
So when you’re like me and don’t know what to do with yourself other than look at overpriced figures at the Vendor’s Hall, it’s good to have a schedule to provide some structure to your con going experience; hence why I attended so many panels this year. Well, that and I knew I was going to recap them for the website; and that’s a win-win in my book! Today, we’ll be focusing on the fan panels which are hosted by individuals attending the convention rather than the invited guests or representatives of some company looking to market directly to their fans. Do these manage to have an authenticity and love of their respective fandoms that you wouldn’t find in more professional presentations? Let’s find out!!
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90s Animation Revisited: Rejoin Your Childhood Friends
Hosted by Peggy Miller
This was the first panel I went to at the convention, and right off the bat it put me in a sour mood. This was nothing more than nostalgia baiting with nothing even resembling insight or depth into what made these cartoons so memorable (or in certain cases, infamous). Rattle off the name of a series, show the opening, ask the audience what year it came out, and repeat nineteen more times. Hell, they couldn’t even stick to the decade as several of these started in the late eighties but remained popular throughout the nineties. Fair enough I guess, but what about showing Power Rangers which was NOT an animated show? I’ll let you all know right now that my biggest problem with most of the fan panels this year is that they’re sometimes a mile wide but always an inch deep. This one did manage to have a breadth of content by name checking twenty different shows in an hour, but so what? No mention of Klasky Csupo shows, no mention of how Mighty Mouse: the New Adventures from 1987 was the jumping off point for many prominent animators in the following decade, no mention of Disney Television Animation who made half the shows name checked here, and most egregiously (at least in my opinion), they couldn’t even be bothered to tell us all that the creator of Doug was born less than a hundred miles away from where we were sitting. That’s a VERY easy factoid to just throw out there to the audience and I’m sure several people would have gotten a real kick out of it. The only thing you’d get out of this is what you already would be bringing into it, and I just don’t think that’s much of a panel.
Continue reading “The NekoCon Diaries 2016: Fan Panel Recap” →