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Oni-Con - Author's Notes - 2006 Notes finished in a motel room near Hobby Airport: On the cable TV system where the author lives, one click of the remote away from the UCLA-Notre Dame football game, there was the opening sequence of Kiki's Delivery Service, aired on the same station that also carried the World Series' opening game a few hours later. How things have changed. In the 20th century before the age of cable and the internet, the Series was the undisputed king of sports, a television event that was unchallenged for importance. Now in the 21st century, one of the Series' lead-ins is a Hayao Miyazaki movie. And during a Series telecast, we spotted one of the first ads for the Justice League Heroes video game. We mentioned that video game in July when we met up with Crispin Freeman, the actor best known for his anime dub voices, who will voice Superman in the game. Freeman is going to play Arucard in the Hellsing Ultimate dub, and we were in the right place at the right time to ask dub director Talisen Jaffe about that project. The author of this site has to put up with the demands of the real world, which gave him only Sunday to make a fast dash to Houston for Oni-Con. We had to work on Friday and Saturday again. We wanted to spend Saturday night at the costume contest in Texas, but instead sat behind a desk, sneaking glances at... the Series on TV, watching Albert Pujols destroy Justin Verlander with an opposite-field home run off the end of the bat. Rather than complain about the limited time at the convention, we decided to be thankful for the collection of frequent flyer miles that cut the potential air fare by two-thirds, put together a heavy load of camera equipment and a light load of clothes, and headed to the airport. Besides, making the late trip kept this writer away from the deluges of rain that floded some parts of Texas. The Houston area got nearly a foot of rain at the start of the Oni-Con weekend. Things had dried out for the convention weekend, with only some spots of standing water seen in rural fields on the airliner's approach to Hobby Airport. The Texas trip gave this writer five consecutive years in which he's attended at least 20 fandom conventions. We still have a few more we're hoping to get to in 2006, starting with next week's SugoiCon in Kentucky. For the Cincinnati-area event, we plan to be on hand for all three days. Then one week later, we expect to make a Sunday-only trip to Youmacon in Michigan. The convergence of having Youmacon and NekoCon on the same weekend, along with our limited time for convention trips, means we'll miss NekoCon for the first time since the Virginia event began in 1998, the year when the big increase began in the number of anime conventions. The Reactor convention, held in a northern Chicago suburb, was on the same weekend as Oni-Con. We'd been to every Reactor since it began, but chose to head south this time for a change of pace. October is a busy anime convention month with at least 13 events; a decade ago, you'd barely have 13 conventions in six months. But maybe our brain is fried by too much anime. In the wake of the insurance company TV ad that paid homage to Katamari Damacy, we spotted a Dexatrim ad featuring a red tablet in a clear bottle that, to our eyes, looked just like a Shizuma drive from Giant Robo. On the trip to Houston, this site's author faced one of the largest temptations of his convention coverage career. The Oni-Con weekend also was the weekend of the big Wings Over Houston air show at Ellington Field. The taxi fare from Hobby Airport to the air show would have cost about the same as a trip downtown to the Brown Convention Center, and would have given this writer another chance to see the Thunderbirds, the Air Force team we had seen a couple of months earlier. We chose to head to the convention, still appreciating the irony that the air show featured a re-enactment of the attack on Pearl Harbor on the same weekend as an anime convention. It's also interesting to note that the air show was run by the Commemorative Air Force, the group once known as the Confederate Air Force until the name got too touchy with the rest of the world. The group's Minnesota wing has a P-51 Mustang dedicated to the Tuskegee Airmen, by the way. Oni-Con Main Page