Comic-Con, Day 1

Thursday, July 23

Thursday was a fun day and it's the day that my brother-in-law Cameron came along with us for his first Comic-Con. Here's a breakdown of the events that we went to:

11-12:30 Disney 3D Panel
This was a pretty good panel. Like so good that it was in the biggest room at the SDCC and I waited in line 2.5 hours to get in to see it while Amanda was getting a big free bag and Cameron was getting his badge to get in. Fun stuff, eh? Anyways, this was where we saw:
-various clips from A Christmas Carol with Jim Carrey (no, he wasn't there) but Robert Zemekis was (he's the director) and it was really fun to see the clips.
-Alice in Wonderland was great. We saw the preview before anyone else (although it was on Yahoo! by the end of the day) and Tim Burton was there to talk about the movie and at the end...Tim Burton said that his imaginary friend was there and that if he concentrated hard enough, then he might appear...so when he did, Johnny Depp walked onto the stage. That was pretty cool and the room (which sat 6,500 people) went crazy. It was a lot of fun and the movie looks amazing!! I can't wait for it. Watch the trailer here.
-the last part was new scenes from Tron: Legacy and some cool collectabiles that came along with it. There were various cast and crew members from the movie.
2-3 Sony Animation
This was a cool panel which we were very excited to go to. It was the Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs panel and had the two directors of the film, Anna Faris, and (drumroll) Andy Samberg! The movie looks really good and Andy and Anna were hilarious. This was a really fun panel and we really enjoyed it. Here's a clip...taped by me...


4:30-5:30 Halo Franchise: What's Next?
This was highly anticipated by Cameron, and highly disappointing to all! The purpose of this wholle panel was to announce that Halo will be mage into an Anime series of seven short films. They didn't directly announce it, they just kind of showed a clip and inferred what they were doing without ever directly saying it. As soon as people realized what was going on there was a max exodus from the room, including us. The Halo games were all about high quality graphics and a violent shooter with a compelling story. They then came out with books and graphic novels to enhance the story and fill in gaps, but they were true to form. Then this? A highly simplified anime cartoon where the characters and monster-horde aliens don't look anything like the ones from the game? Really? It looked soooo stupid. Here's the clip that they showed if you have time to waste.

In between all this fun we wandered around the exhibition hall, Cameron played Halo 3:ODST (which hasn't been released yet) and he won the group that he was playing against (pretty impressive considering we were at a nerd-fest and the booth was crowded). We had a lot of fun but I think that Cameron was dissappointed 1) because of Halo and 2) because he couldn't find the comic book he was looking for. Overall a great day though.