Wondercon Anaheim 2013 - Day 1

Well, it's been a while since I've done an event, but we kicked off day 1 of Wondercon in grand style, at the Anaheim Convention Center, in Anaheim, CA. The R2 Builders were out in force.



Last night I had the pleasure of folding 300 club brochures, along with finishing up the presentation for our R2 Builders panel that I moderated.



This morning, we started setting up the booth, in preparation for the 12:00pm show opening.



The show opened, and despite the fact that it was a Friday and we were located way in the back, large numbers of attendees found us in no time. All told, I heard that they sold out the day at 40,000 people!



Some of the booth traffic eased up once Mike Senna and Michael McMaster rolled out their WALL•Es. Mike Senna also brought his R2, but it was upstaged by WALL•E.



Ed Perello brought his impressive assortment of R2 gadgets to display.



At 4:30pm I moderated an R2 Building panel with panelists William Miyamoto, Chris Romines, Michael McMaster and Mike Senna. We were semi-surprised to see quite a line forming before the panel started.



We were even more surprised to see that we packed the room with 375 attendees! Thank you to Mark Chu-Lin for the pic from the audience.



The famous Don Post joined us for the latter part of the panel and discussed the licensed replica props he produced back in the early Star Wars merchandising days. (Yes, I even take pictures while I'm moderating panels.)



Yahoo did a mostly accurate write-up of our panel here, although there were some minor misquotes and misattributions. Hopefully the link will work for a while.

We wrapped up with a group picture (thank you Katy McMaster), and non-stop questions and answers from the crowd that admired the robots.



We'll do it all again tomorrow!

The full photoset is here.