The Vile One's Dungeon: San Diego Comic Con 2008 - Preview Night and Day 1

Posted by Jeffrey Harris on 07.27.2008

The Vile One will wreck Con this year. And by "wreck", he means pwn@g3!!!

Alright guys, this year's San Diego Comic Con is already in full swing. So in hopes to give you some info., in case you haven't already retrieved it elsewhere, here's the lowdown on what is going on at the biggest nerd event of the year. Not just geek Christmas, but Nerdvana, Nerdotopia, and Nerdopolis. This is true. This is real. This . . . is . . . SAN DIEGO COMIC CON INTERNATIONAL 2008.


Photo by Sheldon Lee

This year's SDCC reached max capacity before it even began. This year will only see pre-registered attendees, in the range of 125,000. One could say that Con is reaching its capacity in San Diego. There's been talk of moving the event to Los Angeles or Las Vegas when the current agreement with the San Diego Convention Center ends in 2012.

PREVIEW NIGHT

Preview night at the convention hall this year was the most jam-packed its ever been. Usually preview night is a good way to check out the booths and the exhibition hall with less people around. As well as getting some fancy giveaways and picking up some exclusive con merchandise. Not so this year as preview night seemed to resemble more of a crowded Saturday at the convention. It was unbelievable. For folks that aren't into the live crowds, this scene probably isn't for you.

So Preview Night was a chance for fans who were registered for all four days of SDCC to check out the exhibition hall, the dealers, and all the entertainment companies set up with their ultra sleek booths. There's also chance to get special giveaways like shirts, key-chains, and other accessories like huge SDCC bags from certain companies that you would be lucky to get if you weren't trampled to get. The big ones this year were for Watchmen and the new animated Wonder Woman movie at the WB booth. Sci-Fi Channel's booth was giving away "The Big Frakkin Bag" in honor of BSG. WB also had the huge Archie vehicle from the Watchmen movie displayed over at their booth.


Exterior shot of Dan Dreiberg/Nite-Owl II's Archie vehicle


Photo by Sheldon Lee.


Photo by Sheldon Lee.


Photo by Sheldon Lee.

What I noticed at Preview Night and SDCC 08 in general is that this event is just getting too big. No matter how many rigid staff members are, they cannot control and organize this event. Its gone way beyond capacity. But CCI just wants it to get bigger and bigger. I'm not quite sure how long it can last this way. Still there was a lot of cool stuff going on in the exhibition hall.



Mattel set up their booth like Castle Grayskull. The big exclusive item this year was the new Masters of The Universe: Classics King Grayskull action figure, sculpted by the legendary 4 Horsemen. Also the DC Universe Con exclusive for Lobo, JLU's Giganta two-pack, and the Volume 3 exclusive cover DVD set for the He-Man and The Masters of the Univers animated series.

By far one of the coolest and most popular give-away items this year had to be at the Mattel booth. By doing a Mattel Collector's.com survey, fans could obtain an inflatable He-man Grayskull Sword of Power.


You could say that The Vile One has the Power.

Later on I did manage to snatch up a King Grayskull figure. I decided to buy two. One to open, and one to keep boxed up and to get autographed. What sucks is that scalpers and vendors were buying up as many as possible in cases, even though Mattel apparently set a limit of three per customer. While waiting in line for certain events I even saw one vendor selling cases of the King Grayskull figure for a marked up price of $40 a piece, $10 more than the price for the Mattel booth. The booth's line got so out of control that Mattel began assigning another booth in the autograph area to designate specific times to wait in line. Hasbro's booth was even crazier for it, so I gave up all hope of buying merchandise from their line. Hey even press don't get many special privileges at Con.




The Vile One is sandwiched by the sinister Evil-Lyn and Teela after a job well bought of King Grayskull.

Over at the Star Wars booth, the big thing this year was the hype for The Clone Wars animated series. The series will actually premiering in theatres this upcoming August before debuting on Cartoon Network.



Over at the Hasbro booth was tons of stuff for their biggest brands: Transformers, GI JOE, and the Marvel Universe. Besides new 25th Anniversary figs, fans were given a glimpse of designs for the new GI JOE animation, GI JOE: RESOLUTE. The first ever PG-13 level GI JOE animation. The 5 minute short series which all together will run about 60 minutes is being written by Warren Ellis and was later previewed at the Con. The new animation will surely prime fans for the big movie, GI JOE: THE RISE OF COBRA. Speaking of which, Hasbro had one of the replica prop vehicles from the movie on hand. A big underground drill vehicle that might remind fans of a similar one from the classic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle series. Hasbro also had some life-size movie versions of Iron Man and Hulk over at their booth as well. One of their cool giveaways was a Nick Fury eye-patch.


Iron Man and the Hulk are held captive at SDCC 08.



The big thing over at the Lionsgate booth this year was for the new movie, The Spirit, directed by Frank Miller. Booth babes were dressed up as corresponding bombshell femme-fatale characters from the film. Also some of the DC Direct toys for the movie were shown off. The booth also had a fake snow machine spouting fake snow flakes.


The Lionsgate booth.

Not sure how I totally feel about the movie now. The trailers just look really weird. Members of the Lionsgate staff don't seem to know if this movie is PG-13 or R-rated. The latest trailer with The Dark Knight was really pushing the ladies and sexuality hard. But it looks more like a Sin City sequel than anything else. Frank Miller sort of comes off like a one-trick pony with this. His best work in comics is definitely behind him, and he's failed to do something of true relevance and quality in years.


The Spirit movie action figures to be released by DC Direct.

Marvel's booth set up was very similar to last year. This year they had a full size Iron Monger armor from the awesome Iron Man movie set up which fans could take pictures of.


Iron Monger got his ass beat by Iron Man and now he's just a stupid prop at SDCC.

DAY 1

Tiny Toons/Freakazoid Freak-A-Panel


From L to R: Stacey Stoner, Rich Arons, Andrea Romano, John McCann, and Paul Dini at the Freakazoid/Tiny Toons panel. Bruce Timm was in attendance and is not pictured here.

What a great way to start off the convention. This was a panel featuring the cast and crew of the hits 1990's series, Tiny Toons as well as Freakazoid. Season 1 of both shows are due out July 29th. Tiny Toons was actually a show where animation legends Bruce Timm and Paul Dini got their starts before moving on into creating the DC Animated Universe. Writer and voice actor, Paull Rugg moderated the panel in which the extras for the DVD box sets were also previewed. The absolute best though was Paul Rugg's story of getting cast as Freakazoid as well as a DVD extra clip which incorporates the hilarious RELAX-O-VISION bit from the series. Later in the day, I got the chance to interview many of these wonderful people which I will have up soon.


Paul Rugg, the voice of Freakazoid and moderator of the panel.

20th Century Fox

Over in the giant Hall H auditorium that seats a max capacity of about 6,500, 20th Century Fox previewed several of their big upcoming releases. This included the new sci-fi remake, The Day The Earth Stood Still and Max Payne. To be honest, the preview for The Day The Earth Stood Still looked massively underwhelming. Some decent special FX, but the trailer had a kind of bad WAR OF THE WORLDS and INVASION vibe. And Keanu is the lead, joy. There was also Max Payne, which had a panel featuring the star, Mark Wahlberg (Max Payne), Mila Kunis (Mona Sax), Ludacris, and the director John Moore. This one featured a clip with what looked like the nasty scene in which Max Payne's family is murdered and he's beaten. Besides this clip, a much longer reel was featured with the song, "Whole Lotta Love." The reel featured lots of the shoot 'em up and action sequences, as well as some naked back action from Mila Kunis. Action sequences and slow mo looks nice, to which Moore said they didn't want to use The Matrix set-up and wirework, so instead they just used a new camera called the "Phantom" system that they used to slow the image down to give it the bullet-time feel for the game. And it does look like the games, and Wahlberg looks like Max Payne. There was another clip shown where Payne delivers some vigiliante cop justice to some thugs in a subway bathroom. It does look like the movie won't have the cool noir voice-over and graphic novel feel incorporated into the games. There were no QnA's with the audience for the last two movie previews, and probably for a particular reason. That being . . .

. . .

. . .

X-MEN ORIGINS: WOLVERINE


Hugh Jackman addresses a sold out room of fans to introduce the Wolverine movie reel that was leaked online in minutes.

In the big surprise of the day, Hugh Jackman arrived to a screaming harem of women in order to preview the new Wolverine movie due out 5/1/09. Wolverine's creator, Len Wein, was in the audience to which he gave him major props and went out to personally shake his hand. Jackman thanked the fans for making comic book movies viable and the current rage. So he did a good job of sucking up. He also said that Wolverine had just finished principal production, and he brought a bunch of footage to show that he put together that's still a little rough. So here's what we have:

-We see Wolverine and a younger Sabretooth or Creed (now played by Liev Schreiber instead of Tyler Mane). It looks like they were insubordinate soldiers in the military, and they were court martialed in a firing range, but due to their healing factors they could not be killed. Wolverine when asked about his failed execution says, "It tickled".

-A younger Stryker brings in Sabes and Wolverine into the fold, and creates a team consisting of Wolverine, Sabes, and what looked like Deadpool, Blob, and even Gambit. So there were quite a few action shots of Gambit in the preview which the fangirls in the crowd were very excited about.

-We see Wolverine going through the adamantium bonding process, as well as the following berserker rage and escape, and a growing rift between himself and the sadistic Sabretooth. We also get a brief flash of the young James Howlett popping his bone claws for the first time.

-The trailer seemed to have quite a few slow motion action shots that rotate around like in the Matrix. One in particular between Wolverine and Sabretooth. There's also what appears to be a big action set piece in which Wolverine on his motorcyle has a big fight with an armored car and chopper, which looked pretty sick.

-There's also some Wolverine/Silver Fox action. And Wolverine going after Sabretooth. Sabretooth asks Wolverine something to the effect of what are you going to do, since you can't kill me. Wolverine says, "I'm going to cut your head off and go from there," or something like that.

Well the movie looks good. Some intense, cool looking action and a ton of Marvel mainstay characters. This is an origin movie for Wolverine as well a prequel to the X-men films. However, I hope the movie isn't bogged down by having so many characters, and it can't get rushed like X-men 3 if this is the case. The other problem is, I honestly miss Brian Cox as Stryker and Tyler Mane as Sabretooth. Just feels like they should've kept those actors. Also . . . I would kind of rather see another X-men movie, with Singer back in the fold. But Wolverine still looks like it will be pretty cool, and hopefully better than X3.

Hulk VS. Wolverine


Wolverine eagerly awaits his brawl with The Incredible Hulk.

This is part of the new Hulk VS. animated DVD release due out in January of next year. It will be a two story set with both Hulk VS. Wolverine and Hulk VS. Thor on one disc. The 33 minute Hulk VS. Wolverine portion was previewed in Hall H at Con. Co-writers Craig Kyle and Chris Yost were both in attendance as well as director, Frank Paur, and the voice of the Hulk, Fred Tatasciore. Wolverine's voice actor, Steven Blum unfortunately couldn't make it due to some bad traffic. Hulk VS. Wolverine was a short little story in which Wolverine is sent off to hunt the Hulk by Department H. After a brutal battle, Hulk and Wolverine are captured by Weapon X including Deadpool (Nolan North), Sabretooth, and Lady Deathstrike. Hey an animated version of Deadpool, and it was totally badass. Deadpool definitely steals the show in this movie. His voice actor, Nolan North, will also be playing Cyclops in Wolverine and The X-men which debuts on the BBC in August, and the US next year on Nicktoons. The character designs in this movie were done by Jeff Matsuda (Jackie Chan Adventures, Gatchaman, Kaboom, and the Wolverine comics). Matsuda nicely reigns in some of his more crazier looking design work in this movie. The main animation production was done by the legendary Studio Madhouse.


From L to R: Frank Paur (director), Fred Tatasciore (Voice of The Hulk), and Chris Yost (co-writer).


Craig Kyle (co-writer).

The Wolverine/Hulk fight is brutal and nasty. And we actually get to see Wolverine do something with his claws besides cutting through walls and using them to open soda pop cans and water bottles. He uses them not just on the Hulk but even . . . well I shouldn't say. While the story, which focuses more on Wolverine and his past induction into Weapon X, is well done it feels like this could've been a direct to DVD feature all its own instead of a close to half hour segment. The animation and action are really good. The voice acting, especially Blum as Wolverine is great. So hopefully we will get to see releases like this more often from Marvel Studios/Lionsgate.



It's cool to see finally see Hulk and Wolverine have a violent, bloody battle in animation. The appearance of Deadpool was a great surprise that fans did not expect and gave a big reaction to whenever he was onscreen. The drawback is that this really could've been about another half hour or 40 minutes longer, but its sharing a disc with Hulk vs. Thor which is about 43 minutes, so together they are both the next animated feature to be released on DVD. More interviews with the cast and crew of this movie to come later.