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Notes finished after watching the first episode of Kiddy Grade at 28,000 feet: Yes, part of the Hyatt Regency Crystal City was evacuated on Katsucon's final day, but it was an inconvenience rather than a problem. The author of this site had just settled in at the hotel's lobby bar to watch the start of the Daytona 500 when one of the convention security guys told everyone to leave. Then one of the hotel staff members repeated the order, which was a sign there was no joking around on this one. Everyone left the lobby level...and then they noticed that the only people who left were on the lobby level. The people on floors above and below were left on those floors, but they weren't allowed to exit the hotel through the lobby level. The area around the elevator banks and the restrooms was cordoned off. Outside the hotel, some people spotted what looked like smoke as it came from the top of the hotel, but it wasn't a fire, apparently just steam. The evacuated crowd watched as fire trucks rolled up to the hotel, but they weren't the big ladder trucks needed to fight high-rise fires. A couple of people in turnout gear walked into the lobby, but they weren't in a rush. What was going on? Then the first hint; two firefighters got out of a "hazardous materials" trailer and toted a plastic equipment case into the hotel. It turned out that case contained a materials testing device, which was used to check out something found inside the hotel - a white powder located in a restroom or an elevator car. The firefighters said they found the mysterious material was...baking powder. The $70,000 testing device produced a quick answer that there was nothing sinister or dangerous about the powder. A half-hour after the lobby was evacuated, everyone was allowed back inside and the convention continued as if nothing had happened. Overkill? Not in a security-conscious age, and not a week after ricin was found a few miles away in one of the U.S. Senate office buildings in Washington, D.C. The hotel had no choice but to turn the case over to the fire department. One of the reasons the fans didn't complain was the attitude they brought to the convention, where they were determined to have fun, regardless. It also helped that, when the evacuation happened, the sun was out and there was no snow as had happened the previous year. The storm that stranded hundreds of fans at the hotel hadn't been forgotten, and many fans still wore their "Katsucon 9.1" badges from 2003. But if anything left people with a good feeling from the convention weekend, it was the Saturday night costume contest. The event started way too late, but the show that followed was worth the wait. And the award presentation gave anime convention costumers an unique, independent validation of their hard work. In the same way that the Westminster Dog Show has a single judge to choose the event's best of show entrant, and that judge is selected long in advance for his expertise, Katsucon had a single, experienced workmanship judge. That person, Marty Gear, was not familiar with anime conventions, but he had long experience with costuming. Gear had been in charge of judging and organizing at many Balticons and the national Costume Con, and he was familiar with the the level of costuming at the many World Science Fiction Conventions. The workmanship award winners you see on this site all were Gear's choices. He was exceptionally impressed with all of those winners, and his lengthy comments at the end of the Saturday night costume contest made it clear that the perceived performance gap between the best sci-fi convention costumes and anime convention costumes has been closed. Gear said that the honorable mention workmanship winners were good enough to win top honors at the other conventions he's attended, and he encouraged all of the Saturday night awardees to head to this year's Balticon and compete. Gear praised the top robot costumes for their use of materials, saying the fiberglass work on one outfit had a better surface than his car. He enjoyed the mallet of a Skuld costumer for being made out of hard-to-work hardwood rather than softwood. He was impressed with the use of fabric on the best entries. One entry got a workmanship award for an arching pair of six-foot feathered wings: Gear said he made that award because he knew first-hand the difficulty of working with feathers. And - very important for those who want to win - he gave several awards to costumers who brought documentation to show how their outfits matched the original costume designs. Katsucon's contest has become something like the NBA All-Star Game or the Daytona 500, played on the same weekend, for its level of presentation and competitiveness. There were only 34 stage entries, but five of them could have been best of show winners at any convention on the continent. The best of show entry, an anime version of the "Cellblock Tango" Broadway show tune from Chicago about cheatin' men from the William and Mary group, was one of the wittiest and best-written presentations in a long time. But four others - a Castlevania dance routine, a big Sailor Moon presentation from the Dark Muffins group, a Gaogaiger entry from the same guys who had the Go Nagai robot winner in 2002, and a "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" parody, were outstanding. The only thing that went wrong for this site's author was not being able to get wireless internet access after Saturday morning. That led to the "Saturday afternoon costumer" pages going without pictures for most of Saturday, and delayed uploads for the rest of the weekend. The hotel lobby was supposed to have wi-fi access, but it was barely useful. For the first time in two years, this site had an artists' alley table, and the convention provided a great location right next to an all-important power outlet. Each day, the author could barely get the table set up before fans spotted the site's three cosplay picture sample books and started paging through them, enjoying the pictures from conventions going back to 1999. The author brought 17 copies of the A Fan's View cosplay book and sold them all, with one of the final copies being purchased by character designer Hidenori Matsubara. However, the author doesn't have enough self-discipline to stay at an artists' alley table for an entire convention weekend. So he recruited help from cosplayer and artist Subaru, who wanted her own table but missed a deadline. Subaru brought her brother, mother and hundreds of cute color cut-out bookmarks, and the family took care of the table while the author wandered away. The combined crowd for the books, bookmarks and pictures was as large as for any other artists' alley table. The author should think of doing that again, and might considering recruiting help at future conventions. The 2004 edition of Katsucon likely will be the final one at the Hyatt Regency Crystal City, but not the last one in Arlington, Virginia. In 2005, they'll probably move down the road to a Marriott that has more room and on a single level, a switch from the five-level "geofront" that the Hyatt has. The Hyatt is getting cramped for Katsucon's purposes, as the convention had to use every inch available. The dealers' room was moved to parts of the exhibition level that had not been used before, an area that could have fooled some fans. There was a divide of sorts in the space that might have given the impression that the room was smaller than it seemed, and fans had to be sharp to venture beyond the divide and find the back half of the dealers' room. While Katsucon was the first U.S. convention of the 2004 season not to have a concert, there were several J-rock music vendors in the dealers' room, one which had a banner advertising the four-concert Miyavi tour that had been scheduled to start in May at Anime Central. (The tour was called off one month later.) And there were plenty of J-rock and visual kei costumers. Gothic lolita costumes often look like rockers, and those fans had their own "tea party" on the floor of the ballroom level. Most of those in attendance were female. The new setup for the dealers' room meant the service entrance from 2003 was the front door for 2004, and the change meant there wasn't enough room for a bag check area. So, shopping fans with bags had to drop them elsewhere, but the rapidly adjusted to the change. Still, that room swallowed all of the fans who wanted to get inside, and the line to get in seemed to be minimal - certainly shorter than the Sunday morning crowd of people trying to check out of the hotel. What happened to the 2003 front entrance to the dealers' room? It was turned into the entrance for the gaming room, which used part of the dealers' room space. On one side of the approach to that room was the Otakon booth, already selling T-shirts for the summer 2004 convention, and the other side had a portable Dance Dance Revolution machine. Someone hauled a video projector to that spot and aimed it at a hotel wall, making for a ten-foot DDR display which let much of the convention see how the players were doing. Katsucon used an effective video room trick last seen at Ushicon, where monitors with the video room feed were placed outside the room so fans could see what was being shown inside. It cut down on the peek-inside traffic, and led to at least one scene where as many people seemed to be looking at the outside monitors as viewing a video from the inside. |
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