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Anime Overdose Author's Notes 2005 If you were checking this site on the convention's Saturday, looking for updates, but saw no changes until Sunday, our apologies. The combination of a busy day and no useful Internet access delayed the updates until near midnight Saturday Pacific time, when the author finally coaxed a Wi-Fi connection to work at the San Francisco International Airport. And our late Saturday night departure meant no material from the convention's Sunday, as always, including the concerts on the event's final day. However, we put more effort into getting panel discussion material from Saturday, including the presentations from the voice actors. Fans of both universes of acting, Japanese and American, got what they wanted. It looked as if the American trio and the Japanese actor got the same number of people in the convention's largest room on Saturday afternoon. By that time, Anime Overdose was at its busiest. At nine on Saturday morning, a walk through the hotel lobby left you wondering if there was going to be a convention there, since so few people were around. Two hours later, the place had filled with fans and the rush was underway, leading up to the Saturday night crush when the Psycho le Cemu concert line extended down two halls and a flight of stairs. Even through San Francisco is one of the nation's biggest metro areas, Anime Overdose was one of the smallest conventions of the 2005. Fans with long memories may recall when Fanime Con was held at the same late February-early March time of year. Writer Marv Wolfman had some great stories from the world of comics writing, Janice Williams of ADV Films finally got to host a panel on her own, and the DeviantArt crew held their first panel ever. The creators of the web artists' community spent a lot of time talking about keeping their artists happy and honest, and they mentioned that they've had to deal with the Secret Service because of the anti-George Bush art that pops up in their pages. Anime Overdose resembled the now-defunct Big Apple Anime Fest in that it seemed to be a commuter convention, with many of the fans using the area's mass transit system to get to the event. The termination point for a cable car line is right next to the hotel, and the intersecting street is laced with overhead power lines for electric trollies. We were told that some fans had taken advantage of other mass transit to head up from Berkeley for the event, and one of the guests of honor - Gilles Poitras - had he had ridden buses and trains to get to the convention from his home on the other side of the bay. At the previous convention covered by this site, there was a flood of orange-vested "security" people who told fans to keep moving or get out of the way. At Anime Overdose the staff was made of veteran volunteers from years of congoing; these guys actually held up a crowd once so a costumer would have enough room to perform a cartwheel (the picture is among the Saturday cosplayers' pages). It was somehow fitting that a quintet of Psycho le Cemu costumers would get the weekend's best of show award in the costume contest. What our still pictures can't tell you is that the song they performed to win the prize was the theme song from the "I Love Egg" Flash animation web site, which is something PLC is unlikely to tackle. (This sentimental writer admits that he prefers I Love Egg's gentle humor to the ultraviolence of Happy Tree Friends.) Another fitting irony: the Holiday Inn where the convention was held was also a stop for organized tours of Japanese high school students. What must it be like to spend hours on an airplane to travel to the U.S. and see the unique culture of downtown San Francisco, only to find a lot of people (maybe 2,000 for the weekend) who are celebrating what you just paid good yen to leave? The month of March 2005 has four weekends and eleven U.S. anime conventions. Three of those weekends have more than one convention, and this site plans to get to events on two of those weekends. So, this site has to decide which conventions to attend. This time, the selections were based on the apparent strength of the invited guest list. For this first weekend of March, the inaugural Kunicon in St. Louis had a good guest list and a convenient location for this writer, coming a four-hour drive from home. However, the second Anime Overdose had a stronger collection of guests, even after Mari Iijima's appearance in San Francisco was called off. And the guest list for the California convention came together about two months in advance, around the time this site booked its hotel room and flight reservation. In the same way, the inaugural KameKazeCon in Houston at the end of March had the more interesting guest list. The large number of dub actors - and the return of Koda Kumi to Texas - outweighed the Arizona appearance of Yoshitaka Amano and led us to buy a plane ticket to Texas. Moving into April, this site had to make a choice between Tekkoshocon and Sakura Con on the same weekend. As with the first weekend of March, the Pennsylvania event was a shorter trip, but the Washington event has the stronger guest list - along with the people with whom this writer worked on the Cosplex book project last year. So we're planning to head to Seattle. Eventually, though, we'll probably get back into the bad habit of attending two conventions on the same weekend. A series of coincidences that appeals to this writer, but probably to no one else:  the Anime Overdose weekend also was the opening weekend for the 2005 Indy Racing League season, with a 300-mile race at the Homestead-Miami Speedway. The IRL also races at the Twin Ring Motegi track in Japan, and that race is going to be the basis of a Japanese animated film. The information was gleaned from AniPages Daily, Benjamin Ettinger's excellent blog. AniPages is one of the rare anime web sites in English that treats animators as more important than the boxes in which their films appear. That site notes that Imaitoonz, the force behind the amazing Dead Leaves, is the character designer for that film. An Animate TV page says the title is going to be Oval X Over, which hints to this writer that it might be a figure-eight race, but...the other interesting note about this anime is that Production I.G. is going to create the animation - and they're apparently involved in promoting the race. 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