Open registration for San Diego Comic Con is this Saturday, February 20! If you want to go but don't have a member ID yet, well, you're out of luck this year. There's always next year. I was going to do a whole thing on what SDCC is really like, but frankly SDCC Unofficial Blog covers all this way better than I ever could, so I'm just going to link you as a reference. Instead, I'm going to talk about things that I've seen and done at SDCC.
1. My first year, someone got stabbed at a Harry Potter panel. I heard about it on the train back, when someone near me had been in the room. The story I heard was that someone had left to go to the bathroom, and someone else took their seat, and the first guy responded by stabbing him with a pencil. (After a few years of trying to get into Hall H I understand this better.)
2. My friends have done the Walking Dead Zombie Run a couple times, and once I went along as a spectator. They'd come running through the halls of Petco Park, while we were cordoned off to watch them as they ran by, and could watch below. While we were waiting, there were people acting as zombies wandering around and being menacing at us. I have a zombie phobia, which I think one guy dressed up as an army zombie got, and so every time I turned around he was reaching out to grab me.
It took maybe two minutes for everyone to actually run through the halls, dodging zombies, and as soon as they passed, the staff tried to make us head lower. Since we'd paid to watch the whole thing, we were determined to stay... until they moved the barriers keeping the zombies from us. I turned around and there was the military zombie literally right behind me.
And that was how I learned that in the zombie apocalypse I will be the person that yells "NO!" in a zombie's face and walks away quickly.
3. My first year we were staying at the Embassy Suites, and there were fireworks coming from somewhere one night. We stepped onto the balcony to see them, and someone looked down. So, we might've seen some people getting it on in the hot tub way below us. We're not really sure but saying we did is a way more interesting story.
4. I'm a big fan of Rifftrax, and they were going to be showing their new riff of Sharknado 2 at a theater in Horton Plaza. When my friend and I got there, there were two guys in the middle of the aisle talking. We couldn't really see who they were, so it wasn't until the blond guy said they would be taking pictures in the lobby and headed out that they passed by and I realized it was Ian Ziering. I tried to get a picture as he walked, and my friend Kelsey said, "Just go take a picture with them!" and now I'm only two degrees away from my childhood hero Brenda Walsh.
5. In 2014 I was determined to camp out in the Hall H line to try to get into the Marvel panel, but my friends who were going to do it with me dropped out, and it's not really something I wanted to do alone. But there's a playback room at the Omni, where they play the popular panels from the day, minus the footage and clips and such. I went with one of the aforementioned friends, where we sat through several panels, and got to see the panel we really wanted!
Till they started showing footage of Age of Ultron and suddenly the screen went black! The whole room went full on Skywalker "NOOOOOOOO!" at once, and when they came back to the panel, moderator Chris Hardwick was literally like, "I never say stuff like this but HOLY SHIT THAT WAS THE GREATEST THING I'VE EVER SEEN!"
:/
6. In 2015 my friends and I (mostly them, though I tried) camped out to go to the Star Wars panel. Thanks to some amazing connections, we were certain to get in really easily, and the morning in line was kind of a party. Everyone was excited, if tired, and JJ Abrams sent over coffee and Dunkin Donuts to the line. (Sometimes stars and such will visit the lines overnight, too.)
It was a 5:00 panel, and we got into the room at 10, which meant we spent seven hours sitting in uncomfortable chairs with nothing but nachos and snacks we'd brought down from the hotel room to eat. We were headachey and tired, and before our panel we had decided to go out to dinner immediately following this. Then the panel happened, where they brought out the cast of The Force Awakens, and it was super exciting, and then Chris Hardwick (it is always Chris Hardwick) told us that to close out the panel, they were taking us to a concert. A line of stormtroopers came out onstage and then into the audience, leading all 6,000 of us in the room out of the convention center and down over to the outdoor symphony nearby, with workers at the convention center honking and waving at us as we passed. Once we got there we were given lightsabers for free, and got to watch the San Diego Symphony play the best-known music over clips of the movies. Once the fireworks started going off, you got to see and hear a few thousand grown adults lose their minds like kids, only with more astonished cursing.
And then we ate.
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