My Friday at EQLA · 4:36pm Nov 18th, 2017
I was shocked:
Not only did I actually say hello to someone, but for the first time in 30 or 40 years of convention going, I asked a question at a panel!
Of course, the person I said hello to was Super Trampoline. He was sitting in his official staff t-shirt at the door of the secondary program room chatting with some folks, and he called out "AugieDog!" as I stumbled by. So I greeted him in return and continued my stumble around to the other side of the hotel to the primary program room: there's a tertiary program room as well, though about half the programs there seem to only be available to con-goers who are actually staying in the hotel...
I got to the hotel complex about 10AM, and by the time I got my badge and all, it was maybe 10:30. The Dealers' Room didn't open till 11, so I thought I'd catch the end of the opening ceremonies. But either they'd never started or they finished early 'cause nothing was going on in the primary program room when I peeked inside. So I sat in the hotel lobby and read through the little program book. At 11, I headed over to the Dealers' Room and did a circuit during which I found no Zecora merchandise--during Bronycon this past summer, I decided that I should probably collect memorabilia related to the Patroness of Pony Poetry, but it's proven a bit difficult to find any...
I wandered back to the main program room where the Actors' Panel was already in progress: Gabriel Brown, a.k.a. Black Gryphon who I guess has done some singing on the show; Vincent Tong, who plays Flash Sentry and Featherbangs; a woman who's name I never quite caught, but a glance later through the program book told me she was apparently Chiara Zanni, the voice of Daring Do; and Susan Egan, who's done all kinds of acting over the past few decades but never on any of the Pony shows. I always like listening to folks talk about their work, though.
After that was the Directors' Panel with Jim Miller from Pony and Katrina Hadley from Equestria Girls. Miller announced from the stage that since they didn't have a moderator and there wasn't a huge crowd of us--I've never been good at figuring amounts, but I'd guess there were between 50 and 100 people scattered around the big room--maybe we could do this bonfire style: they would stand in front of the stage without microphones, and we would pull the chairs from the first few rows into semi-circles around them. So we did that, and an hour-long Q & A commenced. Since this is southern California, there were more than a few film students in the audience, so it was actually quite interesting, getting into the weeds of the production process. Miller expressed shock more than once that anyone wanted to hear the details of putting the show together, but everyone seemed to enjoy it.
That brought things up to 1:30, so I went across the street to Coco's for a leisurely lunch--that's a local restaurant chain that I thought had gone out of business years ago. Then a stroll back to the hotel, another pass through the Dealers' Room where I bought a comic book, some sitting in the lobby to work on a couple sonnet ideas, and it was 3:30: time for the Writers' Panel.
Oddly enough, even though Kristine Songco and Joanna Lewis, writers since season five and the story editors for most of season seven, are Guests of Honor, they don't seem to be doing any public panels. They're doing one of the "hotel guests only" panels on Saturday afternoon, but that seems to be it...
Anyway, the Writers' Panel had Mike Vogel and Nicole Dubuc. Vogel's been with the show from the beginning--he was an executive at Hasbro helping to get Pony off the ground, started getting more and more involved in the creative side till he was writing episodes, working on the movie script, and putting together the current series of kids' mystery books featuring the Cutie Mark Crusaders. Dubuc's been an animation writer for years, is writing the CMC mysteries with Vogel, and was a story editor for the yet-to-be-aired season eight of Pony. They talked about the differences between writing scripts and prose--writing scripts involves a constant stream of notes from all the other players in the process while writing the books has just a single pass through Hasbro before getting published--and near the end of the panel, I realized I had a question.
They said they had time for one or two more, so I raised my hand, Vogel pointed to me, and I asked if Scootaloo's aunts were an example of something they could put into the books but couldn't put in the show. Vogel, who'd been an extremely voluble speaker up to that point, suddenly turned all cagey. The only way, he said, he could imagine that would happen would be if the writers who had put them in the books happened to also be a writer and story editor for the series.
So I'm guessing that Scootaloo's aunts will be making an appearance in season eight. 
By then it was 4:30, so I left the con, drove over to the nearby comic book store I frequent to pick up the latest batch, then came back to the hotel for the 6:30 Popcorn Party where the schedule said they were going to be showing Pony cartoons. This was something I'd been astonished not to find at Bronycon: they never actually showed any episodes up on a screen in front of an audience. The moderator started out by saying that, instead of episodes, they were going to be showing a documentary on horses in their native habitats, then they showed the Pony movie.
And now it's Saturday morning. Time for breakfast, then back out to see what I can find to do till Lauren Faust's program at 5:30.
Mike
Ooh, look who’s becoming sociable! Next thing ya know, you’ll be saying hi to someone not Super Tramp...
You're branching out! Good for you n_n
And yeah, Zecora merch can be thin on the ground. I got lucky in early days and have a little wooden Zecora carved from zebrawood sitting on my shelf.
The bonfire Q&A sounds great.
For whatever reason, my father didn't like Coco's. He called it No-no's.
Good gravy I want that to happen!
Hi!
That's because BronyCon sucks these days, plain and simple. The organizers sneakily want to turn it into a non-pony con.....
First it started with non-pony music at Bronypalooza (that's going on since a few years already), then non-pony stuff getting sold in the vendor hall and this year they accepted non-pony panels for the first time ever.
Each year, they alienate it a little further, until it betrays its name and legacy completely.
Money-greedy hags, all of them.....
Well, guess that was more the opposite then, cause Twilight and her friends weren't in their natural "habitat" for most of the events.^^
This is fantastic news! A lesbian couple in the show, this is something it can really need, it's literally the kind of show suited for it to send a message of tolerance that way!
Now we can find out how they look and how they sound!