Greetings from D23!

Yep, I’m out here on the west coast along with a group of ‘dyed-in-the-wool’ Disney fans to take in Disney’s first, modern attempt to a build a sanctioned/official fan community.  We are just getting over with day 2 (and boy, was it a full day).  I didn’t get to post anything last night about day 1 due to some technical issues, but I’ll cover that in this installment as well.

Nothing much to especially mention from our trip a couple of weeks ago to WDW.  The park is still running, the hours are still being adjusted more or less on the fly as required, crowds seemed to be good, if a bit spotty, and as is typical this time of the year:  IT WAS HOT!  So hot, we took 2-3 hour off every afternoon to leave the parks and seek Starbucks and A/C while letting the little one take in a nap.

BTW, up front, if you hear of something you don’t think is being covered at D23, drop me a line at michael@allthingsdiz.com and I’ll try to follow up before the event ends Sunday night.

So first, the general overall impressions after 2 days of go-go-go and in no particular order.

The Anaheim Convention Center has in general done a good job of ‘swallowing’ the crowd yesterday and today, though I’d say Friday was bigger than Thursday which makes sense given that more locals turned out today than yesterday.  It’s hard to get a firm idea of how tickets are working since the only way to know is by the color of wristbands and even then they have two different versions of some colors:  one for D23 members and one without.

That’s not to say that there haven’t been some minor growing pains with crowds and lines.  Several of the more popular seminars have had lines where the wait has been in excess of 40-50 minutes and lines much longer than the venue could hold.  On day 1 some of the lines were so long we ended up only seeing one seminar due to the distance between venues (it’s a fairly large center after all).

Disney has done good by their goal of including the broader Disneyana community in the convention as well (though I’m sure they probably ‘paid’ for the honor of being part of the Expo as would be typical of a convention).  Many of the more popularly known Disney related fan sites are represented in person on the Expo floor, which I’ll cover below.  Many of the panels have also been hosted by folks who are either retired from the company or from the broader Disneyana community as well.  For instance, the panel on the new art documentary ‘El Group’ was hosted by none other than Jim Hill of Jim Hill Media.

Likewise, I have to give big props to Disney in terms of general production value.  So far there have been lots of surprises (good kinds) and overall fairly well produced (and scripted) larger and even many of the smaller settings.  There are some things to smooth out in the future, but overall this thing has gone off very well so far.

I also have to believe from what I’ve seen that it’s very true that D23 has the support of the top folks at the company as shown by the tons of people that have shown up from the company.  I’ve seen Tony Baxter more than once in the halls for instance, as well as tons of salaried cast members just to point out a couple instances.

EXPO

The Expo certainly takes up the largest part of the overall venue and most of the first floor.  The main areas of course surround the major elements of the overall company, and most of the consumer facing parts are well represented.  The Disney Consumer Products are also has Disney sanctioned licenses like Lego, Hasbro and Hallmark.  There is also a fairly large store for D23 stuff as you’d expect, though much of the ‘unique’ D23 stuff is actually available only through the disneystore.com website.  They have demo items to see of those, but you can’t actually buy them here. 

Here are some photos from the Disney and Disney sponsored areas:

And here are just a couple from the Disneyana area:

   

Day 1

We were a little late in getting here yesterday due to other work commitments, so I missed the Bob Iger keynote in the morning as well as the latest Legends induction ceremony.  No doubt you’ve seen the pictures of the distinguished list of individuals inducted this year and everybody said Bob did a good job with both his presentation and his MC duties.  No major announcements during that keynote that I heard or that I’ve read, just good solid discussions and about 30 minutes of the upcoming ‘Princess and the Frog’.

We did manage to make it to the Imagineering Legends discussion which was good, with that slightly irreverent fun you get when you get these guys together.

Marty Sklar and Bob Gurr joshed with each other (Marty saying they were still in an ongoing debate from the early 80’s over whether Bob quit or Marty fired him.  *laughs*), while Don Iwerks and Alice Davis had some great stories.  Blaine Gibson had a couple good stories too add too.  And of course you can’t have a good meeting like this without a straight man, which was more than taken care of by X. Atencio!   

I’ll try to get some Day 2 stuff up tomorrow.