Down to the dealer room at about 9am (half an hour after it had opened, so I was a little later than I had planned)... I took photos of the art display, and more of the Hasbro display, as I knew that I wouldn't have much time at the end of the day (I would be in the panel room for the entire day, from 10am to 5pm).
Presentation panels for Saturday were:
- Gen1 Voice Actors Dan Gilverzan & Buster Jones.
- IDW comics
- Animated with Derrick Wyatt
- Voice Actors David Kaye & Garry Chalk
- Collector Club
- Hasbro products
- Peter Cullen (Voice of Optimus Prime)
Photos and info from those panels will be done up on a separate webpage here (not there yet).
The interesting non-news event for the day though was the Hall of Fame dinner and Casino/Auction night.
The main course (with a salad before, and a baked cheesecake after) was chicken with veges...
And the commemorative "plaque" card.
The dinner started at 7pm, and about 40 minutes later, the HoF awards were announced... starting with the 3 known robot inductees (Grimlock, Jazz, Shockwave), then the two human inductees (Simon Furman, Chris Latta), and finally the fan-choice winner - Wheeljack.
At about 8.30, the dinner ended, and everyone was now able to spend the next 2 & 1/2 hours "earning" casino dollars, to bid with at the Auction just after 11pm.
I raced out to queue up at the usual $20 "random prize" table (you pay $20 for a chance to win a BotCon exclusive figure, or extra casino-dollars), and after no success in previous years, I managed to win a toy - which is your choice out of whatever is left on the prize shelf. Since I'm not missing any BotCon toys, I looked through the pile for the most valuable one left... I found the Sweeps 3-pack, which I think was the best of the ones there.
So for a $20 fee, I walked away with a $200 set of toys.
I went back up to my room for a couple hours, as I wasn't too interested in playing any gambling games (and end up losing the "dollars" I now had - $4,200). I actually thought that that would be a decent amount for the auction, until Brian ended up auctioning off half the items to the 7 or 8 kids in the room of 300 people. As such, when the adults were allowed to bid on the remaining items, nothing went for less than 6,000 casino-dollars. (only a half dozen kiddie items were supposed to be restricted to the kids, but Brian just kept auctioning off all the toys, to such a saturated point, that kids were winning expensive items and Lots with just 200 casino-dollars.
There were a lot of unhappy adult bidders, who were prevented from bidding on on non-kiddie items they wanted, and then missed out on the remaining items because of all the Casino-dollars still in play for that small amount of items.
I was annoyed as well, because there were a couple items I was interested in, but didn't have a chance with the amount I had to play with. But if I hadn't won that 3-pack of Sweeps, I would have been really peeved.
Actually, before the auction started, the winners of the art competition were announced first, at 11.25pm, with the auction starting 10 minutes later.
The auction ended at 12.30, and I went straight up to my room, and pretty much went to sleep soon after.
One day left to go...and as usual, the convention was going by way too fast.
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