Once More to the Fan Expo

-

We're back!  A little later than last year, but still back!  After finishing our school and work days on Thursday, we set off for our annual last summer sojourn to Toronto for Fan Expo.  We were making pretty good time until we hit the Gardiner Parking Lot (Expressway).  That added about an hour to our travel, so we barely had two hours at FE, but we made the most of it!

First we ran to the back of the Convention Center for the LEGO booth.


With the coming relaunch of the Star Wars franchise, this year's FE was filled with Star Wars-themed booth displays and merch.  Penn's doing the robot here.


And, surprisingly, it appears that Scooby Doo is having a moment.  This Mystery Machine is made of LEGOs, and there's a new video game coming, too.  As an aside, a few weeks back, I saw Rochester's own picture perfect Mystery Machine broken down on the side of 490.  Whoever owns that thing is a van artist.


This statue was lovely, but it looks oddly disembodied in this photo.  The beautiful creature next to it looks just fine.


Hallmark has a booth this year that's totally Star Wars and Marvel themed.  When folks don't send mail, Hallmark sells ornaments and cute little stuffies.  Thursday is the day to try out any interactive booth because the crowds are so much thinner.  So, Harper and Penn got to walk right in to the Halllmark Star Wars photo booth.


Oh, no, J. J. Abrams is demanding another rewrite!!!


Nearby, we found the LIttle Prince booth.  Gosh, this movie looks beautiful!  The stop-motion figures of the movie in a movie are made of paper, so guests got to help create their own figures.  Again, notice how empty this booth was.  Love Thursdays at FE!


How cute is this little prince!


Here are my little prince and princess creating away.


The result ...


Happy little artistes!


FE operates in the realm of cognitive dissonance.  The Little Prince is a happy neighbor to an oculus rift immersive experience of the Strain.  Master meet Prince.


While we were in the etoile-filled world of the Little Prince, Ned was waiting his turn to be infested with vampiric worms.  You say tomato ...




In case you were wondering, this ended with him being beheaded.  


Around the corner, our own lil' Katniss took her throne.


And the world's most ardent and youngest Mad Max Fury Road fan found his people.


This picture captures everything we love about FE ... it is the world where the odd Chippendales dancer, a guy in cosplay at Tony Montana, some anime dude, and Malibu Ken can dance it out together to Uptown Funk.  And then everyone breaks into applause.


Right next door, Penn fell into LEGO Dimensions.  Again, cause it was Thursday night, he walked right up to play.  How wonderful are Thursday night FE-ers?  His controller died, and the random kid he was playing with just handed Penn his controller.  Paying it forward, Penn passed this controller on to the little kid behind him so that he could play before FE closed for the night.



Harper has one goal each FE: TokiDoki!  We hit many of the same booths every year, and we were at one (Mindzai) when FE shut the lights out on the entire convention hall trying to get everyone out.  Unphased, Mindzai staff kept chatting with us as we picked out boxes of Labbits and Unicornos, using their cellphone to brighten the booth.  And, all around us, people kept sorting through bins of comic books and shelves of Funko Pop.  It takes more than a completely dark convention room floor to stop FE regulars.

Thursday is the latest night at FE, when it theoretically closes at 9 and people are actually out around 10.  We had snacks in the car on the drive but ditched dinner in favor of hitting the con, so by 10, we were starving.  On the way back to the hotel, we stopped at one of our favorite Toronto eats: Pizza Rustica.  

Harper got to open her mystery purchases.


Ned found his Funko doppelganger:  angry Groot!  An FE special.


Penn got a pizza filled with spicy sopressata and pepperoni.


And we ended our night with the nirvana that is butter chicken pizza!  


Two hours in, Fan Expo 2015, and we're ready for more!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

From Castle to Temple in Just One Day

-
Image
Our hotel has a theme of music that runs from the lobby through the elevators and into the rooms. Lyrics line the walls in tasteful handwriting. It gives the place a very welcoming, creative vibe. On our second morning in Dublin, we set off around brunch time for the other breakfast place recommended by our hotel, Lemon Jelly . We beat the line by a few minutes and filled up on yummy omelets, Irish breakfasts, and Americanos. It was history day in every possible way: on the schedule were the Dublin Castle, Book of Kells, Jameson Distillery, and a ghost bus. Plus some food in between. Our walk to the castle on this grey day took us past murals and lovely architectural elements. Dublin is a compact city, easy to walk with something to grab your eye around every corner. It's Ireland's largest, but even so, it has only about a half a million residents, a bit more than two-thirds the size of DC. There is great concern about the cost of living in Dublin, but according to internationa
Read more

There Will Be Glaciers

-
Image
After our port visits for the past few days, we were on to Glacier Bay.  According to our Freestyle Daily, we'd be arriving at the bay around 7:15 am, so I was up and out on deck early in anticipation.  There weren't many of us, and there wasn't much to see.  The skies were grey and the clouds were low--making for some dramatically moody photos but no glaciers were in sight. While the ship is in Glacier Bay, US Park Rangers are on board to answer questions, share information, and offer commentary about the glacier and the environment that produced it.  They tendered onto the ship early in the morning and set up shop in one of the lounges.  The map below shows the route we took into and out of the bay. As the morning moved along, the decks began to fill with eager glacier hunters, and I ran back to the rooms to wake everyone up.  (One thing we realized on this trip was that we really need to bring walkie talkies on our next cruise.  Now that we're all fu
Read more

300 Feet Below Ground ... What Started It All

-
Image
Sometime during the winter, CBS Sunday Morning (which we watch every Sunday as a family; Harper expresses great displeasure whenever Charles Osgood deigns to call in sick) ran a feature on the Mammoth Caves.  We watched in awe. "We want to go to there," we thought.  With a bit of time on Google Maps, we realized we could visit the caves in Kentucky and then visit Tennessee: Nashville, Memphis, Dollywood!  And so ... We're on summer vacation in the South.  As my Southern-born and named son Penn observed, "You know you're in the South when the church is selling fireworks as a fundraiser."  Note, he said this just as we pulled into Zaxby's--where fried chicken fingers are an art form. Our trip began in the land of another chicken delicacy: Buffalo.  After getting our Upstate-on at Anchor Bar. Fried pickles, wings, wing dip, wing nuggets, beef on weck? Um, yes. We settled down at the gate, where for the first time in my hundreds of f
Read more