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Nan Desu Kan report - Shibo - 09-29-2002
As promised, a comprehensive review of NDK 2002. =)
This was my first con ever, I was very excited. My friend Pyrite flew into Denver for a week's visit, which not-so-coincidentally happened to be just the right week to attend this con.. I was especially looking forward to the Mari Iijima concert on Saturday, as well as the dealer room. NDK started on friday, the 19th of September..It was at the Holiday Inn right outside Denver International Airport. Pyrite and I got there early, and just kinda hung out for a while, as the doors didn't open till 3 PM. We immediately headed to the dealer room and spent a while looking around. Pyrite picked up The End Of Evangelion and the Love Hina Box to put his DVD's in.. I picked up the 3 Key The Metal Idol DVD's, Night on the Galactic Railroad DVD, and RG Veda DVD.. Oh, and a shirt that says Anime: Drugs Would Be Cheaper. The dealer room tends to get picked over fairly quickly, or so I've been told.. So anyway, we take out stuff to the car and head back in. We check out the video game room for a few minutes, play a couple fighting games, and head next door to KFC for some quick grub, as we kinda forgot to eat breakfast or lunch.. Saw some cool costumes, including some impressive catgirls and one young lady in a belly dancer's outfit.. I have no idea what series she was from but she looked fabulous, trust me on this one, gentlemen.. Her friend the other belly dancer looked very nice too. I'll mention the belly dancer again later.
Hehe anyway, at 6 PM we headed over to a video room and watched an hour of the Adventures of the Mini Goddesses. Definitely kids' fare, but you'd think it was the funniest show ever as the people in attendance were just laughing hysterically over everything. Whatever, hehe. It was ok, but nothing I'd want to buy. After it ended, we headed to the main stage to watch Koto Colorado, a musical act featuring a teacher and her students playing these really interesting stringed instruments, which I'm sure someone here knows the name to but I have no idea.. Hell, maybe they're Kotos.. Anyway, they look like huge zithers or something, incredibly heavy instruments that stood about thigh high or so..The ladies sat in chairs and played various songs for us. The students were ok. The teacher, who played two solos, was fantastic. We left after that, with my hope being that if we went to bed relatively early, we could get to the con really early..Ok so saturday I get up hella early, like 5 AM or so but Pyrite wasn't exactly cooperative, and lazed around far too much for my liking.
That being said, we still got there at like 7:45 AM or so, which wasn't bad. We watched 15 minutes or so of Psychic Academy, which was raw, no subs or anything.. So I kinda vaguely grasped the show, enough to see that it had enough fan service that I'd enjoy it with subs. we watxged an hour's worth of Gate Keepers Starting at 8AM, that was a pretty cool show, sometime to pick up some day if they either release a good HK or I feel like buying 8 R1's.. =P I don't remember what we did after that, maybe headed to the video game room.. They had 2 stand up arcade machines along with all the console machines, with different games every 2 hours plus tournaments running 24 hours a day.. There were 3 video rooms, for those who are curious, also running 24 hours. Dealer room was open till like 7 or 8 on fri, open till 5 or 6 on sat, and will 5 or 6 on sun.. Anyway, after some gaming or whatever we headed over to catch Magical Stage Fancy Lala at 10, which for some reason looked like it had already started. We watched what I thought was ep 1 but seemed like it wasn't.. Turned out it was part 2 and they were running 1/2 hour too early.. They announced that they didn't know how this happened but they'd just run something random for the next half hour. I was kinda grumpy since I wanted to see both Lala eps, but oh well, shit happens. What I saw seemed ok enough. Nothing too deep, but fun. So it was 10:30, we figured it was a good time for lunch... Quick stop at subway, then we came back inside and caught a raw half hour of Cosplay Complex, which I am now greatly looking forward to.. After that was Kuromi-Chan, which we stayed for since we really had nothing else we wanted to do.. Kuromi-Chan was a 40 minute stand alone thing, about a girl just out of animation school in Japan who finds herself as the producer of a show called Time Journeys 2 (looked to be a Time Bokan Parody). The show is not even close to being finished so she has to whip the animators into shape and get it done on time. Cute little show and an amusing way to kill 40 minutes.. We ran out of that video room and straight into line for the Mari Iijima concert.. The lovely Ms. Iijima, for those who don't know, was the voice of Lyn Minmei in Macross.. Her most famous tune is probably "Do You Remember Love?" from Macross.. Some of you might know "My Boyfriend is a Pilot". She has 17 albums out in Japan and does quite well for herself over there, apparently.. The only anime work she's done is Macross. So anyway, we got inside and got great seats. Mari performed for about an hour and taked a lot to the audience between shows.. She sang a new song that she just did for a new anime in Japan which is currently airing.. I don't know the name of the anime but the song was fantastic. The concert was a lot of fun, definitely a highlight of the con for me. Afterwards, Pyrite left and I stuck around to get an autograph. Took about a half hour of waiting in line, but I got a couple of Mari's CD's for myself, some autographs, and even a CD/Autograph for a friend. Was cool. =) I also lent $5 to a guy who didn't have enough $ for a CD.. He turned out to be a dealer and we chatted about Megatokyo while we waited in line. We walked back to the dealer room so he could get my $ and he offered me a Megatokyo poster instead for me to get signed at the Megatokyo Panel later in the day. I accepted the "Capture The B33r" poster happily, and then tromped off to find Pyrite. I found him watching Noir raw in one of the video rooms. this didn't do much for me, so I went and played some video games, then came back to tell him I was going to the Megatokyo and Beyond panel, he said he'd be along shortly. This panel featured a Q+A Session with Rodney Caston, Largo from Megatokyo. Rodney is no longer with MT but he still spent a good hour talking to us about it. Good stuff. After that panel ended, I went up and got my b33r poster signed. I quickly ran out to the car to put away my poster, then came back in, went right to that same room, and checked out Vocal Musings, which was a panel with a few voice actors.. Scott Mcneil, who voiced Duo Maxwell from Gundam Wing, Captain Harlock from the Galaxy Express 999 films, the original Piccolo from Dragonball Z, as well as the voices of Rattrap, Dinobot, Waspinator, & Silverbolt from Beast Wars: Transformers was one of the panelists.. Tristan Macavery, the voice of Gendo Ikari from Evangelion, as well as doing parts as Vector in Battle Angel, Waldess in Dirty Pair Flash, Jay in Kimera and Joyrock in Slayers: The Motion Picture was another panelists.. Last but not least was Jonathan Osborne, who has played background voices in way too many things to list.. All three of these guys were absolutely hilarious. THey just had us rolling in the aisles for an hour as they talked about all the things they'd done and how they got their starts in the business.. Now you guys who know me know that I never watch dubs.. But I enjoyed this panel soo much. It was a great time. I especially enjoyed Jonathan talking about his experience doing background voices in the first town in Fushigi Yugi.. Ask me about it in the chat room sometime, it's a great story. Oh, Scott had fangirls screaming for him the entire time.. He was Duo in Gundam wing, and they just couldn't get enough of him.. Scott is a ham, was apparently the class clown growing up, and popped up in various panels throughout the con, cracking everyone up by doing things like singing "I am a cucumber" in his Piccolo voice. =) We stayed in the room after that panel ended and wathed "Whose Line is it Anime?", in which Scott, Tristan, Jonathan, and some girl whose name I do not know did the famous show with a decidedly anime twist.. The audience was the big winner on this one, another hour of sidesplitting laughter. =) After this was a panel in the same room featuring Raijin Comics, a new *weekly* manga magazine that will be coming out in the US in October.. We stayed for this panel because not only were we interested in the magazine, but the cosplay contest was coming up in the room afterwards and we were hoping to have good seats for that. =) I wish Raijin the best, but I don't see them succeeding.. They have Slam Dunk, Grappler Baki, Fist of the North Star, City Hunter, and some other manga in the magazines, but I mean if Shonen Jump is only going monthly with DBZ and Yu Gi Oh and other really popular titles, at $20 for a year, what makes them think they can go weekly at well over $200 for a year's subscription? It's a great idea, but sorry guys, I don't see it working... Interesting note for this panel, the 2 guys from Raijin were Japanese and were the only people I saw at the con who held a conference/panel using an interpreter.. Anyway, when that ended we had to move back to the 6th row as the first 5 were reserved for guests.. Then it was time for the cosplay contest! There were many great costumes, including a fantastic catbus, a forest spirit from Mononoke, and a guy who dressed up in an amazing Spawn action figure costume. The belly dancer that I told you about from friday was seen on saturday in a Fuzzy white costume, looking great again.. Then at the actual costume contest she was in a gorgeous red ball gown.. I have no idea what series it was from, but the costume was beautiful and it won her a prize.. Catbus and Spawn were the other big winners.. Most popular costume was Nuriko from Fushigi Yugi.. there were a ton of those.. The people who were helping get people on/offstage, usher, etc, were all dressed as different sailor scouts.. They did some sort of stage show on sunday which I did not attend. Anyway, the contest was great, so many great costumes! They had a little cosplay skit thing after, with the notable one being Rei Ayanami hosting a therapy panel for mentally scarred anime characters. Great fun. =) The people who won the various costume prizes got TONS of great prizes, including tons of original Macross 7 cels. That was it for Saturday's stuff. We skipped dinner that day, just headed home and to bed. Sunday sunday sunday!!! Again, we got to the con later than I wanted to.. It was a later 7:30 AM, hehe.
We watched an hour of Those Who Hunt Elves.. Shitty dub, show seemed decent enough. 8:30 we stayed in the same room for an hour of Vampire Princess Miyu TV, which I absolutely loved.. Very very dark humor, very much my style. I'll be buying this series very soon, I assure you. We checked out the Art Show after that, a room with lots of great anime-themed works.. Paintings, sculptures, models.. Even anime cross stitch! We grabbed some food inside the hotel after the art, and then we headed to the video game room.. I left Pyrite in the game room and headed next door to check out Idol Defense Force next door in a video room.. Looked like cute jet pilots, but since it was japanese only and I'm not one for shows about planes, even if the pilots are cute, I headed back to the game room.. One of the arcade machines was playing Shining Blade 2, which I had never played but was quite fun. We were in there for a while, close to an hour and a half.. We headed next door to that same video room afterwards.. Watched 1 ep of Excel Saga because it was there, then stayed for ADV's panel. The two guys did a great job, answered tons of questions, and gave away lots of anime.. But none for me, cause I couldn't answer any of the trivia questions. ADV has a bunch of new warehouses, tons of new dub teams, and should be getting titles out much sooner accoring to the head of DVD production and one of the VP's of the company. They showed us some of a new Excel Saga ep, which was quite funny.. The new voice actress sounds nothing like the old one.. Good thing I watch the subs. They also played some of a Nuku Nuku episode, to huge applause. Nuku Nuku will be out early next year.. ADV did some "no comment" bits with huge grins when asked about Kodomo No Omocha and Memories.. Oh, they announced that they'll be doing Cosplay Complex next year as well, which is hella cool in my opinion. Again, great job, great panel by the ADV guys. ADV gets a real bad rap.. Many of the points are valid, and in my opinion many are just made by silly otaku holding grudges. ADV does many things right to go with the things they do wrong and I wish them luck next year, cause if they make money they can get better, and probably get releases from Japan over to us even sooner. Rahxephon is coming out early next year from ADV.. Damn, that's a lot sooner than we used to get stuff. =) After the panel we had an hour to kill, so Pyrite hit the games, I hit the dealer room and picked up Miyuki Chan In Wonderland and Don't leave Me Alone Daisy DVD's.. Things are pretty much winding down now.. many cosplayers are out of costome, etc.. So after some more games and a trip to the car to put my goodies away, Pyrite and I head to the Manga Entertainment panel.. This panel is hosted by Keith Burgess, who is a really great guy.. Unfortunately for him, his job was to be a Manga rep and Manga has pretty much nothing good/new coming out.. This panel was so uneventful that I can't remember anything at all except that it lasted less than 15 minutes. I chatted with Keith a bit after that about how quick the copies of Six String Samurai that he brought sold out in the dealer room.. After that, Pyrite decided he wanted to head back to the airport for his flight, and since I had to drive him, I left too.. By the time I was done, it was 3 PM.. There wasn't much else I wanted to see at the con, so I headed home.. And that was my anime convention experience. =)Some other videos that were playing that I didn't get to see: Love Hina, Princess Nine, Arjuna, Ronin Warriors, X TV, Saber Marionnette, Comic Party, Ping Pong Club, Berserk, Phantom Quest Corp, Astro Boy, Magic Users Club, Kanon, eX driver, Tokyo Mew Mew, Magical Nyan-Nyan Taruto, Macross, Digi Charat, Utena Movie, FLCL, Trigun, KOR, Kare Kano, Gundam MS-08, GTO, VHD: Blood Lust, EVA: Death And Rebirth, 2nd Kenshin OVA.... And so, so much more.
Tons and tons of other panels as well.
Anyway, I hope this excessively long report will inspire a few people to head to a con.. One of the best times I've ever had. See some of you at Anime Boston 2003?
Nan Desu Kan report - NYxCalm - 09-29-2002
GOOD JOB SHIBO 8O
HOLY COW, thats the guiness book of world record's LONGEST POST!!
THAT WAS A THESIS PAPER RIGHT THERE!!... Wish you'd indent... :x
GOOD REPORT MAN... MAYBE you could work as a reporter for one of those Otaku mags... :!: :!: :!: :!: :!: :!: :!: :!:
GOOD JOB SHIBO!
Nan Desu Kan report - Steve_the_Talking_Pie - 10-01-2002
Yeah that was crazy. Though I like hearing about it. I hope Anime Boston 2003 will be just as good. :mrgreen: