BotCon '95 - Raksha (convention organizer)

Having read some of the thoughts and commentaries on BotCon '95, I'm pleased to find that the general reaction was favorable, that it seemed people had a good time. Especially since I had somewhat bigger plans for the event, and it was very obvious to me that we are still in the amateur stages here -- but hey, Star Trek fandom once started out this way too.

Concerning Hasbro's no-show, I'm personally glad they weren't there. Even if they had been there, I found out that they never had any plans to say anything about the '96 line, so we really didn't miss anything in that regard. They were going to bring prototypes of toys they had once planned to make and didn't, that sort of thing. There was even talk of the Unicron prototype at one point, which would have been neat, to be sure -- but I still say we were better off without them. The '96 line is so tightly under wraps at this point that I've only been able to get the vaguest statements out of them: they say they've completely and totally changed the concept of the toys. Which, quite honestly, doesn't sound good to me at all. We may have been drastically disappointed if they had indeed told us what we could expect. Leave us a few more months of our ignorant bliss, I say.

An unexpected event, though -- the new team leader in charge of the TFs showed up from Kenner, with an apology for Hasbro's bad behavior. That's an encouraging sign -- that perhaps Kenner is more reasonable, and less of "the enemy" that I've always perceived Hasbro to be. He couldn't say anything on the '96 stuff either -- had just seen them himself a week earlier -- but maybe this means things will improve. Let's not blame Kenner for the '96 stuff, whatever it turns out to be, as that was still orchestrated by Hasbro ... though if it's really lousy, let's hope they make some changes.....

As to other things ... the laser show: I didn't know for certain that it was on until the night before the convention -- I drove out to the museum that night still to make absolutely sure. It's amazing that it even got put together at all, due to various circumstances -- which is why it had a bit of a "generic" look. The original plan was to have line-drawings of Transformer charcters shown among the laser graphics, but it didn't come together in time. I still thought it made for a really neat effect. The first time I ever saw a laser show there, I thought that such a thing would be perfect for the TF Movie soundtrack. I wouldn't have guessed at the time that I'd be able to have it made.

The toy: I originally wanted something else altogether, but my choice was limited to one of the six Go-bots. So I chose the one that I thought looked best in vehicle mode and tried to make it as neat as possible. The black color was my choice, the godawful yellow wasn't -- that was supposed to have been blue. I was told they couldn't change that color -- though if you look at High Beam, the yellow is entirely different. So obviously they *could* change the color, as long as it was to something *worse*. Ah, don't even get me started.... In any case, Nightracer is an old character of mine, and I took the opportunity to get her made -- as something unique, something never before seen in this country -- a female Decepticon. Yes, I painted blue lines on almost 300 of the things, as well as making the Decepticon symbols, because I wasn't about to let them go out missing the necessary parts. I agree that the purple background in the text part of the tech spec card made the lettering a little hard to read -- blame it on the product of long hours of battle with color printers and color copiers and various photocopying shops that just don't reproduce the colors they way they look on screen. I will not, however, apologize for the length of the text itself. That was completely intentional, and, I think, the right way to do it. Let's work a little more detail into the characterizations again, rather than the G2 garbage we've been getting.

The video room: some of the Japanese tapes, obviously, just didn't want to play on that equipment, though they looked fine on my VCR at home. They were copies of copies of copies, etc., and I'm sure that had a lot to do with it. Some of the later epsiodes looked fine, though, especially the Victory Leo stuff. It had the effect of messing up the order in which episodes were shown, though. I wish I could have shown my one Headmasters episode that was dubbed into English. But, maybe whoever does this next year, will have the chance to do that.

More in seperate posts ... I suspect this one is already long enough. But I do want to thank everyone who helped in the set-up, during opening, and cleaning up afterwards -- most notably Vulcana, Michael Payton, Eva "Magic" Gillmann, David Kolodny-Nagy, Naomi Novik, Robert Jung, Neale Davidson, and my brother Chris who helped out in spite of long having "outgrown" the TFs. Hopefully that fate doesn't await any of the rest of us....

By the way, Avatar had a great time with all the attention. She'll be back next year, if she's still small enough to carry.....

--Raksha