Day Three - How Many?

Day three started a bit weird, which I won't go into in detail here, but suffice it to say that when you are in a seventh floor hotel room and you are flooded out of that room, it's a bit of a bad night. Nevertheless, I must carry on! Sunday at most anime cons is a good chance to catch up on some discussions with friends, catch a panel or video or two, and make the required last dash to the dealers room. I decided to take in a little of all of that. Finally caught some of Serial Experiments Lain. My kind of show! Checked out a bit of a panel with A.D.Vision producer Matt Greenfield and the editor of Animafantastique magazine talking about possible future trends. Not all that much hard information, but some interesting tidbits.. For example, ADV wants to license Gamera 2 & 3, but Daei had been bought by Disney as part of the Ghibli deal, so Disney has first option on those. We got to see some footage of the upcoming Madhouse anime Alexander, should be pretty interesting. The usual interesting banter filled the room regarding Mononoke Hime as I dashed out to make my dealer's room run. I put on my brakes. Hey Dave, how's it going? That many? Wow. It turns out Otakon has just broken the 4500 person attendee level, quite an achievement. Anyway, Dave, gotta go, there's a Gundam box set with my name on it!

I spend the next couple of hours lounging and catching up with friends I tend to meet only once or twice a year. It's a benefit to these conventions that I always cherish. After all, isn't that really what anime conventions should be all about, being able to enjoy your passion for a type of entertainment with others fans? Well, it looks like time is about up, guess we'll have to check out what others have to say about how the con has gone, down at the feedback panel. At the feedback panel (gripe session) which closed out the con activities, a variety of small issues from artist alley procedures to video schedules to room scheduling issues were raised by fans. It was a very thorough going over in my opinion. It also struck me after listening through the session that the majority of the negative feedback was relatively small and nit-picky, in my opinion. It seemed to be the theme of most of the weekend, you had to go looking fairly hard to find problems. That is always a good sign. My only real complaint (if you could call it one), was that there should have been even more, especially Friday afternoon.

How Far Indeed

Reflecting upon Otakon 1999, among the splendor of the convention facilities, I thought back to the one previous Otakon I was able to attend. (Literally) Hidden amongst the hills and valleys of central Pennsylvania, was Otakon 1995 at the Scanticon Hotel in State College, PA. Very intimate and content-rich, the 600 person convention felt of a different world entirely than the extravaganza it has now become. Credit to the Otakon staff, that though the convention has grown to what another convention organizer termed 'a world-class con', drawing in 750% more fans since those State College days, that the content-driven and otaku-stylized atmosphere has barely changed. Only those trained in the science of quantum mechanics may be able to describe to future generations how far Otakon has come in the past five years.

How far indeed.