Hey everyone, welcome to a President
Dog Takes On... special feature covering the 2014 edition of
Zenkaikon from Lancaster, PA!
This was a rare opportunity for me to
get out and take a trip to visit an anime convention on my own as
just an attendee, which I value highly in multiple respects. In the
interest of full disclosure, the only major anime convention I get to
participate in is Baltimore's Otakon convention, the second-largest
of its kind in the U.S., but as a staff member. Needless to say, this
limits what I can and see on my own as my priority is to help the
actual paying attendees have the most amazing convention experience
possible, though I get rewarded with other perks that am not at
liberty to divulge. I wouldn't trade that experience for anything,
but it's nice to witness the convention experience from the other
viewpoint every so often.
Due to other obligations I could only
attend the Saturday portion of Zenkaikon, but was still an absolute
blast and I'd like to share with all of you my journey, some
highlights and great memories I'll be taking away from this
excursion.
First of all, the location for this
convention, in my opinion, is excellent in both travel time relevant
to where I live (basically a 1 hour, straight shot ride from
northeastern Maryland that barely required GPS assistance) and the
actual building, surrounding area and parking. The organizers of this
convention selected the Lancaster County Convention Center and the
adjoining Marriott hotel and it could not have been more suitable for
a convention of its size. Unlike Otakon, which has to able to
accommodate nearly 35,000 people over its weekend plus cram as many
video rooms, panels rooms and other activities as possible into
nearly every available space in the Baltimore Convention Center (even
having to utilize the Baltimore Arena for its masquerade), Zenkaikon
is a much more intimate, small-scale convention (approximately 4,000
attendees this year) which means a significantly larger amount of
breathing room. Lines were never too long for any major event (except
for maybe an autograph or two) and unless you were at the very tail
end of a line, you could easily get a decent seat for a panel. To go
along with that, props definitely go out to whoever set up the
seating for the panel rooms. There was never a lack of seating for
anything, even major events like the big voice actor's panel; I
wasn't anywhere near the front of any given line throughout the day,
but still managed to get a seat roughly 5-6 rows away from the stage
at worst to any given panel. Granted, the one event that may have
flown in the face of this would've been the masquerade, but I
typically don't attend those and didn't in this case either. Another
big plus came in the form of discounted parking for the local parking
garages, which I was quite pleasantly surprised to see. I always
approve of anything that keeps extra money in our wallets and parking
is always a racket in normal cases, so big time thanks for cutting my
parking expenses by more than half. One last location-related
positive was the abundance of quality food options in the immediate
area of the convention center. Beyond a random Subway sandwich shop,
all the restaurants I saw in surrounding area of the con were local
non-chain eateries, from a little hole-in-the-wall pizzeria (where I
got an excellent, well-filled calzone for dinner), to a smoothie shop
to an an actual Japanese restaurant, not more than a couple minutes
walk away from the con at most. Not even Baltimore can boast that
relevant to the BCC's location. Let's also not forget that in the
same adjacent area, there is the oldest continually operating
farmer's market IN THE ENTIRE COUNTRY in the Lancaster Central
Market. Regardless of what you personally go to Lancaster for
initially, if you are ever there on a Tuesday, Friday or Saturday
morning or afternoon, go to that market. You will not regret it.
Anyway, on to the events themselves and
I'll be going step by step throughout my journey through Zenkaikon,
starting from registration to the end. I started my day by easing my
way into things, heading to a video room and watching, of all things,
Super GALS! Yes, I know I just reviewed it and I own the whole thing
already, but I wanted to see if anyone else knew about the show.
Sadly, most people seemed to peek in, saw what was being shown and
promptly left. Granted, I think the showing had a couple of strikes
against it: 1) they were showing the dub and 2) they were showing the
first four episodes, which to the untrained eye aren't all that
exciting (except for maybe the moment where Ran slaps Aya in the face
in episode 1). Oh well, their loss.
After watching a few episodes, I headed
over to the vendor/artist's alley hall to do some exploring and not
too far along into my journey I had my first big awesome moment. I
ran right into one of the big guests of the convention, Doug Walker.
For those of you who don't know, Mr. Walker is the man behind The
Nostalgia Critic, a fairly popular Internet reviewer character and
the mastermind behind the website ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com, which
hosts dozens of other online reviewing personalities. Of course I
didn't want to be a bother to him during what appeared to be some
free time in his certainly busy schedule, I asked for a quick hello,
picture and handshake, to which he was more than gracious enough to
oblige. Apologies for the terrible quality on the picture, but I only
had time to get it with the front camera on my cell phone.
After that exciting moment, I headed on my main reason
for going to the artist's area, meeting up with one of my favorite
artists, and at this point, friends, Jessi, who runs the excellent
nerdy webcomic Geeks Next Door along with her husband Matt. I've
given them a lot of business through conventions over the years and
I've always praised their works immensely. Plus they're just
wonderfully nice people to put up with me always hunting them down at
cons and distracting them from their business. Seriously, check out
the webcomic and buy a shirt or something from them, they deserve it.
I mean, if Jessi's willing to dress up as a donut-themed Sailor
Scout, the least you can do is check her webcomic out.
After catching up with my friends it
was finally time to do some shopping, which means indulging in some
art for the most part. I didn't bring a lot of funds, put I did pick
up a few prints that caught my eye for one reason or another, such as
an odd King of the Hill/Sailor Moon crossover, a stylized graveyard
that the artist originally made out of paper scraps, a sweet Shaun of
the Dead poster and an additional badge of a delightfully manic
Harley Quinn. Maybe one of these days I'll do a feature on all the
art I've collected from cons, because I certainly have my fair share.
Next on my agenda was my first big
panel, the big collected Voice Actor's panel with, among others, the
other major guest I came to see, Jim Cummings. Best known for his
work with Disney animation, most people will know Mr. Cummings as the
voices for Winnie the Pooh, Tigger, Darkwing Duck and many more. He
was even part of the singing voice for Scar in The Lion King, which
seriously shows off his skill. Many didn't even recognize him for
that since the blending of his voice during the song was so seamless.
Along with him at this panel were four other voice actors:
- Marc Swint, known as The Engineer in his work with online reviewer Bennett the Sage and his major role in the anime for Mass Effect as Mason.
- Greg Houser, a veteran of voice over in several fields as well as roles in the recent Evangelion movies.
- Bill Rogers, the current (not original, as there was some confusion at the panel) voice for Brock in the Pokemon anime, as well as roles in Gravitation, Boogiepop Phantom and Genshiken.
- and finally Brina Palencia, the voice for Ciel in Black Butler, Natsuki from the movie Summer Wars, Tony Tony Chopper in One Piece, Mad Moxxi from the Borderlands video games and many more.
The panel consisted of two major parts,
a few sessions of fan Q&A, and my personal favorite, reading from
famous movie scenes as their respective characters. Since this part
was too good to pass up, I filmed it to preserve and share with all
of you. Please enjoy and forgive any jitters from my handheld camera.
Following that panel I took a little
time to eat and explore the various gaming areas, both an expansive
area for board, card and tabletop games with an impressive library of
games for all to play and rather intimate video game room that
include a few arcade machines, such as this excellently preserved
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cabinet.
Later on I attended a more dedicated Q&A with Jim Cummings, where
he went a bit more in depth on his background and the business of
voiceovers, from being the class clown of a Catholic school in Ohio
to shaping the childhoods of multiple generations from his iconic
characters. He also shared a few funny stories and bits of insight,
such as a certain musing about how much fun villains are as their own
characters and if they ever get a song, it's usually a tango or
something of the sort, unlike heroes whose musical choices aren't
nearly as fun. I was also lucky enough to get his autograph and a
picture with him afterwards and I value his time spent amongst us, the fandom.
With another big meet and greet out of
the way, I then shifted to having some real fun and attended a panel
on bad video game cartoons which turned out to be a real hoot. To
give any of you a tip as to how to either run a convention panel or
pick which ones to attend, leading off by dumping out several huge
bags of candy and promising to toss out every single piece to the
crowd is a good way to start. We were encouraged to make fun of the
terrible cartoons, which consisted of an episode of Captain N: The
Game Master (Episode 8, “Mr. and Mrs. Mother Brain”) and a
episode of the Saturday morning Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon (Season 2,
episode 1, “Game Guy”), to which the snarky quips and chocolate
flew to all, not to mention other weird things, like (no fooling) a
plush Hungry Little Caterpillar I grabbed for shouting out how
terrible and off-model Rotor the Walrus looked in the Sonic episode
we watched. Yes, the same Hungry Little Catterpillar from your elementary school library. In
between shows we had random bad trivia games and even worse NES
challenge competitions, though I think the problem was in the
competitors rather than the games, which made it more hilarious and
more agonizing to watch people fail at completing basic things such
as getting through World 1-1 in Super Mario Bros. as fast as possible
or knocking out Glass Joe in Punch-Out!!. I will give them a little
slack about trying to get through the first level of Contra on three
lives, that does take a little practice. At the end of the panel,
they even made cleaning up everything into a game which they rewarded
people with random junk prizes. I cleaned up and got a DVD copy of
the awful Will Ferrell/Jon Heder figure skating movie Blades of Glory
to go with my Hungry Little Caterpillar plush. Weirdest prizes ever.
So after that blur of sugar-rushing
weirdness I thought I'd wrap up the day with a pair of panels run by
Doug Walker himself, the first being a quite stimulating discussion
panel on movies, specifically ones where we have a differing opinion
to our peers. Whether we enjoyed a movie the majority of people hated
or we couldn't stand a film that everyone praised, it was up for
discussion here and made for a very engaging and entertaining group
exercise on expressing our own structured opinions despite what the
majority thinks, which as always been a personal driver for me and
this blog as a whole. Unfortunately I didn't get called on for my
personal choice of movie, which would've been Shrek 2 and its
appealing to the lowest common denominator, but those who did share
praised films such as The Rocketeer and the recent Ender's Game
movie, while deriding popular films such as Frozen, The Nightmare
Before Christmas (providing an interesting comparison to the classic
Land of Oz books) and even such supposed classics as The Breakfast
Club. Following that panel, along with a game of convention-style
musical chairs involving leaving the panel room and getting in line
to back into the same panel room, we had a more dedicated Q&A
towards The Nostalgia Critic and Doug's website as a whole. Doug went
into details about learning from mistakes and projects that failed to
find their audience, as well as more about his personal favorite
choices of his catalog of work. He really expressed his love for all
forms of media and showed to us that the only way to succeed in
anything creative is to try everything you can and learn from all the
experiences. And of course someone had to get him to do his classic
Nostalgia Critic freakout over the Bat Credit Card from his review of
Batman and Robin.
Also, enjoy this funny scene of Doug interacting with a flirty dragon
hand puppet in the dealer's room: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IV1xi4VqGTA
Alas, that was all for me for this one
day as the siren song of the road home and my bed was calling and I
could not stay longer. Overall, I think Zenkaikon was a wonderful
experience and a refreshing change of pace from the big cons I'm so
used to attending and working. It really felt like you could do
anything and everything you wanted without waiting in never-ending
lines or fighting through crowds. From the guest lineup to the layout
of the space to all the fans and attendees involved, everything went
smoothly and pleasantly and makes me want to come back next year,
hopefully for an entire weekend in that case. Don't get me wrong, I
love the atmosphere and fellowship that Otakon and its tens of
thousands bring each summer, but for a more focused experience, a con
such as Zenkaikon was most definitely worthwhile. To wrap this up,
I'll share a few nice pieces of cosplay I found in my journeys
throughout the convention center halls and encourage you all to come
back for another edition of President Dog Takes On... where I'll
(hopefully) be getting back into the swing of reviewing anime. Enjoy!
