San Diego Comic-Con: Day 1
by Rob - July 24th, 2008.Filed under: Uncategorized.
Carolyn and I flew from Toronto to San Diego, by way of Chicago, today for San Diego Comic-Con International, at which I’m a Special Guest this year. We were picked up at the airport, and whisked to our lovely hotel suite.
Once we got checked in, we took a cab over to the San Diego Aerospace Museum, which is having a Star Trek exhibition. It’s $24 a head to get in, and, frankly, isn’t worth it. The bridge re-creation is only so-so (Spock’s Library Computer is missing the hooded viewer and the console used for the self-destruct sequence; Sulu’s helm station doesn’t have the targeting scope; there are no chase lights running beneath the main view screen, and that screen has rounded corners; etc.).
And the tour guide flat-out lied and said that this chair they were letting everyone sit in was the actual Captain Kirk chair from the original series. (No, it isn’t; that one is at the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle — behind glass.)
Also, most of the props are reconstructions, not originals, and the Excelsior model is not the one from Star Trek III, but a smaller one built for a flashback episode of Voyager.
We had a wonderful dinner in the hotel restaurant, then headed over to the preview night, and wondered around the gigantic exhibit hall. We saw Nicole DeBoer from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Lou Ferrigno from The Incredible Hulk. I bought a 16″ Diamond Select Toys statue of the Battlestar Galactica from the new series, and pre-ordered a 12″ statue of Linx the Sontaran from the classic Doctor Who episode “The Time Warrior.” We also stopped by the Tor booth, and the Ace booth, and ran into some old friends, including local fan Cary Meriwether.
Today was a long day — 27 hours for us, with the time-zone changes. But it’s been great fun. And, best of all, I got some very good writing done on the airplane (I tend to get a lot of my best work done on planes — which is good, given how much I travel). Tomorrow (Thursday) is the first full day of the convention.
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site