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Middle Tennessee Anime Convention Author's Notes 2005 Houston and Nashville, the locations of the last two conventions visited by this site, don't have much in common. Houston has a downtown that has been completely rebuilt. Nashville's newest skyscrapers share space with the Ryman Auditorium, birthplace of the Grand Old Opry, and the 19th-century state capitol building. Houston is all business with its towering office buildings. Nashville is all entertainment with its country music tourist traps. The only things the cities share are new downtown sports stadiums and anime conventions - and they certainly don't share the weather. In 2004, the Middle Tennessee Anime Convention had barely enough room in a hotel next to the Vanderbilt University football stadium west of downtown. So they moved in 2005 to the Maxwell House hotel north of downtown, a hotel that is the successor to the place after which its popular brand of coffee was named. The hotel has a collection of Maxwell House memorabilia, along with a statue of Jack Daniel, best known for his old no. 7 whisky. With all that history, the new hotel for the Nashville event was still barely large enough for the anime convention crowd. In 2004, people had to be turned away from getting into the convention because the hotel didn't have enough room. In 2005, no one was turned away from attending the convention, but many couldn't get to see the Saturday night costume contest because there wasn't enough room; the hotel's main ballroom was divided between the dealers' room and a main events hall. And those who saw the contest had to wait outdoors in what felt like freezing temperatures, because there was no room in the hotel's halls to hold the crowd. The convention chair had to stroll into that hall and encourage the contest people to speed things up because the chilled crowd was (understandably) getting unhappy. The weather was one of the weekend's big frustrations. The convention had planned to hold some events outdoors in the fashion of Ani-Magic in California, but Nashville in the spring doesn't have the predictable climate of southern California in the fall. In the week before the convention a cold front moved through, and the first day of the convention saw steady rain from a storm that extended southwest into Mississippi. The skies cleared on Saturday, but the temperatures didn't recover. The other frustration was a sign of success: so many people crowded into the convention that the hotel's big parking lot was filled on Friday evening. This writer, who stayed at a cheap motel three miles away, arrived at the hotel at 8:40 a.m. Saturday and was lucky to get one of the few remaining parking spaces. The hotel had to make more spaces by closing an access road and using that for parking, and cars were wedged into odd spaces for the entire day. Again, there had been no such problem at the 2004 edition because there weren't as many people on hand. People in the mid-South are exceptionally hungry for what an anime convention offers. There were large crowds for a martial arts exhibition by a group of Samurai Showdown costumers, for a display of a fan's equisite kimono collection, and for a gathering of Fullmetal Alchemist dub actors. The intense interest in those features showed the strength of the anime convention concept, along with the diificulty of making a show work when the weather is unpredictable and there's not enough room to put everybody indoors. We're led to believe that the 2006 edition of the Tennessee convention will find a larger home. One wonders if eventually they'll have to move into the Opryland Hotel, the world-class convention facility on the east side of town. That place, the home of the Grand Old Opry radio show on Saturday nights, has held conventions as important as the major league baseball winter meetings, and it would be a major show of success if an anime convention grew large enough - and had the financial resources - to be able to use it. The Nashville event had one sign of success: a lot of companies wanted to use it to promote their products. Comcast had a display which included monitors showing the Anime Network and the publishers of the new Konsole Kingz DVD video game magazine had a table in the lobby, promoting their electronic publication and letting people play games on their consoles and monitors. Those groups, along with the Harmony Gold touring promotion of robotech, would not have bothered to show up for a smaller event, and their presence was a sign of the increasing interest in the Tennessee conventions. Now we're rolling into the busy part of the season. The next weekend without an anime convention in the U.S. will be the second weekend of July (and it wouldn't be a surprise if something either will be scheduled for that weekend, or already has been scheduled and we don't know yet). This writer hopes to be either at a convention or a race every weekend until the end of of September; sometimes we'll probably do both. Middle Tennessee Anime Convention Main Page