The Nerdy Girlie at Stan Lee's Comikaze

I had found out about Comikaze via Twitter.  The Wild & Crazy Kids and Salute Your Shorts reunions, where a HUGE reason for me wanting to go.  A secondary reason was that I wanted to see what other conventions were like outside of San Diego Comic Con {SDCC}.  Tickets for Saturday were only $20 each so I scooped them up.  Two hours before opening we drove up and hit MAJOR traffic.  I was worried that we were not going to make the Wild and Crazy Kids panel which began at 11am.

But parking was a breeze and we walked into the convention center very close to 11am.  But there were lines EVERYWHERE and EVERY WHICH WAY!  NO organization at all.  I had my printed out tickets that I had already paid for so we had to maneuver through all these people to try and find an end of a line to redeem them and get our wristbands.  FINALLY we found the end of the line, and got the wrist bands quiet quickly, but afterwards find out that there were HUGE lines of people outside in the BLISTERING heat!  I, and I think the staff, didn't really know what was going on.  There was not enough staff to handle THAT amount of people.  But this is ONLY their 2nd year, so hopefully people will give it a second chance.  It is such a great price and I got some unique and fun memories.  

me with the cast of Wild and Crazy Kids

{L to R} Jessica Gaynes, Omar Gooding, Annette M. Lesure, Donnie Jeffcoat & me :)

 We ended up making it into the Wild and Crazy Kids reunion panel with time to spare and the room was SPARSE!  With maybe 100 chairs in the room, with no more than 20 bodies in the chairs.  TOTALLY different from SDCC.  But I throughly enjoyed the panel.  The cast was super friendly nice and just let people raise hands and they took everyone's questions.  They talked about how they were cast on the show, what their favorite events where and all the insanity that went on behind the scenes of a show hosted by KIDS for KIDS {LOTS of kids}.  It was a super fun way to re-live a HUGE part of my childhood, which was Nickeloden shows.  I had always wanted to be on one of Nick's awesome game shows and would have died for an official Wild and Crazy Kids T...and happily today I was able to accomplish my 8 year old self's dream {totally wearing the T to work on Tuesday!} :)  The cast was super talkative, friendly and kind!  It was a pleasure to meet them and let them know how much their show made my childhood happy!

Salute Your Shorts reunion panel 

After the Wild and Crazy Kids reunion panel, was the Salute Your Shorts reunion panel and the room was filled to capacity.  Present were:

Kirk Baliy - Kevin Ug Lee

Megan Berwick - Z. Z. Ziff {did a video message}

Michael Bower - Donkeylips

Steve Slavkin - Dr Kahn

Venus DeMilo - Telly Radford

Tim Eyster - Sponge

Danny Cooksey - Budnick

Erik MacArthur - Michael Stein

Salute Your Shorts reunion panel

The panel began of course with us all of us doing theme song sing a long, the cast included!  It really made my day!  This was one of the shows that my childhood was all about and it was great to see it come alive in a way that I never thought I would ever see!  The cast told stories of how the show came about, life on the set and how they were pretty much typed casted for their specific characters.  They also talked about all the injures they received, mostly happening to Kirk aka Ug.  Most of them had not seen each other since they were early teenagers making the show and were so happy to see each other again, swap stories and interact with the fans, who they didn't realize were around.  During filming they said they were kept in a bubble.

We are going back...to the future!

After the two panels, we began to walk the show room floor.  The hunny thought that it was like a Costco for NERDS.  To pay $20 to come and shop for nerdy stuff.  Kinda was, but I love to shop!  Above is a picture of one of the most favorite of cosplayers that I have ever seen!  I LOVE Back to the Future!  Doc even had a copy of the sports almanac!  

THE CUTEST life size remote control Wall*e...soooo cute!!

At the Salute Your Shorts booth, the entire cast was there signing stuff and taking pictures.  I didn't get good ones because it was $50 for a tee and a poster for the cast to sign and we didn't want to pay that!  The Hunny wanted a tee but not for that much!  So I took a couple quick shots and we moved on.

Venus DeMilo from Salute Your Shorts

Bad picture but only one I got of Budnick in the background.
Donkeylips and Ug in the foreground. 

Donkeylips & Ug

Another one of THE best cosplayer I have seen.  The original Joker.  This guy had UH-mazing facial expressions {freaky but awesome!}.

Lastly one of my favorite parts of Comikaze was meeting people I connect with because of this blog!  I wrote a previous post on NERD Ts saying I had found Graphic Lab and how they have so many awesome Ts I would have added to my collection, had I knew about them before.  They were nice enough to respond to my blog post by sending me one of their Ts to try out!  I was SUPER excited to receive it in the mail with a sweet thank you note, JUST in time to wear it to Comikaze!  So I stopped by their booth to check it out and to say thank you!  It was a rad booth, with TONS of awesome Ts!  Too many to pick a favorite!  But I wanted to let them know that I LOVE the T, it is GREAT quality with the type of fit and length I love.  I can't wait to order from them in the future!

So that was my 1st non-SDCC con.  Obviously TOTALLY different from SDCC!  But I found a LOT of cool booths, that I can't wait to check out online and add their stuff to my wish list.  I met sweet and fun people, and it really made me come out of my shell more!  I love sharing my passions with people and connecting with them because of it.  I hope that in the future I get to do it more and more!