No Sleep 'Til Monday
or
"It's eight hours to breakfast, we've got half a box of videos, it's dark, and I'm wearing a very loud shirt. Hit it..."
Rather than run out a con-report that probably repeats the same stuff already adequately covered by someone else (hi, Simon!), thought I'd concentrate on the night-shift, since I became deeply familiar with the hours from midnight to 6 a.m over the course of the weekend. The whole event now takes on the aura of a distinctly dubious dream six hours sleep in 2 1/2 days does this to memories but as far as I recall, it went something like this:
The whole idea was a "seemed like a good idea at the time" one. After the success of 'City Hunter' at AD3, it was logical to expand on, and so I offered to run not one, but two all-nighters for Cont-anime-ted, since there was just so much good stuff to show. So I lugged up my beloved video-tapes to Brum by coach; the journey reminded me of precisely why I generally take the train.
After a couple of drinks (non-alcoholic; it was going to be a long enough night even without depressants), Friday night began with 'Holy Virgin vs. The Evil Dead', which I think it's fair to say delivered the goods to a decent sized crowd. However, after that, someone suggested 'Jetman', and the audience evaporated like Ranma fans threatened with cold water. The brave individuals who remained didn't actually have to suffer that, they instead got an episode of a TV show about three schoolgirls with a cute line in secret identities fighting a prince on a flying carpet, who had a tendency to be cruel to puppies. Yeah, that's what I thought. On a schoolgirl roll, we followed this with 'Sukeban Deka', unquestionably the best schoolgirls- with-killer-yoyos movie ever made. By the end of that, we'd hit five a.m. and the audience had dwindled to about three; I bribed them to go home by offering them copies of the rest of the night's program, and went to bed to grab my first three hours of sleep.
Saturday night's show got off to a bad start. I'd carefully booked an alarm call for 00:15, in plenty of time for the 00:45 start, but the...silly people...at reception put their clocks back an hour several hours early and so the call failed to appear. At one a.m, I was awakened; "Aren't you supposed to be showing stuff?".
Stumble in, put on 'Saviour of the Soul', an episode of 'Dairanger', then the highlight the Japanese domino toppling show. 960,000 dominoes, lined up in ultra-intricate patterns. Several questions come to mind: a) Where did they find the room? - they looked to be covering several billion yen's worth of real estate - b) What about earthquakes?, c) How did the commentator manage to talk non-stop for 45 minutes about dominoes? and, perhaps most crucially, d) Why bother? However, the whole thing was so totally hypnotic that the only person who left the room really HAD to go, as he was running one of the other all-nighters!
At about 5 a.m, I decide it's time to get down, and show undeniably the most dodgy piece of material at the con (those that were there, know; those that weren't can just wonder!). Two minutes later, a viewer wanders in from a coffee hunt and says "There's two policemen standing at reception". You have never seen a stop button fumbled for so rapidly. We decide to watch music videos, while my paranoia subsided, until we discover they were really just security guards.
After that video nasty finished, we all felt in need of some light entertainment (though we were probably still better off than the people at the anime all-nighter, who had just sat through 'Grave of the Fireflies'). So one rapidly altered schedule later, it was 'Heroic Trio', a saga of babes, babies, bullets and, er, bmagic. This seemed to go down very well, so is probably in line for a showing - at a more civilised hour! - at Anime Day 4. Thanks to the clock changes, we still had an hour to kill, so I finally cracked and put on some anime, albeit in the form of more fan pop promos. Some of these definitely deserve wider exposure, notably the fandub and Iczer-fixated version of 'La Isla Bonita', so I'll be sluggin' for a better slot for these at some future con.
And that was it; from there, went straight to the dining-room, and redefined 'The Big Breakfast'. Would I do it again? Hell, yes. But next time I'll remember not to wear contact lenses for sixty hours straight! Pass the vacuum cleaner...