Monday, October 25, 2004

Post Oni-Con thoughts...

Rented a Malibu II and drove down to Houston with Ed. Found Oni-Con and spent a few minutes looking for a parking spot, got lucky and found one close to the loading dock. Went in and found Bruce and Mundee, went to the bar and knocked back 3 G&Ts to steel myself for OtakuHELL. Found the room, it was a smallish video room and luckily I was able to set up a half hour before the show. Unfortunately we had sound troubles. I broke out the portable speakers and hooked them to the Audiovox but they couldn't really do much for the room. I may need to look into some sort of portable yet powerful computer speakers/amplifiers for future shows. And it looks like I'll be buying a switch box just for the VCR/DVD problem. As things were set up in the Atlanta room I was unplugging the Portable DVD Player and plugging in the VCR because the DELL Projector wasn't getting a signal from the L1/L2 inputs on the VCR. [It was a decent VCR, too, I didn't run anything from the Audiovox Portable VCR] Eventually I got a tech who figured out where my sound problem was and I cannibalized the connector from the Eddie Bauer and we had sound. That left me with about an hour left of the show before the GTO Movie was scheduled. I felt ok with that. I'd rather surrender the room to GTO then something like, say, HentaiFEST...

We had a great crowd for the show, and the room was packed the full two hours, and they even put up with the prerequisite technical snafus. Gogo and his Rube Goldberg egg machine was well received, as was Lolita 18's VIDEO KILLED THE RADIO STAR. FORKLIFT DRIVER KLAUS was a bigger hit then I expected, despite the fact the DVD player froze up at least 3 times. Once the audio problems were licked I played ARE YOU LISTENING and TOOTHACHE OF A CLOWN. But once again the break out hit was NINJA SQUAD with Master Ninja Gordon up against Ivan the Red in an all out Ninja battle for Ninja supremacy. I ended the show with some FARTING EVANGELIST to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Then I packed up just as the Oni-Con Video Director, Michael Unfried, came in to run GTO. I shook his hand and then we were off for a big steak dinner!

All in all it was a great show and I want to thank everybody who showed up and had a good laugh. I hope we can do it again next year.

No comments: