Nerd Convention 2006

This weekend, we were in San Diego for our third year of Comic-Con. We saw a couple pretty cool presentations.

First, we caught the tail end of the Superman 2 Director's Cut presentation. I guess the director of the first Superman started filming the second one, and then for whatever reason they ended up changing out directors in the middle of it. So now they're releasing a DVD of the movie w/ the first director's unused footage. They showed a few clips of it, and it looked pretty cool. It was kinda weird seeing Margot Kidder & Christopher Reeves in NEW material. Kinda like how Tupac keeps releasing albums, even though he's dead. WEIRD!

Then we saw the Battlestar Galactica panel, with Lucy Lawless, Edward James Olmos, a couple of other people from the cast, and the creators of the show. They gave some hints about what was going to happen in season 3. We're still on season 1, so that kinda sucked for us. But it whet our appetites for the rest of the series.

Then we caught the tail end of some new Star Wars video game Q & A with George Lucas' press agent. Talk about some angry nerds!

By far the largest and funniest presentation was for Snakes on a Plane, w/ Samuel L. Jackson. Samuel L. Jackson was funny as hell on the panel. One kid asked if he would ever consider working with up-and-coming directors, and he said sure, if they could write the right check, he'd work with anyone. Or if they had a fine sister or a fine momma. Then he interrogated the kid about whether his momma or his sister were fine. It was hilarious. Then he kept calling the snakes motherf*ckers, which was equally hilarious.

One cool tidbit they revealed was that Samuel L. Jackson had it written in his contract that he would get no closer than 20 feet to any real snakes, so you're going to see a lot of CGI in this movie. Apparently, the previews for this movie intentionally don't show very much of the film, and the makers are not having critics screen the film before its release. They say it's cuz they don't want to give too much away (yeah right), but then they went ahead and showed us about 10 minutes of footage from the movie. Yeah, the movie looks horrible. Don't buy into the marketing.

We also got to see a preview for the new Tenacious D movie, Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny, which looks a hell of a lot better than Snakes on a Plane. I think it's a rock musical, at least the entire preview was in that format. Anyway, yeah, it looks mad funny. I'm definitely seeing it.

Another cool presentation we saw was w/ Robert Smigel, who does the Saturday TV Funhouse cartoons on Saturday Night Live and who also does the voice of Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog. He showed some of the cartoons that were too hot for TV. A couple were about Michael Jackson molesting little boys. He also ran around as Triumph, which was kinda cool. I wish I would have gotten a picture, but I didn't. Oh well...

Here are some pics we took w/ the digital camera and some David took w/ his phone. We planned on going for a second day to see some panels about Lost and Veronica Mars, but online registration was down and we didn't want to battle the registration lines, so we just went to the beach instead. And Ikea. Don't be jealous. :-)