Comic-Con 2009 Part 4: Saturday

Saturday was a great day for Geek World. We started the day with an interview with Rod Roddenberry (son of Gene Roddenberry) and Trevor Roth (in my excitement for the interview I found myself unable to speak words properly and called him Treasure, yeah I suck sometimes). They were largely promoting Roddenberry's new comic project Days Missing which is a little too complicated for me to write about here but definitely check out the interview on our August 6th show. Lucky for us Rod was willing to answer some of our Star Trek questions too and between Rod & Trevor we learned some really interesting facts about Roddenberry (the company). One of the most interesting things is that they have two divisions, one handles the comics and sci-fi aspect, the other part deals with adventures like diving. The adventure part is fascinating because it really does hold true to Gene Roddenberry's ideas of exploring new worlds (there are so many parts of the ocean humans are still unable to travel, some day we will explore new worlds but now is the time to continue exploring our own).

We spent a lot of time exploring the floor before heading to some panels. First we went to a Ray Bradbury panel but we got there early and ended up at the tail end of the panel for Green Lantern: Blackest Night. I don't know how the rest of the panel went but it ended in some hard core nerdiness. There is nothing like a huge room filled mostly with adults all holding out their fists (as though displaying their green lantern rings) joining together in the Green Lantern Oath:
In brightest day, in blackest night,
No evil shall escape my sight
Let those who worship evil's might,
Beware my power... Green Lantern's light!
It was pretty awesome, hilarious, and like nothing you can experience anywhere other than Comic-Con.

The Ray Bradbury panel started next. It was amazing to see the man in person but the panel had a very strange start. They started out showing us all the things we could buy such as old paintings done by Bradbury and tickets to his stage productions. While I understand that certain fans were probably extremely excited by those things the whole thing felt unseemly. As I said on Twitter it felt more like The Things You Can Buy From Ray Bradbury Panel. After a few minutes they finally got on with the actual panel which was amazing. Ray Bradbury truly is a legend. They started by showing a video of Mike Wallace interviewing Ray Bradbury on the day of the moon landing which was incredible. Mr. Bradbury also talked about his issues with the current education system and encouraged the inclusion of comics to help teach children to read (he discussed his own experience as a child using the funny pages). He also discussed how he remembered his birth and his circumcision, it was strange but he's Ray Bradbury so it was also awesome.

Our final panel of the day was for the new show Human Target starring Mark Valley, Chi McBride, & Jackie Earle Haley (as of now it's slated for January 2010). They showed the pilot and then the panel took questions. It was really great so the next blog post will be specifically about the show and the panel.

-AnnaMay