On Station At Celebration: Day 3

August 25, 2012 at 10:01 pm | Posted in Celebration, Conventions, Events | 2 Comments
Tags: carrie fisher, james arnold taylor, on station at celebration, timothy zahn

Day 3 at Star Wars Celebration VI, or in more dramatic terms, The Penultimate Day! I honestly didn’t have a whole lot on my schedule today, which was kind of nice as it gave me more time to look around and take pictures. Plus I finally got to check out the Rancho Obi-Wan Experience. However the first point on the agenda was the DK Booth.

Today was a pivotal moment in Pith History as I was officially pronounced the second inductee into the Pith Army. With Pith helmet and certificate in hand, I was able to get the final signature from Pith Lord Ryder Windham. I even have a picture as further proof.

But don’t fret, there’s plenty of room left if you’d like to join the army. Just don your Pith helmet and meet up with Pith Lords Ryder Windham and Randy Stradely. It is the pithy thing to do, after all.

With that mission accomplished, I headed for my second goal of the day: Rancho Obi-Wan. Now for several days I’ve been eying the Rancho Obi-Wan Experience booth and each day it has had a very long line. With an hour to kill, I decided to make a go for it, and the line moved surprisingly fast. In just 20 minutes I was in. There was a lot of cool stuff in there and most of the fun is in the little stories that accompany each piece. According to the guy at the booth (Steve Sansweet wasn’t there when I was), the collection represents just 10% of 1% of Steve’s entire collection at the Rancho Obi-Wan museum. Here’s a taste.

From there I was off to Timothy Zahn’s panel Fakin’ It Panel (and I happened to see Ashley Eckstein along the way). Tim’s panel covered how to use technology in your fiction. He made extensive use of good and bad examples of various franchises using technology. From Star Wars to Star Trek, Back to the Future, and even Galaxy Quest. It was entertaining and it did open my eyes to how tech can be manipulated in a story. At the end, Tim did a “lame but cool” giveaway of eleven gold colored solo cups, each signed by him and with a character’s name from Scoundrels. To win a cup, audience members had to fix the tech example Tim gave. For instance: what was wrong with the way Alderaan exploded? Answer: it exploded too slowly.

Next up was my interview with James Luceno which was a lot of fun. Jim is a real nice guy and we talked Plagueis, Dooku, Mayans, and writing in general. Yet another interview to look forward to in the near future.

With what free time I had, I jumped in for a few more signings (Allston and Denning), and got some more pictures of cosplayers.

The last panel of the day for me ended up being James Arnold Taylor’s Talking with Myself and Carrie Fisher’s Date with a Princess (it was a back-to-back panel). Both were very entertaining. My favorite highlight of James Arnold Taylor’s panel was the Obi-Wan vs Fred Flinstone cartoon which had him doing both voices and poking fun at the Anakin vs Obi-Wan duel.

The Carrie panel was also a lot of fun. She recounted various stories and touched on different topics all across the spectrum. For instance she told a story about how she, Harrison Ford, and all of the band members of the Rolling Stones ended up partying the night away. She and Ford had to go back to shooting The Empire Strikes back, and neither of them had a hangover…because they were still drunk. The first scene when they arrive in Cloud City and are greeted by Lando, Carrie and Han are smiling. Those are the smiles of silly drunk people. And that’s just a taste of one of the many stories she shared.

There were also clips from the Holiday Special and the SNL ‘I’m a princess from outerspace’ skit. The panel ended with a short Q&A with the crowd. One fan asked if Carrie would be Leia again if George did another three Star Wars films and she said yes which received a huge response from the crowd. Of all things, the very last act of the panel was Carrie spanking James Arnold Taylor.

Yes, enjoy that mental image.

Just one more day left!

Posted By: Skuldren for Roqoo Depot. On Station at Celebration.