NYCC Day #1

First day of NYCC (New York Comic Con) kicked off this morning. One of the biggest pop culture and geek events in the world. With close to 200,000 people attending this event (!) it is indeed very crowded everywhere!

I visited the first panel of the con which focused on a remake of the movie The Watcher in the Woods, directed by Melissa Joan Hart. She was there to talk about the movie, and we saw a clip of it. Not bad.

Later I attended a panel about a weird new animated series voiced by Michael Madsen, Carl Weathers and Vivica A. Fox who were all present. I saw Michael at the London con a few months ago, and he’s always up for a great story or two! It was also fun to see 80s action hero Carl Weathers from Rocky and Predator.

My next panel was about an audiobook of a novel by the guy who wrote The Martian. The panel featured the lovely Rosario Dawson who is the voice talent used for the audiobook. I saw her at Wizard World in Chicago last year and she’s just amazing!

After browsing the show floor for some time, I had a photo shoot with none other than Mark Hamill from Star Wars! Really fun to meet Luke Skywalker in person.

The con had some other events that I was interested in, but I rushed out of there (and got a whiff of the sun and 28 degrees Celcius!) to attend a movie screening at the beautiful Lincoln Center. The movie was the world premiere of a documentary about Steven Spielberg, as part of this year’s New York Film Festival. Funnily I saw Spielberg in person exactly two years ago at the same festival for the premiere of his new movie at the time. Now he was here again!

It was a great documentary, and definitely quite surreal to watch it with Spielberg himself in the room, presumably watching it for the first time himself. The director Susan Lacy did a Q&A afterwards about the comprehensive project. Great experience.

To finish off another busy day in style, I went to see a stand-up show with Jerry Seinfeld. I’ve been a Seinfeld fan for many years so it was great to see him perform live. As I’m writing this there is a new interview with him on TV.

After Seinfeld it was time to move over to a much better hotel, the InterContinental in the Times Square area.Read more