ONIcon98! Part 4: End Of Days (As told by Catsy and her wonderful imagination@_@)

Neow. The final day of the Glorious ONIcon began early like the previous. All I wanted/needed was a little cat nap to recharge my Energizer and give me just enough juice to make it to the car ride home. There was something "Special" listed on the schedule to occur at 8:00a.m. that day, but none of the con people I had talked to would give me any info as to what it would be. The most I ever got out of one (whom I had only had to mildly threaten with disembowelment) was that I "would be pleasantly surprised." So, being the curious cat that I am, I woke the Rossman up and made him check this "surprising" program addition with me.

  After we stopped off at the front desk (the Rossman just kept complaining about the scratches on his face and demanded some bactine [baby!]) we strolled over to the North Red Brick room for the "Special".... and "Special" it was indeed@_@ It turned out to be a pencil test of the new Miyazaki feature to be released simultaniously in Japan and the States in early 2000!!!! I was totally floored, especially 'cause Miyazaki himself was there to introduce the thing (with translator of course)!!!!! Let's just say that the Rossman was glad I got him up for it after all ^_~
  The animation master told us that it was a work in progress and that many of the scenes still had to be animated in from the rough sketches, but to bear with it. They even subbed it for us too!!
  I want to tell you all about everything that happened in this cool flick... but in order to view it, we had to sign a confidentiality form that said that we would not reveal any of the plot or characters to any media source (Neow. Yup, even this tiny little page counts as "media" apparently). I can tell you that it takes place in the future and has a lot of cool mecha (it's a world where all of nature is artificial) and that it was ten Xs more violent than the few "loppings" in MH. I hope that wasn't too much!

"I like frogs. People don't seem to think that I do, but I really like frogs! My next film will be nothing but frogs. They won't eat eachother or anything, but they will be frogs. I like the color green."

  Needless to say, everybody gave it great scores!... I know because I made them! After the screening, the con people unbolted the doors and we were allowed to go (with huge smiles plastered on our pusses@_@), but I stuck around and asked Hayao a few questions. It turned out that retirement wasn't all he thought it would be-tcha. He was spending so much of his time back at the studio that he decided to just go ahead and direct another film that he had been thinking about since even before Mononoke Hime. He went on to tell me that he is back in the studio for good now! I'm just glad he finally saw the light^_^

  I left (in a bowing position) Miyazaki-sensei and went to look for the Rossman (who wandered off again!). I found him back in the room that was showing the new Gainax show (roughly translated as "His and Her Circumstances"). I wanted to see more of it, so I sat down on his lap- uh, er, with him and watched the ending episodes. Now everybody has been saying that this is Gainax's first ever animation without any sci fi elements at all in it, but let me assure you that by the last episode they do get it into space^_^ It's actually quite believable, and Jung Freud actually makes a guest appearance in the final half hour too! I was floored by the epic scale of it all! Oh yeah, and Pero-Pero rocks!

I've got no clue who this yahoo was/is. It seemed as if he just planted a table right in front of the dealers' room and started signing things. Some people just need a life!

  As we came out of the theater, we ran into the rest of the UGAnime crew. They had already packed up our room and checked us out for fear of getting charged any late fees (they just threw my stuff into my suitcase and loaded it into the Glam Rock Wagon themselves! If they left any of my catnip I would have had their spleens for dinner!). As a group we decided to hit a bunch of the remaining panels together on the finalmente dia de la convencion. Our first priority was Hideaki Anno's "It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad Mad World" Panel.

"You wanna know about Eva?!?! You wanna know about Eva?!?!?! I got your Eva right here, pal!"

  Not much of anything was really revealed here (Well, we already knew that he was an Ego-maniac of the highest Gendo degree). Whenever anybody asked him what the last part of End of Eva was about he would either literally spit upon the questioning party or jump off the stage, run over to the questioning party and kick them in the head while calling them stupid and himself God or both (spit and kick).
  Soon the room grew quiet as nobody had anything else to ask for fear of getting beat up. Finally he broke the silence as he told us of Studio Gainax's next project after Kareshi Kanojo No Jojiou. I couldn't remember the name of it in Japanese, but somebody translated it into English for me. It will be called "You Are Stupid: Watch This Mind F*** And Buy Toys". Granted that's a rough translation but you get the idea.
  It will be about a bunch of cute 14 year old girls in revealing outfits and their old lecherous sensei as they battle some ancient Japanese evil, get naked alot and take over the world. A lot of it will also be in "dream time" (?) and the ending will be released as a five part movie first hitting theaters two weeks after the final episode of the 26 volume series ends on Japanese TV. The bidding war for the US distribution rights has already rocketed over $145 million for the television series alone! Yowzah! I wonder how much per tape we'll have to pay for a single episode? If it's ADVision, ya know that the crappy dub will be $50 and the badly translated sub will be about $105..... can't wait. Then Anno began to spin his head all the way around and a fountain of green stuff came spewing out of his mouth.

  Everybody came out of Anno's panel scratching their heads in confusion, but there was no time for pondering what an ******* Anno was as we had to race over to the Megumi Hayashibara concert!

She's Megu-rific!

  We piled into room and forced our way to the very front of the stage! We were even able to touch her shoes when she came out and started singing to us@_@ They were black suede^_^ (and they fit me perfectly-tcha!). She started singing a bunch of crap from her latest album (who cared?!) and the crowd was pretty quiet. But when she broke out into Cruel Angel's Thesis and Give a Reason the crowd went nutz and started to sing along with her! That was about 2,000 fanboys and gals singing in broken Japanese along with the coolest seiyuu of them all (a memorable experience to say the least^_~).

  The good times wouldn't last though. After the second verse of Fly Me To the Moon some deranged big-haired Megu-fanatic rushed the stage, pushed away the bodyguards and chased Megumi away while yelling "Stop! I'm you're number one fan!! I love you Megu!" It was disturbing to say the least. I tried to save the concert myself by getting into the spotlight and singing the only song I could think of at the time: Ryoh-ohki's "Neow Song" at the end of the 13th Tenchi OAV. Soon everybody left-tcha.

  Oh well. After the concert cleared, the gang headed over to the ADFision panel to heckle the anti-fans in charge of their *ahem* operation. After the usual questions about their outrageous prices and crappy quality tapes were asked, the big cheeseheads told us some incredible breaking news!!! It turned out that Evangelion was so popular and sold so incredibly well that they were able to buy the rights to every single Japanese anime production ever made and as a bonus to their contract they also get US distribution rights to every show, OAV and movie that have even yet to be produced in the land of the rising sun!!!! So get ready for a butt-load of underexceptional dubs filled with incredibly lame in-jokes and references to other shows that were never intended by the original script writers, 'cause here they come!

  After they broke that news, the ADF team was ignored as the panel turned into a heated sub vs. dub debate! On one side was this really freaky guy (I think his name was Stewart, and boy did he look and sound familiar), and on the other side of the dispute was Tish Leduh. Now, guess who was on which side of the argument.... Wrong! Tish was actually defending subs! That retarded Stewart smelly man was saying that "subs suck" and that his "crappy dubs were ten times better than any words that flash by at the bottom of the screen!". He even went so far as to pour lighter fluid on a bilingual Tenchi LD and set fire to it with a Crayon Shin-chan pocket lighter while screaming "SUBS MUST DIE!!!!" It was at that point that Matt Greenspan, Tish and some guy named Ronin (or something) teamed up, beat the crap out of and threw the Stew out of the room amid the loud cheers of the audience. Now that was teamwork! (Tish even ran back out of the room, kicked the guy in the nads and told him that his manga sucked too^_^). If only all anime companies could unite like that, the fandom would be unstoppable!

  Wow! My opinion on everybody changed pretty quickly! I always loved Tish's manga adaptions, but now I had a newfound respect for her as a person. I also felt like something could grow between Greenspan and myself..... AS LONG AS HE DOESN"T FARGE UP THE TRANSLATIONS TO NADIA AND NADESICO IN ANY WAY, SHAPE OR FORM (and keep all of the puns in both series in the subbed releases with help in understanding them from a different colored font [i.e. do NOT make up your own gay little English puns in the sub])!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Puh-leeeeez!

  Neow. What a panel! After it was over, everybody simultaneously looked at their watches and realized that it was "Food Time". The nice thing was that this time we didn't have that far to go. All of us had signed up for the "Meet the Guests Closing Brunch" when we first bought memberships on Friday, which was just about to take place. The tables were huge and we got to pick which guest that we wanted to sit with (the Rossman and I got next to Mikimoto). The menu was huge too (Italian, Chinese, German, Mexican, Korean, French or Japanese!!), and they had a Mariachi band (Los Testiculares!) and a German Polka band playing on opposite sides of the hall^_^ It was a good time to say the least!

Mikimoto-san ordered off of the Korean menu.

  We ate till we were full and then we ate some more (Hey, it was free!). I didn't think that I would ever eat again.... Well, at least not until we stopped at our first gas station on the ride home (I needed to get some Slim Jims). Before we left, I shook Miki's hand and thanked him for his glorious contributions to the anime community over the past few years and then I tried to knock him unconscious and wrap him up in the table cloth to take him back home, but apparently they have very large men there who make sure that ya don't. I was disappointed-tcha.
  As we were walking out the door, the Rossman and I ran into one of the anime fan community's biggest contributors! I'm talking about none other than Nadel Scott Neilman (sp?). He was cool^_^ Even though we knew that we had to get a move on, we stood there and listened to his fun stories for a while..... until IT happened. By "it", I'm referring to Nadel letting it slip that he has shrines set up to Sandy Frank and Carl Macek in his house! I mean, he even had pictures of the shrines with him! It was freaky- kinda like that chick who was obsessed with David Letterman... only this was a whoooooole lot more disturbing. We both smiled nervously and backed away as fast as we could while he just stood there and admired his own photographic talent while audibly sighing a lot..... If only Dr. Katz was real.

  It was now getting pretty late in the day and I knew that we had to start getting ready to vacate the premises. It was a sad moment when we realised that this glorious Con of the Century had to end. And it had to end sooner for us since we couldn't even stay for the Closing Ceremonies (we had to get back to Athens in time for people to make it to their jobs Monday morning... the bastards!)... P.C.D. was weighing heavily upon us.
  As we each counted on the others to force our way away from the hotel and to the paylot where we had parked, we realized that the MegaPlayboy was not among our ranks. Chujo, the Rossman and I *sighed* as we collected our strength and dove back into the pure bliss of ONIcon, hoping that we would be able to return to the let-down of reality ourselves.

-"Yo, Playboy. We's gots ta go. Don' make me do this the hard way."
-"I think he's serious, MPB. Just give in to the P.C.D. and come with us. It'll be okay."

  We eventually found him in what remained of the "All Night Dance Party" from Saturday night. He was jumping up and down among twenty other people who were still on their feet trying their hardest to avoid the bodies that covered the floor. It was a depressing sight. I thought that the Playboy could deal with the imminent arrival of real time with some grace.
  Neow. It took a little convincing, but we finally made the MPB see the foo' he was making of himself (all we really had to do was just point to some otaku-schlong who was jumping up and down in the corner just like the MPB was), and he beat us back to the Glam Rocker by a good thirty seconds^_^
  The sublime weekend was almost over. Now only a car trip home would ease us of our albatrosses around our necks and welcome us back to the mundane life of UGA with (hopefully) minimal casualties.... or something. Other than the sound of German Rock pulsating from the speakers there was silence. I tried to start up a conversation about how fun the whole weekend was and how much cool stuff I sto- uh, bought but the Chief just pulled out his penguin to shut me up.

Get your mind outta the gutter! Of course this is the kinda penguin I meant! Baka!

  Now, I know that Lord Pen^2 is not related to that evil Bud Ice Penguie, but I still think that he's got connections to him, so I stayed quiet and away from the Chief. He apparently just wanted to mellow out in his Depression. The Rossman and I played blackjack with his new set of Urusei Yatsura playing cards.

A GHiPs officer (Georgia Highway Patrol)

  Things were quiet for a while. We had the usual run-in with the cops and all that stuff, and soon we found ourselves at the border of Athens. Many hours had passed, but it seemed like mere moments. At least P.C.D. is good for something, neh?
  As we pulled up to the Chief's apartment something freaky-freaky happened..... I won't go into it here to save your sanity. But here's a pic @_@

Whooooooooaaaaa! The Rossman and the Chief have gone INSANE!

  We had made it home safe and sound... Just not sane. As we began to unpack the Glam Rocker, Mulder and the chicks pulled up. And just before everybody went their seperate ways, we got in one last picture of the group to remember ourselves as we once were until we met again at the club meeting the following day.

What a long strange trip it's been. UGAnime was back on the Jazz!

  

  

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  Anyhow, after you're done with this page you can check out the UGAnime DEAD Ultimate Homepage, the Oni-chan Does L.A. and AX Page, the Catsy and Oni-chan's Wild Ride To, At and From Animazement 98 Page or the Fushigi Shin Seiki Expo 98: Catsy and Oni-chan Go To WAR!