Fan Expo 2010: I’m Getting Too Old For This $#!+
When I was 9 years old, I got to spend an hour waiting in line to see this movie that everyone had been talking about all summer: Star Wars. It wasn’t just the start of my love affair with the Empire and the Republic, it was the start of a new way of life, waiting in line to get my nerd on.
Fast forward to my first FanExpo in 1998. Having spent many an hour in line at opening nights for the likes of The Empire Strikes Back and E.T., I knew enough to show up early. We got there relatively early and waited for about an hour and a half to get in and walk around amongst a lot of comic shop displays and artists signing their work.
The thing that really got me though was that I was finally in attendance at a venue with the population of some of the smaller musical festivals that I used to go to. I was finally in the company of a vast number of people who were geeks just like me. Not only were they like me in their nerdy tastes, some of them loved this stuff so much they even dressed up as their favorite characters. This was totally foreign to me outside of Halloween costumes.
That was it. I had had my first taste — I was hooked on geek fan festivals, Toronto’s answer to Comic-Con.
The trouble is that each year these FanExpo events have grown exponentially. It’s a double-edged sword — it’s great to have more fans show up because the Cosplay gets more and more interesting each year but two years ago it took me three and a half hours to buy my ticket and gain entrance.
This past Saturday when I went to this year’s FanExpo, the line must have been about a third of a mile long. I mouthed under my breath: “I’m getting too old for this $#!+”. The saving grace was that I was blessed with a media pass via Geekscape, and what a godsend that was. In sharp contrast, I spoke with Sylvain and Roxy of Ottawa who had spent $40 each on gas for the five-hour drive and provisions along with a carload of other people and were couch surfing their way through the weekend, only to face a line of two and half hours. You add that along with the 6 hour car ride and they were pretty tired for their first day of Fan Expo.
I’d already set up a meet with some friends I know at torontothumbs.com. They were holding interviews with the folks from the Aliens booth, the Tron booth and others. Also they were meeting up with a torontothumbs.com alumni Shaun Hatton who is now a Reviews on the Run guy.
They’d set up shop at the G4 booth, and what a set up. I couldn’t believe it — they had people lining up for 30 minutes just to talk to them and have their pictures taken with them. I was thinking of saying hi, but not at the expense of a 30-minute lineup.
I was reminded of something I’d read about music TV journalists who cover music celebs and end up being elevated to the same level of celebrity as those that they would cover. The journalists ended up with as much if not more screen time as the musicians. It left the viewers with the illusion that the journalist and musician were equals. No, I don’t mean on some karmic level. I mean in terms of celebrity.
Reviews on the Run had the same lineup as Ernest Borgnine. Ernest frickin Borgnine of Ice Station Zebra fame, Ernest Borgnine, of Black Hole fame. The guy’s resume reads like a film history course curriculum. Well, maybe from a course on Ernest Borgnine, but you get my point.
Geek culture has made that leap now. Certainly videogame programmers and designers like John Romero and Alice McGee had been living rock star lifestyles, but now we are seeing the addition of geek journalists to go along with them. And we geeks will wait in line for them along with so many other things.
The lineups seemed endless, no matter where we went. I caught up with Jorge Figueiredo, also of torontothumbs.com, while he was in line for a coffee. 15 minutes in line for a coffee and it wasn’t even like it was a good coffee. I spent 10 minutes in line at the only significant t-shirt sales place just to get an Atari wrist band.
I’m a sucker for a line and the one thing that FanExpo has taught me is that we geeks are an easy mark right now and marketing firms need to take more notice. We’ve got some dough to spend and, yes, we’ll wait in line.
