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Anime Detour Author's Notes 2005 The middle of March was a good time to be a college basketball fan or an anime fan in the upper Midwest. The state of Iowa got a couple of teams into the men's division one NCAA tournament, Minnesota got a decent finish in the Big 10 tournament, and there was another anime convention in Bloomington, Minn. near the big airport. The second Anime Detour moved a block or two east from the first year's location, to one of the most unusual Ramada Inns in the U.S. The place, also called the Thunderbird Conference Center, is a cross between an old-fashioned hunting lodge and an American Indian art museum. It's easy to forget that "thunderbird" is more than a brand name used for a Ford Motor Co. automobile or a U.S. Air Force flight display team, but a part of Native American mythology that spans North America. The Ramada never lets you forget the word's origin or the nature of the people who once ruled the continent. Every wall has a sculpture or painting, every room is named after a tribe. The Ramada's hunting lodge feel comes from the stuffed and mounted game in display cases; you can buy the seven-foot grizzly bear for $12,000. Anime fans stuck to stuffed plushies in the dealers' room, along with trips to the artists' alley, where this site had its picture taking and sales table. All of the art on the walls would have distracted from the cosplay pictures, so we hauled out a big blue tarpaulin for a backdrop. It had the right color to compliment the costumes and was just shiny enough to eliminate shadows from the strobes we used. Saturday was a pleasantly busy day for picture sales, but things got busier and more interesting on Saturday evening. The artists' alley room was used as the green room for the costume contest entrants, and the convention staff let us hang around to get a few more pictures before the show. That room was nice and warm, important on a weekend when the temperature never got within hailing distance of freezing. But the room was out of range of the Ramada's WiFi signal; this writer had to retreat to his guest room to upload some pictures. Our backup cell phone connection was the only Internet link in that green room, and the costumers noticed it. Several times, cosplayers came over to the table and asked if we would go online and find reference art for the workmanship judging. It took some patience because the cell phone link was slow, but eventually we managed to fulfill each request. That cell phone connection at the worked a lot better than the promised, yet useless, WiFi at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. That 2005 costume contest saw some advancement among costumers; the young fan award winners from 2004 stepped up to get the best in show award in different costumes (and the decision came from different judges). One of those presentation judges was actor Greg Ayres; we think the purple and yellow spiky thing on his head on Saturday night was not his own hair. Actors Carrie Savage and Travis Willingham were the other presentation judges. The convention also brought back actors Kyle Hebert (who spent a lot of time in the artists' alley) and Monica Rial. Producer and director Jonathan Klein was scheduled to appear, but apparently didn't get to the show, but writer Marc Hairston (whose son wore a Last Exile costume) and music video maven Phade McCormick were on hand. Watching the display of Phade's music video collection while waiting for the costume contest winners to be announced, and considering the the sophistication of editing and timing those videos offer, a heretic thought crossed this writer's mind: isn't it time for the best of those video makers to advance beyond re-editing others' footage, join with equally talented fan animators and fan-fiction writers, and create their own original animation based on new ideas and stories? Anime Detour Main Page