Convention Schedule Previous Reports Personality of the Week About this Site Search this Site Racing and More E-Mail the Author

Anime Central - Author's Notes - 2006 Yes, it took nearly a week to post the author's notes, written in the exotic location of a Starbucks. It's been a busy time at home, so busy that we haven't had a chance to get out to the Speedway for 500 practice yet (we'll try to go there for pole day, weather permitting). One week before Anime Central, this site's author sat in O'Hare airport, waiting for a flight that had been delayed by bad weather. The airport terminal is barely a mile from the Hyatt hotel and Rosemont convention center that houses the annual Illinois event. At Anime Central on Saturday morning, when we reached the big foyer outside the convention hotel's ballrooms, we looked around and saw that few people were there. We were too lazy to check it out, but we'll assume that most of the people either were still wiped out from the previous night's parties, or were across the street in the convention center at the dealer's room. We didn't hang around on Sunday afternoon to learn attendance, although one friend said it seemed as if there were fewer people around in 2006 than in 2005. The convention was one week earlier in May this time. The dealer's room moved upstairs this year, from the convention center's ground floor to the second floor. The organizers arranged everything roughly in a racetrack shape and tried to set up a clockwise traffic pattern, which forced all of the foot traffic to walk through the artists' alley. That alley location was one of the improvements; the artists finally got to operate in a high-traffic area and no one ordered them to leave, as happened a few years ago when the alley was in the hotel. There was plenty of room for the alley and most of it went unused; apparently word didn't get out about the new layout and fans didn't take advantage of the deal. Part of the dealers' room layout included an autograph area, and one of our U.S. industry friends was impressed by the number of people in a Sunday afternoon autograph line who were waiting for dub actors Christopher Patton and Greg Ayres, among others. That industry friend saw that line as an endorsement of the popularity of dubs, at which time we noted that dubbed anime has been more popular than dubs for some time. Others in the industry who date back to the era of VHS home video once said that dubbed tapes outsold subbed tapes, and there's talk that the DVD format probably saved dubs from retailers who didn't want to stock both kinds of videos and were likely to sell only dubbed tapes. Certainly the number of U.S. guests outnumbered Japanese guests at Anime Central, and the most popular appearance, as always, probably was Fred Gallagher, one of the convention's mainstays since the event began in 1998. One of the intriguing surprises at the convention was TsuShiMaMeRe, the female Japanese rock trio. This group kind of snuck up on people, so to speak, since they're a fairly new group that hasn't gotten the buzz among American fans as groups such as the veterans Shonen Knife. On the convention's Sunday, TsuShiMaMeRe had a good-sized crowd around their dealers' room booth, showing that they had managed to attract new fans. One of the convention's oddities came during the wait for the Saturday night costume contest. Anime Central had to share the hotel with other groups, including a prom and a wedding, and when an image of the prom group was shown on a big video screen, the audience booed. We haven't figured that out yet. The real bizarre deal of the weekend happened on the convention's final day. A group of costumers had gathered at the base of the abstract sculpture that is the hotel lobby's landmark, and they were posing for pictures when some of Anime Central's "IRT" security types walked up and said that everyone would have to leave; the hotel lobby needed to be kept clear because there might be a medical emergency. Not that there "was" a medical emergency, that there "might be" an emergency. That warning also carried the inference that something was wrong at the convention or was about to go wrong, so we wandered around the hotel and the convention, looking for a medical emergency. There was none. We returned to the hotel lobby, expecting to find it vacant, but finding there were more people on hand than ever before. It was a long line of people trying to check out before the noon deadline, a line that came within a few feet of reaching the hotel entrance. There were a couple of people wandering around, yelling orders at those in line, with one person saying if anyone didn't belong in the line, they should leave. No one moved (and apparently no one made an effort to speed up the line), and there was no more talk of a medical emergency. Eventually, a Rosemont, Ill. police officer walked into the lobby. Aha, we thought, here's someone with law enforcement authority who will take firm control of the situation and clear the lobby to make room in case there's a medical emergency. Instead, the officer walked though, glanced at the crowd, and kept going - no radioed calls for extra officers to control the crowd, no shouted order from the police for people to leave. That officer was no more worried than the other Rosemont officer who spotted a group of costumers outside the hotel, immediately stopped his car and got out - with a camera in hand to take pictures of costumers. So, what does it mean when the area's police are more comfortable with an anime convention crowd that the so-called "security" volunteers? Anime Central Main Page