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Star Wars Celebration Author's Notes 2005 This non-anime convention draws attention from this site because it's big, very close to home and allows a good look at a different fandom subculture. And, frankly, it may have gotten too big. Long lines left some fans out in the rain, and anyone who wanted to attend any of the convention events, such as panel discussions with the actors, faced long waits. If you were at Otakon in 2004, do you remember the long line for the L'arc-en-ciel concert? Imagine what it would have been like had rain fallen on those fans, and you get an idea of what Friday morning was like for some of the people who tried to attend Star Wars Celebration III. For other events, the Indiana Convention Center has swallowed thousands of fans and has had room for more...but this year, there were around twice as many fans as had attended the previous celebration, three years earlier. That, along with a conflict with another event, led to the Friday afternoon display of signs announcing there would be no more sales of passes for the convention's Saturday. Yes, Celebration III ran out of room, and that takes some explaining. We heard attendance figures ranging from 40,000 to 52,000 for the celebration. Those numbers were large enough to get the attention of the Indianapolis Fire Department, who had a firefighter at the convention center serving as a fire marshal on Saturday. That man had the power to alter the operation of the event if he felt things were dangerously crowded. Fortunately, while there were points that Saturday foot traffic slowed to a crawl, there was no reason to take drastic action or blatantly order fans around. Also: the RCA Dome, used by the Indianapolis Colts, is a large part of the Indiana Convention Center. The Saturday of Celebration III also was the opening day of the NFL draft, and the Colts used the Dome for a fan fair. That meant football fans who headed to the convention center on Saturday found thousands of Star Wars fans already were there, waiting to see George Lucas on Saturday morning. People already were lining up in the Friday afternoon rain for Lucas' three Saturday shows. There were far more people in those lines than the few hundred that trickled into the dome for the sparsely-attended football show. One of the major weekend disappointments for hard-core fans was over the Celebration III Store, a second dealers' room offering merchandise from "Revenge of the Sith." The Thursday line to enter the store extended most of the indoor length of the convention center. On Friday and Saturday, the demand was so great that the store was closed by early afternoon, frustrating fans who had traveled to Indianapolis mostly to get Episode 3 collectibles. Uniformed security people kept a quiet but close watch on the crowd. We were told that there was a problem with people sneaking past door controls and avoiding the $40-per day admission price ($110 at the door for all four days; we paid $95 in advance). Because of the crowds to get into the scheduled events, this writer concentrated on what most visitors to this site want to see, pictures of people in costume. We felt that costuming in 2005 was better than in 2002 for this event, maybe because another episode of Star Wars gave fans more costuming options. There was a big demand for those costumers, partially because people love the characters, and partially because taking pictures was one of the few things you could do on impulse and without standing in line. The reason for the huge crowd was because of the history of Star Wars and its fandom, and also because the celebration was the only major Star Wars convention in the U.S. Unlike anime fandom, which offer 70-80 conventions a year to its fans, there are no organized Star Wars conventions outside the irregularly scheduled celebrations - and no one can be sure if there will be another convention of this kind, ever. We actually met some people we recognized from anime conventions - a bunch of guys from Canada, Kellila from Tennessee, another Tennessee fan, clad as a bounty hunter, who had worn a Metal Gear Solid uniform at the Middle Tennessee Anime Convention, a group of professional costumers who said this site was great reference for their business, a California fan who wore the same Indiana Jones outfit to the celebration that he had worn to Ani-Magic six months earlier. And there was Vic Mignogna, who dressed as a Star Wars Jedi rather than Edward Elric from Fullmetal Alchemist, entertaining camera-toting fans in the halls by posing with other Jedi costumers he had never met before. As with Mignogna, the best Star Wars costumers of the weekend found they could barely move because of the number of requests for pictures. All of that showed the demand for anything Star Wars, something that predates American anime fandom by nearly a decade. A glance at Richard's Animated Divots, the informative web site maintained by Richard Llewellyn, shows how far tastes in animation have progressed since 1977, the year of the first Star Wars feature film. The hot animated movies of that year were Wizards from Ralph Bakshi and The Rescuers from Disney. Hanna-Barbera was cranking out formulaic Saturday morning stuff like Dynomutt, Jabberjaw, The Three Robonic Stooges and Captain Caveman. Batman and Tarzan were being recycled by Filmation into Saturday morning shows, and even Muhammad Ali had an animated series. In Japan, the Sunrise animation studio was barely a year old. The hot Japanese series were Danguard Ace and Space Cruiser Yamato, and most of the current generation of anime fans had not yet been born. Now, the youngest of the first generation of Star Wars fans are nearly 40 years old. It showed in the Indianapolis crowd, which was noticeably a decade or two older than anime convention fans, but a larger crowd as well. The largest anime conventions of 2004, Anime Expo and Otakon, each attracted more than 20,000 fans. The 2005 celebration had more than 20,000 people register in advance. As many people went to the celebration than had attended the NCAA division one women's basketball championships at the same convention center, three weeks earlier. The Star Wars event rivaled the attendance of the largest fandom shows in the U.S., Dragon*Con and Comic-Con International, all events that seem to stand above the size of each show's national fandom. As with sci-fi fandom in general, there's a question of whether Star Wars fandom is going to continue to another generation with the strength and enthusiasm of anime fandom, which has generated 60 new conventions in seven years. If any film series had a chance to renew sci-fi fandom, it was The Matrix trilogy, but those films had an odd effect. Rather than generate Matrix fans, the films generated more interest for the Asian films and concepts that were used in the trilogy. Instead of causing more demand for Matrix stories, the Animatrix DVD was one of the best recruiting tools ever for anime fandom. We're planning to get back to anime convention life on the weekend after the Star Wars show. We have a plane ticket and hotel reservation for the Anime Boston convention, at which we have an artists' alley reservation. If the photo equipment (especially the printer) withstands baggage banging, we'll be up and working from Friday morning through the end of the show, taking cosplay pictures and selling prints for those who are interested. After a weekend off, we're expecting to head to Anime Central in Illinois. Yes, we know that the Star Wars weekend also was the time for the inaugural Kawaii Kon in Hawaii, and this site might have been expected to head west because we've endorsed the idea of a Hawaii anime convention. However, the Indianapolis event was several thousand miles closer and nearly as many dollars less expensive to attend. Star Wars Celebration Main Page