Coverage: San Diego Con 2004

Updated July 29, 2004

San Diego 2004 Day 3 Writeup
We didn't spend all our time in San Diego taking pictures. We also attended some panels and saw some movies. Here is a brief description of various bits of stuff from the third day that may be of interest to people. Day 3 seems to be where ComicCon has put a large number of its big panels now.

Jump to: Index, Part 1a, Part 1b, Writeup 2, Writeup 3, Part 3, Writeup 4, Part 4, Part 5

Tru Calling
The Tru Calling panel showed some clips from last season's finale, then Eliza Dushku came out and did a Q and A session. Dushku seemed very friendly and down to earth, and answered even the awkward questions with a smile and without making the questioner look bad. The main points of interest were that: she felt the show is really on track now that they have both a hero and a villain; she felt the first season suffered somewhat for the lack of a villain; and she and the rest of the cast had just finished recording commentaries for the 1st season DVD box.

The Incredibles
The Disney/Pixar Incredibles panel actually started with a very short teaser trailer for The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy movie, which got a lot of cheering. This moved on to director Brad Bird, producer John Walker and moderator Mark Vaz talking about the new Pixar film. Interesting bits included:

Bird talked about Pixar's "weak spot", which is doing humans.

Bird mentioned that Pixar techs were perfectly willing to give him any kind of explosion, no matter how large, how much debris and dust, but turned pale when he wanted one character to grab another by the shirt. However, he did say that The Incredibles would have the best CG shirt grabs of any film.

1st film clip: Mr Incredible, coming out of retirement, accepts an assignment from the government to retrieve a rogue battle robot that can learn from its enemies. Mr Incredible's battles begin with trying to squeeze his gut into the drop capsule, and later, trying to get out of it. His fight with the robot involves straight out fighting, then running away, and ultimately tricking the multi-armed robot into punching pieces of itself out.

2nd clip: not having told his wife that he's un-retired yet, Mr Incredible needs to get his costume (ripped during the robot fight) fixed, so he takes it to his old costumer, Edna. Edna's comment on seeing him, "Good God, you're incredibly fat" was priceless. She's clearly unhappy with her current work making costumes for supermodels ("Supermodels? Hah! I used to design... for gods!") There follows some bargaining, with Edna clearly wanting to work on his costume but not willing to admit it. When he wants a cape added, she gives him a list of superhero accidents with capes to dissuade him (one hero's cape was snagged on the rocket he was trying to defuse; another was sucked into a jet's turbine; still another's was pulled into a tornado, and so on).

You can read some more details here.

WB Animation
This panel covered Teen Titans, Justice League Unlimited, and the new animated Dark Knight show, The Batman. All 3 were emceed by producer Sam Register.

For Teen Titans, the panel had Ron Perlman (Slade), Tara Strong (Raven), Scott Menville (Robin), Greg Cipes (Beast Boy), David Slack and Glen Murakami. They started off with a Puffy AmiYumi music video of the Teen Titans theme song. This was a pretty typical J-pop kind of video, though it had some funny parts in it with "Guitar Wolf". Sam Register also mentioned that a Puffy show would start in November, though he gave no details. Following this was mostly Q and A, though they did show some clips from the upcoming season (they also mentioned that Tara Strong is pregnant). First clip showed a fight between the Titans and Red X. After Red X gets away, a super-deformed Starfire starts poking Robin, trying to figure out if he's a hologram. This multiplies into dozens of Starfires until Robin tells her to stop. When they're convinced he's actually there, Beast Boy brings up the possibility that he's a robot. The clip ends with Cyborg pulling on a big rubber glove, saying "we can check that."

JLU panel showed some clips that included a big fight with Brimstone, some of Supergirl's attitude, and how Batman persuades Green Arrow to stay on board. They also mentioned that one problem they ran into was that, after requesting dozens of heroes from DC for the show, they found that the new Watchtower satellite was too big, so they had to go ask for even more heroes, just to fill out the space.

The Batman was the only one for which they showed an entire episode. Just like when WB first introduced the Batman Animated Series at Comic-Con years ago, the episode they showed was the one dealing with Man-Bat. The music for the new show will be done by The Edge, from U2. Unfortunately, at least based on the episode shown, this doesn't look like a very good show at all.

InuYasha Movie
All the No-Name staff who went to San Diego (Warner, Robert and Andrew) were lucky enough to go to the InuYasha movie premiere that Viz held. The premiere arrangements were a bit disorganized, as New Line had their sneak preview of Harold and Kumar at the same time, at the same theater, but things managed to get underway only a little late.

Before the movie, some prized were given out randomly to people with stickers under their seat. Andrew won a pretty nice InuYasha jacket. The producer of the film gave a short talk, interpreted by Toshi from Viz. Then the movie started. Unfortunately, the premiere was slightly ruined due to the fact that the movie, which should be wide screen, was shown in a 4:3 ratio. In addition, the surround sound wasn't working correctly, so we only got 2-channel stereo that was cranked up way too loud. Talking to Toshi afterwards and also to one of the theater staff, it sounds like the theater screwed up. The movie was on a DVD and shown using digital projection. Changing between 16:9 and 4:3 ratio should have been fairly simple for the theater, but they never fixed it.

The movie itself was enjoyable, even dubbed. A few parts of the story seemed a little weak, and you could tell the movie wasn't written by Takahashi. Instead of giving out any spoilers, we'll just hope to show the movie when the DVD comes out in a few months.