Comic-Con: Day Three Recap

(Due to some technical difficulties, we fell a day behind on Robin's awesome Comic-Con reports but here's Day Three...a fabulous day for Mythbusters fans and more!)

Okay, I'm not as young as I used to be. This crazy kid stuff is finally catching up with me (wow, two whole days later!) The feet are starting to give out, the back is not tolerating folding chairs well, and I nearly fell asleep during the Green Lantern panel. But I soldier on for YOU! Also for maybe possibly getting pictures of interesting celebrities. And because Doctor Who isn't until tomorrow.

It's lucky there wasn't anything to rush into a line for this morning, since we were not moving rapidly. One of our wonderful hosts, who only had a one-day pass for yesterday, offered to drop us off to save the hassle of parking and walking. The Hall H line was once again insane, though it's unclear if that's for the first panel of the day (Lost) or for the later big-ticket ones (Iron Man 2 followed by Kevin Smith). Either way, we weren't going anywhere near it.

The first major score was that we finally tracked down people handing out the GIANT Mythbusters bags (because I need almost-life-sized Adam and Jamie following me around). Mostly it was for (husband) Sal, who is a mechanical engineer and I figure he can carry tools around in it or robots or something. Also it took some of the load off our backpack and allowed it to be split between us.

The morning was spent fairly leisurely, strolling around the exhibit hall, taking pictures of interesting costumes (today was the steampunk meetup so there were lots of good ones there, even a set of steampunk ghostbusters, which blew the needle off the fandom meter) and random celebrities. There was also the little game Adam Savage of Mythbuster fame started-- he said he was on the show floor somewhere, but in costume with a full head mask, and dared people to try to find him and take a picture with him. We thought we had him, but sadly no. He wasn't found until 5PM by one clever and/or lucky fan. It was a fun chase though, even if a lot of people in full body/face costumes got stalked a bit.

We stopped by to see an impromptu performance by MC Frontlot at the Penny Arcade booth. It certainly amused me to see him rapping into a megaphone, with his drummer tapping away on a little electronic drum kit. Later, on the webcomic theme, we went to visit Jorge Cham of Piled Higher and Deeper fame. He taught a couple of Sal's classes at Caltech, and Sal eventually TAed for him, AND Sal joined the same lab in which Jorge did his PhD work.

With nothing really in particular to do, we headed up to one of the smaller rooms where we caught the end of a panel on cartoon voice-overs, which was interesting enough that we wished we had seen the whole thing. After that was the panel for Green Lantern: Blackest Night which is this biggish crossover event they're just starting up (I have to say ish because it doesn't come anywhere close to the scale of DC's other recent endeavors). Sal's got a soft spot for Green Lantern and I was a little intrigued by the way they're dealing with a whole spectrum of Lantern colors, so I was thinking of picking it up. Sadly, the panel was a bit of a non-panel. Almost all questions were answered with "we can't answer that, you'll just have to keep reading," which I'm told is DC's favorite answer to everything. In fairness, they were pretty detailed questions about nuances I didn't know anything about, so I wouldn't have gained any information if they had given straight answers, but never mind that. I just felt it necessary to detail this one because it was one of only two actual comic panels we went to at, you know, Comic Con.

We made a half-hearted attempt to see if there was any room at the Iron Man panel, but between that and the Kevin Smith panel following it, there was no way we were getting in. So we wandered a bit more, and found an impromptu Doctor Who costume party -- there was a whole pack of various Doctors, along with a few companions and a couple of Masters as well. The pair dressed as the Doctor and Rose from Idiot's Lantern were amazing-- her dress was spot-on and he looked exactly like David Tennant. In fact, we were careful to make sure he wasn't in fact Tennant, since really the best possible way to hide at Comic Con would probably be to dress up as your own character! I got several pictures, but...well, I'll get to that.

Not wanting to get shut out of yet another evening's entertainment, we moved into the hall where the Mythbusters would, eventually, be. This of course involved a) NOT getting in line for the showing of Children of Earth and Planet of the Dead, and b) sitting through the two panels prior to the Mythbusters. The first was the pilot episode of a show called Human Target, which was actually semi-interesting (Tricia Helfer was on it, though she's not a regular, and it involved a fancy train, so I watched.) The second... well... the second was for The Vampire Diaries. And as far as I can tell, this show is a stale Twilight ripoff, except no sparkling, and the lead vampire looks like David Boreanaz instead of Cedric Diggory. Plus, because of the bad planning, most of the people in the hall were there for the Mythbusters -- we were not what you'd call a friendly audience. Fortunately, nobody was rude during Q&A, but there were lots of snide comments in our section.

Having survived that, it was time for the Awesome. The Mythbusters were great, though it was mostly their interaction with each other and the audience that made it so special, rather than any particular information. So await the quotes update, and my apologies for the cop-out. The best news was that there will be an entire episode next season on duct tape myths. Also, the rocket sled will make a return, but for slicing instead of flattening this time, which makes me a tad giddy since the first rocket sled episode was so awesome. Further, there may be a third rocket car episode at some point, since the makers of rocket car II's exploding-on-launch rockets donated two more for another attempt. So good news all around. Also, Kari Byron had her baby last week, after 42 hours of labor.

I should probably note what we missed by choosing Mythbusters over Torchwood/Doctor Who. Now, in fairness, it was listed as airings of the episodes and I knew I could see them on BBC America when I get home, and Sal's an engineer, and it seemed like the right thing to do. On several occasions we heard screams and cheers from that room, separated from ours by a thinnish partition, but we assumed it was just standard "someone we like just came on screen" cheering. No. Russel T. Davies, John Barrowman AND David Tennant showed up. And, well... let's go to the video...

Finally, we watched a bit of the famous Masquerade, which is not so much a party as it is a costume show where entrants put on little skits or dances to show off their handiwork. It apparently requires many hours of waiting in line to get in, so I figured it must be a big deal, but they broadcast it to a few other rooms as well to make it easy for us to see it. Some of the costumes were quite impressive, others less flashy, some focussed on the performance (like a performance "Freeze Ray" from Dr. Horrible as it would be on Broadway). Some other highlights were She-Ra and cohorts performing "Womanizer" by Britney Spears in order to teach Skeletor a lesson, a skit that involved costumes from many cultures first dancing as "It's a Small World" and then to "Thriller," and a skit introduced as "Rainbow Brit and the Color Kids" that ended up being the Joker, Riddler and Poison Ivy taking over the show. And we were only there for the first 45 minutes or so of a 2+ hour show. I'd certainly watch again, but I don't think I'd wait in line for many hours to see it live.

And, oh yeah, sometime between "Vampire Diaries" and Mythbusters, I managed to leave my camera somewhere. See, when one panel ends there's a window of about two minutes where the people who only cared about that panel leave and people camping out for the next panel can claim them. I guess we moved too fast and had too much junk to carry and it got left behind. Boo.

Postscript, since I'm only just now, Sunday night, catching up: this turned out alright, we visited Lost & Found this morning and there it was! Apparently between the good will of fellow nerds and the fact that it's ANCIENT nobody thought to run off with it! So hopefully I'll have a picasa album set up in the nearish future as well as a quote post :)