For Steve's 29th birthday, we went to the Anime Expo at the LA Convention Center. It was... interesting.
We arrived a little after lunch and was amazed at the complexity of some peoples' outfits. Steve made a game out of guessing what everyone was dressed as. He played by himself.
I think the high point of the day was when he saw Optimus Prime posing with two Power Rangers. He was pretty darn excited.
I was pretty surprised a the whole experience, I was expecting something completely different. Just like an auto show has booth after booth of "look but don't touch", I thought that this was going to be similar where each exhibit would represent an anime/cartoon series and show scenes from upcoming episodes, feature artists or whatnot. Instead, it was like a huge anime swap meet. It was like Tokyo x 50, or even Sawtelle x 100.
We ran into a booth that had toys from the 80's, it was awesome! Most of them were used and selling at garage sale prices, but it was fun to see collections of my childhood. For example, there was a shelf full of My Little Ponies.
Some of them were in pretty bad shape. They did remind me of my own from 1987 with a scratch and sniff butt. At least I think I was seven, maybe I was a little older.
They also had a ton of Care Bears, from all different generations. You can tell which ones were the oldest -- they were the scariest looking. In addition to these childhood memories, I also saw Glowworms, Popples and little Playskool people. It's ironic to think that kids back then were so happy to watch these simple cartoons and yet this was in the midst of a huge expo of complicated anime cartoons which kids today are immersed in.
After walking around the main convention floor about 3 times looking for stuff to buy, we finally decided to take off, checking out some of the video/dance rooms on the way out. We ran into the Karaoke contest room. When we came in, they were in the middle of a transition and the judges were talking to the last contestant. Then they called up the next girl (mousy white chick, brunette) who got on the stage and started clapping/bouncing around to her intro music. Then she went on to bust out some anime/Japanese song, complete with hand movements and yelling parts! We were... less than impressed at her singing ability but completely blown by her... Japanese-ness? It was HILARIOUS. I mean, they were all so into it and they actually had 5 judges in the front judging everyone.
After a few minutes of off-tune karaoke, we headed towards the arcade. There were a lot of cool games, makes me wonder if some of these arcade games pre-date guitar hero and rock band. Some guy approached us and asked us to join the "Para Para Dancing" session later on, and to check out the Para Para game to see what it was about.
Our jaws dropped to the floor. This game was so complex and the girls (and guy) coming up to play were so
good at it. It's basically a dancing game where you follow the hand movements, and there is a ring of sensors above you to sense your accuracy. The hand movements would put any cheerleader to shame as they comprised of poses as well as complex twisting movements and were really
fast. There were also a bunch of white girls (and one guy) that memorized the routines pretty well... made me wonder where they learned it? Is this a pretty common arcade game? Did they youtube the song earlier and memorize it before the Anime Expo? Mind-boggling.
On our way out we hit up the Artists' Alley which were rows and rows of amateur artists selling their work. It was pretty awesome to see how much talent there is among "regular" people. There were a lot of cool drawings for sales and commissions were only $2-$3 whereas they were about $100 with a real artist. There were also cutesie other things like keychains and homemade things. My favorite was the Fuzz Academy (www.fuzzacademy.com), I kind of regret not buying a couple of prints to put up at work. Their polar bear (dry clean only) and gummi bear prints were super cute:
