Orlando and the Dolphin Party TF Style
Finally, years after the first Botcons, promoters decided to come to Orlando. This is the first big toy robot event in Florida versus challenging locations (for me at least) like Detroit, Ohio, Indiana, Tokyo and Kentucky. It is about time and judging by what I saw, a great success!
Close to Epocot is an epic scale hotel and convention center building known as the Dolphin. Oh, it is next to the equally large hotel known as the Swan. Disney does things right and big with polish. So after entering the $11 jammed packed parking I was greeted by gobs of adult kids, kid kids, international kids, pale white never-seen-light-kids, and costumed out kids. -Surreal!
Dare I say that I was a toy geek in the midst of other toy geeks. BUT, I had sun on me. I hadn’t played 8 straight hours of video games while in travel, and I had a family. LOL. NO, it wasn’t that bad, but I definately saw our odd demographic in all its non-jock persona.
After traveling the maze of corrodors and escalators the Botcon signs directed me to the lower hall. It was completely appropriate for all the closet case collectors, it felt like the basement that our toys eventually get relegated to. Then, my god, there were about 500 people waiting in line for the “private showing” for Friday. I arrived after trying on a number of occassions to get a press pass. It looked like I was sunk after finding out how strict Hasbro is and learning about the sell out.
Luck would have it though that business cards, past visits to Toy Fair, and great people, allowed me to register at the last minute. Thank you again Hasbro and event organizers. Jack and I were taken care of.
We entered the pearly, err, flourescent, gates of bot heaven to be greated by about 50 dealers, toy displays, tons of Hasbro items about to be released, kids tables, and a super sized Bumblebee with Camaro. Schweet! The event was impressive.
There were a ton of G1 items in opened boxes and just a bit of vintage diecast. At a glance I would say most of the dealers averaged over 100 robots with containers to choose from. One dealer seemed to be the Transformers Animated king, another a G1 box king, another the Beast Wars King, and then many of the others had a good mix. One SOC Voltes V made it to the big dance.
Jack and I found a few Gobots too. They were frosting on the cake of a wonderful experience.
