Letters From The Loft
Stuff From The Desk Of Chuck Thornton
DAY TWO - PAGE 5
The Peanuts panel consisted of the widow of Charles M. Schulz, the creative director of Schulz's studio in Santa Rosa (there's a museum there), and some animation folks. The big news was the production of a new Peanuts cartoon special for television. The creators promised that they were going back to the Charlie Brown Christmas roots of Peanuts animation history, and the couple of rough clips seemed to back them up... you would have thought they were produced 40 years ago. I think that's a good thing-- I always thought the earlier Peanuts cartoons more closely captured the tone of the strip for the younger audience that would be watching it, and maybe encourage them to read the real thing-- but I've talked to people who think Peanuts should be left on paper. Thankfully, the panel audience wasn't filled with the latter, since 3 out of 5 of the panel members were associated with the new animation product. Comic-Con attendees usually aren't bashful about expressing their opinions, so if the audience members hadn't liked the clip, we would have watched the equivalent of someone telling an expectant mother that her baby's sonogram was ugly.
After that panel, we went back to the Exhibition Hall and looked around for a while. I took a few random pictures. Here's a full-size bust of Thor at the Sideshow Collectibles booth:
Sort of the Venus de Milo for non-sissies. It can be yours for about 650 bucks. At least 200 bucks of that is for the styrofoam peanuts required to pack it up.
There's a Thor movie being released next year, and on display was Odin's throne from the set of that movie:
Odin parks his rear end down toward the front of this monstrosity. To give you an example of the throne in action, I got a picture of some guy dressed as Loki sitting in it:
Loki's supposed to be the Norse god of mischief, but I never thought he looked that mischievous, unless your idea of mischief is being able to put an eye out just by mingling with a crowd. As you can see, the Norse deities' taste in furniture ran toward the ostentatious. They probably needed a crane for one of their coffee-table books.
There's always some neat Lego sculptures at the Con. Here's one of Woody and Buzz from Toy Story:
Although we've seen these types of sculptures for the many years we've been attending CCI, for the first time Sam suggested that maybe these weren't actually built with Legos, but were instead just manufactured molded plastic figures with a Lego-like surface texture. I wouldn't tolerate this kind of cynicism exercised so close to a Pixar property, and I gave Sam a 15-minute time-out.
You can always count on a few giant armored figures hanging around the Exhibition Hall. Here's a Transformer:
And here's that big suit of armor from Avatar:
I didn't take a picture of the group of guys arguing over which of these would win in a fight.