bunch of 70s proto-nerds:
Afterwards we finally managed to see Noboru Ishiguro; by then everyone had run out of questions, which he solved by taking 15 minutes each to answer three questions about LoGH. Afterwards he gave a speech about the Japanese government’s anime museum and how they should be funding studios instead; his new idea, “in case you know any Japanese government officials”, is for them to fund digitizing of old film masters, since a few early episodes of LoGH have already been lost in floods. He also gave away a pile of Reborn product samples at the end of the panel; one person somehow got an R2 rental DVD of Silent Service instead. (I hope the late fees on that one aren’t too bad.)
And then we left. Even though it was still as packed as last time, this year’s Otakon seemed really low key – there weren’t any HOT CON PARTIES and the dumb teenagers in the halls didn’t even remember to start yelling “Marco Polo” at each other until Sunday. And I actually know so many internet superstars now that meeting them all is becoming really hard, a #firstworldproblem if I’ve ever heard one. Still, it was a cool event for cool people.
Here’s some photos, presented in advanced Apache directory index format.