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KamiKazeCon Author's Notes 2005 Two years earlier, the inaugural Anime Boston was held on a weekend that featured Easter and Patriots' Day. The organizers expected a small turnout, but got so many people that they needed to cut off membership sales. The first-time KamiKazeCon didn't have the same small expectations, but the results were the same - a large turnout on a weekend often considered a bad time to hold an event. This writer hadn't heard any numbers by the time he headed for the airport on Sunday morning, but it felt like around 3,000 showed up for the convention's first two days. This writer spent most of the weekend in a second-floor area that led to the artists' alley, taking and selling pictures. To attract people to the area, we broke out a pair of inflatible rabbit figures, including a four-foot high bunny that needed to be pressurized by an electric fan. The trick worked, and there was a pleasantly steady flow of costumers during the weekend. We were so busy that we didn't get a chance to check out any of the appearances by voice actors during the weekend, seeing them only in the halls and in the hotel's atrium bar. While most of the actors came from ADV films' Houston-based roster, Jamie McGonnigal headed over from New York (where snow fell just before he headed west) and Carrie Savage was on hand from California. Greg Ayres and his brother were on hand; all sympathies to them for the loss of their grandmother, who died a couple of days after Greg had appeared at Anime Detour in Minnesota. The Ayres brothers were planning to head from the convention to Virginia for the funeral. We checked with David Williams of ADV about the closing of the company's Austin, Texas dubbing operation, and we were told that the company had caught up with the dub production backlog that led them to set up the second studio. Workers had been offered Houston jobs, he said, and several of the actors who were contracted through the Austin shop were planning to move to Houston to keep finding roles at ADV's headquarters studio. ADV had an unexpected tryout of sorts for the "fumoffu" Full Metal Panic series. Convention organizers needed some extra material to fill time at the costume contest while the judges deliberated, and ADV gave them a DVD of an episode. It was played after the Kumiko Kato concert, and the crowd was astounded over the show. Most anime is viewed with a few people as an audience at best, and there aren't many chances to see how a big crowd will react. A few years ago, a pilot episode of a proposed Robotech series was shown at Fanime Con and the crowd nearly laughed the presention out of the theater. The laughter for the Full Metal Panic episode shown at KamiKazeCon was the opposite, the sort of laughter you'de expect to hear from the audience of a successul stage comedy. The audience loved every minute of the show, even cheering when a damsel in distress was rescued by the hero. When the presentation was cut short for the announcement of the costume contest awards, the crowd booed - loud. But that reaction was short of the crowd's enjoyment of the Koda Kumi concert. With more dancers, more sexy action and more familiar songs, the Houston concert was a level above what Koda had done a year earlier in Austin at Ushicon. Koda got big cheers for the Cutey Honey and Final Fantasy themes, and even an encore didn't satisfy the audience, which was left pining for more once the concert was done. After the show, the crowd just hung around the hall outside the ballroom, clearly overwhelmed by what they had witnessed and not wanting to let the afterglow fade away. It was the most amazing audience reaction of the weekend and the convention season seen by this writer. The airliner trip home was like an episode from Last Exile. One of the major plot points of that retro-future airborne saga is the existence of a powerful "grand stream" of air in the upper atmosphere. Our real world's weather is dominated by a jet stream that is less powerful, but still carries a punch. The jet stream was flowing in the direction of the author's Sunday morning flight home, providing a tailwind that increased the airliner's ground speed to 100 miles an hour faster than the airspeed. The jet stream was so great a boost that it cut a half-hour from the flight time. KamiKazeCon Main Page