FantaSCI Impressions

I’m not sure what first brought my attention to this one day sci-fi and fantasy con, but I was skeptical at first. Venue was my initial concern. Housed at the Chesapeake Central Library, it seemed like it had the potential for being a slapdash, apologetic sort of programming geared more toward wallets than toward interest. However, checking out the guest list and seeing the variety of what was going to be there, I figured that the cost of admission (free, but with the price of gas a still central concern) outweighed its possible problems.

Many of my worries were put to rest when I saw that the building was both able to accommodate a substantial group and sufficiently decked-out to appeal to nerdiness. I mean, what better way to beckon fans and casual enthusiasts alike than to have a huge X-Wing fighter right outside the entrance? Nothing more effective comes to my mind.

Regal Cinemas had set up right at the entrance, providing both general con scheduling and tons of free stuff. In addition to lots of backlight-able marquees of recent films (sadly, no Land of the Dead goods in sight), there were lots of junky promotional doohickies and mini-posters.

Worst item? The Island promotional rubberband/livestrong bracelets that attempt to create buzz for a film by way of mimicking one of the most bizarre fashion trends in recent memory. In an unrelated note, my favorite trinket promotions are from two bad films: the free metal skull rings promoting The Phantom (1996) and a small metal axe for Frailty (2001) are both pretty awesome and are still at the bottom of a drawer somewhere. The Island rubber band will be used to roll up a newspaper so that I can chase their marketing executives around and emulate any number of the more memorable scenes from American Psycho (2000).

I arrived just in time for the costume contest. Lots of folks came in costume, and though there were the usual plethora of Vaders and Klingons, there were some pleasant surprises. There was a great take on the recent Van Helsing. The movie was a train-wreck but the art direction was groovy. Had I been judging (which I wasn’t, nor do I even know who won), the guy appearing as Neo would have won. Simple, but pretty cool.

Harry Potter was understandably well represented. The Hagrid pictured above looks like Robbie Coltrane enough to begin with to pull it off.

The ballsiest kid of the lot had to be this little Draco Malfoy. Gutsy move, dude. Gutsy move.

There seemed to have been enough going on at once that you were always missing something interesting. Rather than commit myself to too many presentations, I did lots of browsing. The vendors (largely consisting of the Friends of the Library Books, a comic store and a gaming/anime store, as well as some memorabilia as pictured above) were not all that expensive, which surprises me. I ended up buying a bunch of 80s horror films from John Kenneth Muir so I didn’t indulge in any of the certifiable collectables, but these were some eye-catchers. Gotta love the “Monster Cookies,” though because of their age they are probably a bad thing to have around while drunk and hungry.

Surprisingly, there was a relative diversity of interests all being accommodated at once. Collectible card games appear to be at least acknowledged, though not in the same way that marked the heyday of Wizards of the Coast and the proliferation of Magic: The Gathering. It seemed that Yu-Gi-Oh is still the bee’s knees, though I saw some of whatever the current incarnation of the Lord of the Rings CCG happens to be.

I stopped by the booth of Richard C. White, a very cool genre author who has written a novelization of Gauntlet: Dark Legacy as well as forays into the world of comics. His latest comic book is an excellent adventure yarn called Chronicles of the Sea Dragon. Look for an interview in the near future discussing the process of adapting a video game successfully to book.

I can’t say that I am exactly in tune with fandom on the whole. While I certainly know a very large chunk about the shows, films and such in question, I was never quite interested in the politics and baggage of liking some things but not liking others. Overall, I was pleased with the diversity of what people were involved in or with, though there remains that definite slant toward Star Wars or Star Trek-philia. For example, there was a strong turnout of VERY organized Star Wars folks who had some VERY authentic looking replicas of the blasters and lightsabers from different Star Wars iterations.

Though that is all swell and impressive, far more interesting to me was discovering the sub-sub strata of fandom that one seldom sees or hears about. There was a large turnout of Stargate: SG-1 fans who seem to have forged for themselves an incredibly intricate mythology of military tactics based on what I had always considered a very obscure and relatively unpopular show. Maybe I’ll run across Sliders cosplayers next.

John Kenneth Muir’s talk on the television of the 1970s proved fun. Muir excels at filtering out the latent content in shows that seem ideologically neutral, or at least resistant to interpretation beyond the status of entertainment. In fact, shows such as Battlestar Galactica, Space: 1999 and Blake’s 7 are brimming with political fervor, sometimes in very overt ways. Looking at them reminds us that our current entertainment, arguably even more veiled and hesitant to be read as political than these older shows (their flashy, effects-driven production mixed with the fact that they often, as one fan pointed out of the new Battlestar Galactia, expect nothing of their audience), remains very politically motivated. Much as in literature, sci-fi on the screen is a staging area for various problem-solving utopias, a trial ground for the “what ifs” that mainstream political thought brushes off as unimportant.

Soon thereafter was a slightly more broadly themed panel on science fiction television in general. With guests such as Tee Morris, Dr. Madblood (host of a program on sci-fi and horror television and film that is nearing its 30th year), Muir and others, it took the form of a large jam session of waxing nostalgic. The room in which this took place was a sort of children’s classroom, but there were two very bizarre things about it. First, (and sadly I do not have pictures to illustrate) there were Raffi LPs sitting in the back of a room next to a record player…it appeared that both of these were in continual use. This library (which at times felt like being in one of the sterile labs of Men in Black [1997]) still used records? Fair enough, I suppose, though Raffi CDs are probably available for pretty cheap with just a little bit of hunting.

However, the biggest “odd” thing about this room was one of the READ posters on the wall. If you’ve ever spent any amount of time in elementary school libraries or in the children’s section of public libraries, you’ve seen these advertisements for literacy. This one makes me feel, perhaps, like they occasionally miss the point. Olympic sprinter Marion Jones is seen here in some bizarre corridor of books with a surreal sky behind, running at lunging sprint with a copy of Orwell’s 1984 in her hand. OH! I GET IT! Wait, that was a premature interjection. I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THIS POSTER MEANS. Most READ posters pair the celebrity with a book that has to do with what they are known for. Has Marion Jones mastered a way of sprinting away from totalitarianism so as to avoid its horrible legacy?

After this I was able to briefly meet a couple of very nice authors. The Curry’s (elder and younger) have both created the ultimate study of exploitation king Hershell Gordon Lewis in A Taste Of Blood: The Films of Herschell Gordon Lewis. Attractively presented by Creation Books, it contains a bevy of interviews and a thorough lineup of stills. Also on hand was Joseph Maddrey, author of Nightmares in Red, White and Blue: The Evolution of the American Horror Film, a look at the broad development of horror films as reflexive of cultural context. Though I have not read either of these books they both seem incredibly interesting, as the rave reviews on Amazon suggest.