BotCon 2001 - Bobbi Carothers

Yeah, it's been a week. I've been busy. I'm *still* catching up on my sleep. Give me a break!

Anyway, as I suspect with most people, BotCon weekend started Thursday night for me, as I packed and went to bed. I immediately got back up, packed my camera and watergun, then went back to bed.

Then I dreamed I was at BotCon.

I'm not kidding! The only people who were there, though, were my dad, my sister, and her college friends, and we were all staying in the dorm I lived in when I was in college. The only a.t.t.er I saw was Megatron33 (who I was to room with at BotCon) outside through the window. I called his name so I could get into the hotel room, and he said, "ok, baby." I told him if he called me baby one more time, I'd deck him.

Then the alarm went off at 5AM, Friday morning. Amazingly enough, I didn't have much trouble getting up so early.

Off to my 12-hour-long drive from Rochester, NY to Durham, NC. My CD player died an hour into the trip. 11 hours down through the Appalachian Mountain range at the mercy of the radio. *Not* a good thing, but at least the drive was scenic.

Walked in to the hotel lobby at around 6:30, and the first person I recognized was Steve Stonebraker, who was talking to Rikard Bakke! I chatted with Rik about fanfic for a bit, until I heard someone call my name from behind me. I recognized Recharge and HooperX, and was introduced to Cool Slider, who I think I might have met at last year's convention, but can't remember. Somewhere in there, Scott McNeil walked by, and he was muttering to himself in his Waspinator voice as he passed behind me. I met up with TonyFitz, Phil (Skyjammer), and Dark Claw, which was good since DC was my other roommate and had a room key. He showed me where the room was, I said hi to Megs33 as he was getting ready for the BotCon dinner, borrowed DC's key, ran back to my car (parked across the street), threw my stuff in the room, and then went back down to the lobby to wait for the non-dinner #wiigii! people to go somewhere to eat. As per usual, we kept waiting and waiting and waiting, and finally my 12-hour drive caught up to me, as I yelled over the group, "Can we *please* go to dinner!?!?" At that point, Recharge pointed out the delay - a bunch of folks in the group were talking with Paul Davids, the production coordinator for the G1 cartoon. I stood there, gaped, stuck my foot in my mouth, atoned for my sin, and waited patiently for dinner time.

Eventually, myself, Hoop, Scylla, Recharge, Alan, Zack, Lith, Cool Slider, and others hit the town for dinner, as Mad Max MFP lead the way through a rather sketchy part of town. Scylla off-handedly mentioned that it's never safe to be a sheep where #wiigii! is concerned, any my reply was that Max would gladly lead us into a slaughterhouse. Eventually, we did wind up at some reasonable places to eat. Amazingly enough, Max didn't annoy me nearly as much as I thought he would. He's also grown about a foot since last year.

We came back, hung out, and waited for the BotCon dinner to finish. Megs33 came out with his exclusive toys, took a set out of their boxes, and generously let us play with them in the lobby. Arcee is really, really, really... pink. I like the fact that she's a TM2 BA repaint, giving some folks a shot at a mold that was quite difficult to find, and I suppose it just wouldn't be Arcee if she weren't pink. I guess that's my own personal hangup. The Tigatron repaint of Ravage, however, is beyond cool - and he's *blue*!

Saturday morning dawned bright and early, and I threw myself together as quickly as possible to get down to the registration line, as I'd missed it by about half an hour the day before. We got kick-ass lanyards with the Wrecker symbol included with basic registration, and they actually *stayed clipped* onto the passes this year! The line for the dealer room took roughly a century, due to a technical difficulty with hooking up the credit card lines, as explained by Karl Hartman. Everyone around me was fairly civil about it, which was cool. I finally got too tired and sat down on the floor, with a bunch of others following suit. I was behind the guys from Cold Hard Slag, one of whom pulled a laptop out of his backpack, stuck in the "Heroes" DVD, and we started watching. Soon after, however, the line started moving, so I hauled myself up, swallowed my claustrophobia, and packed myself into the small dealer room.

"This is it?!" was my first thought. I was majorly disappointed. This room wasn't a quarter of the size of the dealer room from last year! But, what was this? I overheard a conversation about the "big" dealer room next door. I breathed a sigh of relief. After I worked my way through the first room, I went to the bigger room, which itself was about the size of last year's. Things were right with the world again.

Not that I have much of a budget to throw at the dealer room in the first place, mind you. I picked up Tripredicus Agent, who never made it to the stores in Rochester (until the following Monday, that is). I saw a loose Springer for $20 who looked like he was only missing his rotor blade and probably his gun. I should've taken him, at that price. Went back the next day, and he was gone.

Off to the G1 voice actor panel. Michael Bell is one dirty old man! I'm pretty sure that "dildo" was among the first ten words he said. And the rumor about him saying that voice acting was like having a 12- inch penis: it doesn't do anyone any good unless you can make it hard? Completely, utterly, absolutely true. The man was hysterical, and Karl Hartman's face turned a slightly darker shade of red with every word Michael uttered. The entire panel was actually quite informative, as the voice actors were able to give us a nice flavor for what the business is like. I was amazed at how much they had to say about, well, everything.

During the panel, I drooled over the MISB (Spanish packaging) Springer that Trix had gotten. For some reason, I remembered him looking a *lot* smaller and gimpier when I saw him last year. I dunno what's wrong with me.

After that, Steve-o, Windy, Brax (I think?), and myself went on a quest for lunch, and failed miserably. McDonald's was packed to the brim, and there was not a single open place within a 10-minute radius of the hotel to be found. We did, however, find a place to purchase bail bonds. Two of them, in fact. On the same street. Separated only by a law office. Thankfully, we eventually found a guy pushing a cart down the sidewalk selling icies. I got blueberry/raspberry. Yumm. We should have directed him over to the hotel - he would have made a killing. Wandering back to the hotel lobby, I swallowed my pride and got in line for one of the rubbery hotdogs they were selling for $2.50. I found myself standing behind none other than Vince DiCola himself! Who is, amazingly enough, shorter than I am.

The BW voice actor panel was, as expected, a riot. Since Garry Chalk played a bit part on "Dark Angel," a question was inevitably asked about Jessica Alba. I, for one, cannot *stand* Jessica Alba. She has all the acting talent of a snail. Garry was talking about her, erm, "other" attributes, when Scott McNeil jumped in and said, "Yeah, but she's no Venus Terzo!" Yay!

Afterwords, I headed to the art room, and was stalked by whoever was wearing the Megatron costume. Now, I'm normally not intimidated by people who are otherwise fairly large, having been raised by a football coach, and all. However, seeing a Megatron roughly the height of Karl Hartman silently lumber over in my direction with those glowing red eyes of his... well, that freaked me out a little. Thankfully, he backed off when I told him to. Having succeeded in the battle against evil, I poked around the art room and cast my votes. One of my favorites was Robowang's computer-assisted still entitled "Ha ha, Prowl's Dead," a collection of screen-grabs from the infamous TF:TM shuttle scene with a humorous hiku. Trent Troop's CGI video was pretty cool, and Fred's Workshop had some hysterical dioramas.

Back to the dealer room to pick up the Wreckers comic. I won't say anything more other than it totally *rocks*!!!

Off to Arby's for dinner. We filled the entire place. A cop walked in not too long after we arrived. Gotta wonder about that.

The trivia game show was lots of fun, and they had a good mix of easy and difficult questions. The following concert was equally impressive, and Vince is fun to listen to. I wasn't so hot on Gary Falcone, though. It was all I could do to contain a peal of laughter as he sang the TF:TM theme song. It's glam-rockish enough on video, and downright corny as a live performance. Still a lot of fun, though probably not in the way it was supposed to be.

After a short time, it was off to Doug Kern's room to sample the home- brew. I'm normally quite picky about my beer, and even though this stuff was on the warm side, it still was pretty decent. I'm pretty sure it would have been excellent when cold. We went down to the bar and dropped some off to Garry Chalk, Scott McNeil, and Simon Furman, then headed outside to the water fountains to hang out. Max went tearing down the street waving a gun (Megatron, I think), with Megs33 in hot pursuit. Upon their return, Max said, "I've been drinking, I was chased down the street with a gun, and I'm in the south. I've just lived an episode of C.O.P.S."

Sunday morning, I crawled out of the room and walked down for the big-screen showing of TF:TM. The theater was quite a bit smaller than last year, so I imagine that 3H scheduled it so early on purpose, in order to avoid a mob scene. It was fun, people booed and cheered at the customary places, and I had a good time.

Up to the MST3K presentation, which had a surprising amount of #wiigii! in-jokes. Phil, you're a bad influence! My favorite part was the segment of Dark Awakening, where Daniel is sneaking around and we first see Optimus Prime in a flash of lightening, and Doug Dlin hissed into the microphone, "I see dead people!" I was actually surprised that they did Dark Awakening, but it turned out that there was plenty of stuff in there to pick on.

The Hasbro Q&A got cancelled, which was ok with me, as it gave us some time to hit the mall and grab some lunch. Perc, Tim, and I went in Tim's car, and beat the rest of #wiigii!, as Pic apparently got lost. Hee hee!

The Simon Furman and Paul Davids panel was actually quite informative. Paul told us all about how they'd send everything off to one of about four Asian animation studios, and get the shows back with a huge amount of errors. They'd send 'em back, and then the *corrections* would have errors in them, but by that time they'd hit the deadline, and had to ship them to market. In a way, it was kinda cool that he seemed about as frustrated by the errors as we the nit-picky fans are, as it reassured me that he actually gave a damn about the quality of the show. Zobovor would have loved it.

Then it was time for the 3H panel. It started off quite well, but by about half-way through, people who'd shown up late asked the same questions that'd been asked at the beginning. Come to think of it, that happened at a few of the other panels, as well. Here's a bit of advice, folks: if you want to ask a question at a panel, get yourself there on time so that you know it hasn't already been asked, in order to spare those of us who *did* manage to get ourselves there on time the misery of having to listen to the same question being asked three times. That said, 3H showed a *remarkable* amount of patience. 3H rules.

By the end of the 3H panel, I absolutely had to take a nap. So I did. About an hour later, Megs33 called from Trix's room with the promise of pizza. Not one to pass up food, I headed straight down. The pizza arrived in short order, and Megs33 paid for the whole thing! Thanks, Megs!! After a bit, we were feeling restless, so Megs, Hoop, Zack, and myself loaded up our waterguns and headed for the fountains outside. Hoop gave up after a bit, though, as he felt there wasn't enough carnage. He was replaced by Lith, however, who was packing the equivalent of a portable garden hose, and there was much carnage to be had. My own weapon of choice, however, put out only a paltry bit of water, so Lith was kind enough to trade firearms with me. Wreck and Rule, baby!! By the end of the night, we were absolutely soaked through. I couldn't help but laugh at the sound of Megs and I as our footwear squished down the hallway.

Monday. Sssooo tired! Packed, headed downstairs and hung out in the lobby for a bit as some of the #wiigiiers checked out, then headed out to my car. Luckily, there was no parking attendant at the parking garage, and I was able to sneak out having only paid $2.00 to park the car for the entire weekend! Yippee!

In the end, I had an absolutely fantastic weekend. Durham wasn't nearly as convenient food-wise as Ft. Wayne had been, but other than that, the facilities were top-notch. The only quibble I had about the convention itself was that the only thing shown in the video room was Beast Wars. I was kinda hoping for G1 or some Japanese stuff instead, as I already have all of BW on tape at home and can watch it whenever I like. Other than that, the convention absolutely *rocked*. 3H has my eternal gratitude.

Here's hoping I can go next year!