ANIMECON '91
                               by Sea Oh

It was a fantastic convention.  Unfortunately, I missed the beginning
ceremonies.  I arrived in California on the 31st of August at 10:00pm.
When I finally got to the hotel, I had missed the first day of it
(rats!).

Well, enough about my bad luck, let me tell you about the con.  They
were not kidding when they said 24 hour anime on three television
channels.  There was just too much to see.  It's too bad we couldn't get
extra sets in our room.  There were always a large number of free flyers
at the freebie tables.  The con suite always had popcorn, drinks, fruits,
chips, and dips aplenty and it was all free!

The dealers' room was a dream come true and a horrible nightmare.  They had
just about anything an anime fan could possibly want. One stand had a
Dominion poster that just about everybody wanted, but since they only had
one they could not sell it.  I didn't really care, as I'm not too fond of
Dominion in the first place.  The dealers had books, magazines, comics,
cels, models, pins, bags, etc.  You could easily tell that Bubblegum Crisis
was the main focus of the dealers' room (yea!).

The most spectacular thing (to me, anyway) at the con was at the Gainax
stand.  They had Silent M”bius and Gunbuster computer games.  They
absolutely blew me away!  The graphics were incredible.  Yours truly was
severely tempted to gas the entire dealers' room and swipe the games,
monitors, and computers there.

The dealers' room also had some stuff on Japanese SF.  I saw Adam Warren
there and Lea Hernandez did two nice little sketches for me.  Tomoko Saito
is a very good artist and also very nice.  Finally, I met the man who made
Robotech.  It was a dream come true.  Carl Macek is a swell guy.  I was
extremely pleased to meet and chat with him.

Now, here comes the bad part - unless you were a millionaire, you had to
be very picky on what you bought.  The prices on some items were
unbelievable.  For example, I know of one person who bought a partial run
(episodes 26-50) of the Urusei Yatsura LD 50 set for $3,300 when the entire
set only costs around $3,300.  The exchange rates, even though many
competing companies were present, were not observed - 100 yen to the
dollar was the order of the day.

The autographing sessions were long and tiresome, but (of course) to get
a sketch or autograph from any of the Japanese artists, fans would wait
hours before the artist even arrived.  I was able to get sketches from
Manabe and Sonoda, but I could only get a signature from Mikimoto.

Several varied conferences were also held, dealing with Gundam, subtitling,
and computer gaming, which were interesting.  The viewing rooms were always
dark and sometimes they had technical problems.  I wish they'd kept the
scheduling for the anime straight.

I was able to catch Claude J. Pelletier, the publisher of _Protoculture
Addicts_, after a conference, who was a very nice guy.  I also met L. Lois
Buhalis, who performs art touch-ups and lettering for Studio Proteus'
translated _Appleseed_ series (as well as other comics), while waiting in
the Mikimoto line.

Two outstanding pieces of anime I saw were Detonator Orgun and RG Veda.
They were awesome awesome awesome!  Other good anime I saw were Vampire
Princess Miyu, Nadia, Gundam F-91, Kujaku-O, and Ranma 1/2.  Unfortunately,
I missed the Silent M”bius preview.

Three planned guests did not appear - Otomo Katsuhiro, Matsumoto Leiji, and
Okada Toshio, which was very disappointing.  I later found out that Otomo
was involved in a new animation film currently in production in Japan.
A close friend of Matsumoto became ill, so Matsumoto had to fill-in until
his friend recovered.  I'm not sure behind the reasons for Okada's absence.

All in all, it was a great con.  I'll probably be going to AnimeCon '92.
Until then, Sayonara!