Official Creation Star Trek Con Philadelphia 2013 Day 1 Coverage

 
So this past weekend was the “big” Star Trek convention in lovely Cherry Hill, NJ, celebrating 20 years of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Because it’s only 3 miles from my house (and I prepaid for it at last year’s show), I headed on over to meet most of the cast of DS9 and take some expensive pictures. They jam a lot of stuff into 3 days, and I’m still kind of exhausted from it, hence why it took until Tuesday night to post this.

If there was an ongoing theme for this year’s show, it would have been “It was always the writers”. Almost every guest gave high praise to the writers of DS9, and whenever they were asked about their contributions to their character or if they had any say in the storylines or had something they wanted to do but didn’t, they all answered that everything that came out of their mouths was straight from the writers, and that the writers had such a fantastic grasp of the characters they didn’t leave much wanting, and that until about the 4th season when Ira Steven Behr took over, the cast and the writers almost never spoke to each other. Also, they all said that The Next Generation was the fun show, where the cast were all friends and laughed all the time, but that DS9 was the serious show, full of real actor’s actors who were there to do a job, and have fun later.

So, that was the general feeling of the weekend, but how about the specifics? Read onward!

Friday

 
First thing Friday afternoon was Max Grodenchik (Rom) and Armin Shimerman (Quark). Back in August, Max moved to Austria full time, and flew in to the show from there. Armin spoke about the reasons why the Ferengi failed to be “big bads” of The Next Generation were because he was cast as the main leader, and that the director of The Last Outpost (Richard A. Colla) was “on drugs”. (He also said that quote would end up somewhere on the internet, so here I am, printing it). He said of the blue energy whips, Colla handed him a blue foam tube and told him to “Make it look menacing!” Toward the end of their time, Max and Armin were joined on stage by Aron Eisenberg (Nog).

 
After the Ferengi, Richard Arnold gave a talk about the history of DS9. There’s just one problem with that. Richard Arnold, while a great guy, was Gene Roddenberry’s personal assistant, and as such, barely worked on DS9. His The Next Generation talk last year was very informative, but this years on DS9 was little more than a slide show of press photos.

After that Morgan Gendel gave pretty much the same “Journey to the Inner Light” talk he gave last year, but with no emphasis on the graphic novel sequel he wrote (available for $20 in the vendor room!), since he was there by himself without his illustrator this year. Basically his 45 minute talk was watching 25 minutes of The Inner Light with him giving a running commentary every so often. The graphic novel sequel is pretty decent and you can read it online for free, but his talk wasn’t anything I hadn’t seen or read before.

The next talk was with Casey Biggs (Damar) and Vaughn Armstrong (Admiral Forrest et al.). They spoke a bit about their Enterprise Blues Band, and played a few tunes before taking questions. Casey said that he was currently directing Macbeth at the New School for Drama in New York City, and said that the first bit of direction he ever got from Avery Brooks was simply “Glide, ya dig?” Vaughn said that of the 11 characters he played, he enjoyed Admiral Forrest the best, mostly becasue it involved the least amount of makeup, and he got to be the captain of the ship in the mirror universe.

 
The next speaker was Jeffery Combs (Weyoun/Brunt/Shran). He told about his first time on the set when he first encountered Avery Brooks. He needed to be in very early for his Vorta makeup, and made the mistake of walking onto the set with his coffee cup as he needed to stay awake. Avery gave him a hard Avery Brooks stare, and said in his deep voice “There’s no liquids on the set.” Avery Brooks, if you don’t know, is pretty much batshit insane, as we’ll get to tomorrow.

 
After Jeffrey it was time for autographs. I’m glad I got the gold package and was in and out in about 20 minutes, because the autographs ran from 7:30 all the way until about 10:15, because Armin Shimerman is apparently a chatty Cathy and his line snaked all the way around the room. He was still signing long after everyone else had changed into their tuxedos for the Rat Pack show. Apparently Max Grodenchik had written Star Trek lyrics to go over the words to a bunch of old standards, and they had all rehearsed it all over skype. It did not appear however that anyone had ever seen what they were singing before, which lead to them restarting songs over many times or not being able to read their scripts, or just kind of improving rather than sticking to the rhyme scheme. It was pretty funny to watch and quite enjoyable, even if it was a hour late.

 
After the Rat Pack was the Gold Patron’s party, where if you paid far too much money you could sit around and talk to the guests for a few minutes. It’s fun, but its never more than idle chit chat. One of the pluses of the Gold party though is the centerpiece contest, which had a $250 first prize. Last year, some dude took nacelles and glued them to a big mouth billy bass and won by default, being the only entry. I thought I’d win for sure this year, with my DS9 playmates toy with Micro Machines glued to it. That was until I saw this guy, who built a full scale model replica of the Defiant bridge, complete with working viewscreen. It was downright excessive. When it came down to the judging, I was a sore loser, and screamed like a jackass for the other entries to make sure he didn’t win (To be fair, I modulated my volume to ensure he tied, I didn’t want to deprive him of his winnings, he just shouldn’t have been the only winner being so far ahead of everyone else)

 
So at these parties all the guests line up for photos, then you put your camera down and they all circulate to different tables around the room. Jeffrey Combs bailed almost immediately, just running around waiving at people as he ran out the door. Fortunately Aron Eisenberg stepped in and took his place. Usually at these things each guest has a handler with a timer, and each table gets like 3 minutes with a guest, but this year it seemed the guests didn’t care and the handlers just gave up. Armin was spending like 15 minutes per table. I was over in the corner, and ended up being the second to last table to see all the guests. I honestly don’t remember most of my conversations, because it wasn’t until 2:20 AM that Max Grodenchik made it to us, but they were all perfectly pleasant. I mostly recall Max griping that no one followed along to the lyrics he wrote, and that many of the jokes were lost because of it. If you have money to burn and don’t mind a late night (at least they had free booze), by all means go ahead and get the Gold, but I can’t really recommend it solely for the Gold Party. The only benefit of the Gold Package is the quick autograph times, but I don’t know if the time you save is worth the huge difference in cost. Just bring a book or go out to dinner and come back, you’ll be fine and save like $300, you’ll just have to sit further away. I think that’s a fair trade.

 
So that’s the happenings from Friday (and early Saturday). Come back tomorrow for the details from the main days of Saturday and Sunday, featuring Avery Brooks, Nana Visitor, Michael Dorn, Cirroc Lofton, Rene Auberjonois, Ethan Phillips, and Gates McFadden.

JohnScott is the proud owner of a life size replica Captain Kirk Chair. He is a hoarder of Comic Books, Transformers, and Star Trek action figures. He attended Space Camp as an adult. He has taken vacations to the closing of the Star Trek Experience and the final night Shuttle launch. He has been known to yell at his television when the kids can't put together the damn statue in the Shrine of the Silver Monkey. When not writing for InsufficientScotty, he is a Software Engineer for a major healthcare communications company. You can Email or follow on Twitter @NotEnoughScotty or Facebook