I wanted to write something about Anime Boston shortly after our panel, but the craziness of my work schedule seemed intent on postponing that. For posterity’s sake, I’ll do a quick recap now and put up some photos.
My preparations for our panel didn’t really begin until two days before the event. While Sean and Shawn were working on the PowerPoint, I decided to do a last-minute music video to accompany my part of the presentation. I figured that our audience would appreciate actual music and video clips more than ten minutes of my own random opinions. However, I had forgotten how long and arduous video editing can be. In a previous life, I was pretty handy with Final Cut Pro. I spent many nights at the MIT Media Lab cutting together interactive movies. But that was over five years ago, and it doesn’t seem as easy as I remember it. Also, I’m stuck with iMovie. Whatever speed increases my MacBook Pro delivers over my old G4 are canceled out by iMovie’s insipid usability. I won’t get into this, but the fact that it takes more steps to crossfade audio than it does with video is pretty dumb.
As a result of my endeavors, I spent most of our pre-Easter Saturday dinner hunched over my laptop. Around 3am I finally finished, and we got a chance to do a dry run of the presentation. By this time, we were resigned to the fact that we would get little or no sleep. The infamous 10-hour registration line was a scary thought, and we weren’t going to take any chances. We had to get there early since our panel was scheduled for noon.
Parking at the Hynes Convention Center was easy around 7:30am Sunday morning. There were already a small number of otaku faithful waiting. When the security guard let us in at eight, we marched upstairs to the registration room and found ourselves less than ten bodies from the head of the line. Piece of cake, right? Not so. We waited another inexplicable 45 minutes while the organizers trickled in, cleaned up, and made random excuses. And it’s not that they didn’t care–they really seemed to feel our pain–it’s just perplexing how slow the process had to be. Seriously, there’s no good reason that admitting each person should involve up to three different desks. Next year I might volunteer to help run registration instead of a fan panel, just to see if I can inject some efficiency into this clogged process.
The panel.
The slideshow.
Sean and Shawn.
Leilani and Lawson.
Shawn at dinner.
Easter dinner.
As expected, there were lots of costumed people, but I wasn’t much in the mood for photography so I didn’t get any pictures of them. The group dressed as Avatar characters was our favorite, in particular Appa. We did manage to take in a few random showings in the early morning hours. The only one I really remember was Desert Punk, mostly because of its idiotic fascination with breasts (certain repetitive segments stick to your brain like 4chan memes). At around 10am, exhaustion got the better of us, so Irene and I dozed off on some benches in one of the long hallways. Fortunately, we woke up just before the panel and made it with enough time for a comfortable setup.
The presentation went very well. The audience was larger than we expected–around forty people. Sean started out with introductions and then focused on the structure and flow of the series. Shawn followed up with a character analysis of Spike Spiegel, and I closed with a brief discussion of the music. I didn’t know what to expect when I played the video; I didn’t know if viewers would be bored with my selection of clips. But in the end, I felt my efforts vindicated when I heard a few people quietly singing along to Rain, and later when someone exclaimed “best.. episode.. ever!” during a clip from Mushroom Samba.
The last thirty minutes were spent in open discussion with the audience. Big questions were tackled, like “Does Spike have romantic feelings for Faye and vice versa?” Many interesting theories were offered and absorbed, from the hidden significance of Ein to the possibility of Spike being Jewish. There was never a slow moment or shortage of questions. In the end, it felt like a melding of minds for Bebop scholars, with plenty of nostalgia to go around.
I’m grateful for such an enthusiastic audience. Just as I’m grateful to Sean for kicking my ass into doing this panel. It was definitely worth it.
In case you’re interested, here are the slides and the accompanying video.
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