SAN DIEGO: Rebecca Wagner decided to fly out from Kansas to attend the country’s largest pop-culture gathering this weekend when she learned that Dana Snyder would be there, too.
For those readers who do not follow the “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” cartoon series on TV as closely as Wagner does — which would be almost all of you — Dana Snyder is the voice of Master Shake, a hipper-than-thou talking beverage on the show. When Wagner isn’t developing Web sites at her KU job, she maintains a fan site for Snyder. “Yeah,” says Wagner, laughing, “I’m the hard-core nerd.”
But she’s a different kind of nerd. Brainy, pretty and ironic, Wagner blows away the stereotype of the pasty-skinned white male with a closet full of comic books that once defined this convention that is expected to draw 100,000 over its four days.
In recent years Hollywood has discovered the amazing power of word-of-mouth or “viral” marketing that fans like Wagner represent. That’s made Comic-Con a magnet for film studios and TV networks that bring their stars to San Diego to interact with fans and to hype upcoming high-profile releases with sneak previews and giveaways.
“I think people are realizing that the fans who come to Comic-Con aren’t such a niche anymore,” says Michael Shames, supervising producer of “Attack of the Show” on the G4 cable channel. “It really is the mainstream.”
That’s why NBC is here screening its fall series “Heroes,” a drama about young people who are starting to discover their superpowers, two months before its air date.
It’s why CBS is doing much the same to promote “Jericho,” its apocalyptic drama set in Kansas and why the studio that produced “Snakes on a Plane,” installed a huge fanged snake’s mouth that convention-goers can walk through.
While comic book collectors and sellers carry on their business quietly at one end of the huge San Diego Convention Center exhibit hall, the midsection is a cacophony of movie and film displays with powerful sound systems and plasma screens galore.
At the CBS booth, you can also sit on a piece of rooftop and have your picture taken re-enacting the promotional poster from “Jericho,” where a child stares at a mushroom cloud on the horizon.
IFC has set up a living-room environment for screening the trailer to its upcoming documentary “This Film Is Not Yet Rated.”
At the two-story Spike TV booth, fans this weekend can meet the cast of the new “Blade: The Series,” as well as pro wrestlers featured on the channel.
“We’re reaching our audience and telling them what we’re doing,” said Debra Fazio, senior director of communications for Spike, which is at Comic-Con for the first time. “People are going to get excited and start talking about it.”
On Thursday, hundreds of Comic-Con attendees were toting oversized shopping bags with ads urging them to watch the shows “Supernatural” and “Smallville.” Those air on the new CW network, which has bet big on word of mouth to promote its low-rated programs.
Those bags will fill with free swag and promotional materials that will go home with the Comic-Con crowd, generating buzz for upcoming TV shows, movies, DVDs, video games, toys and even the occasional comic book.
Another newbie, Warner Bros., is featuring all sorts of things it thinks will have cool cachet. That includes its upcoming video game based on the Justice League and its venture with AOL called in2TV, which will stream hundreds of classic TV shows over the Web.
The cast of “Veronica Mars,” another fan favorite the CW picked up, are at Comic-Con today. The company’s executive vice president of worldwide marketing, Lisa Gregorian, predicts “it’s going to be crazy here” when Kristen Bell and her “Mars” co-stars arrive. Fan intensity, Gregorian says, can “keep a show alive for many years.”
The Sci-Fi Channel’s “booth” is an enormous piece of bluish molded plastic that looks like a broken-off piece of a spaceship. “It’s whatever your imagination wants it to be,” a Sci-Fi worker says. For most Comic-Con-goers, it served as a park bench to rest and watch a “Eureka” promo or pick up a “Stargate” button before roaming the aisles again.
Among the shows Sci-Fi was promoting this week is “Battlestar Galactica,” one of the best early examples of how buzzmaking at Comic-Con helped bring about surprising results.
Seven years ago one of the stars of the original 1970s version of “Galactica,” Richard Hatch, began a campaign to have the show revived as a movie or TV series. Spending $25,000 of his own money, Hatch put together a special effects-laden trailer for a new “Galactica” and showed it to thousands of attendees at the 1999 Comic-Con.
The room went wild. It was a memorable moment and gave added momentum to the effort to bring back the show, which has become a critic’s favorite and a cult sensation. Hatch wasn’t involved in its production, but he has appeared on the new “Galactica.”
Hatch was back at this year’s convention as part of a Thursday panel promoting the new and classic “Galactica” and his own graphic novel The Great War of Magellan. The crowd loudly begged him to play the old trailer again. Reaching into his carry bag for the DVD, he obliged.
That craving to relive the past, even if “the past” is the late 1990s, fuels a lot of what goes on at Comic-Con, from the well-attended panels with old-time comic artists to the selling of DVDs, toys and other mementoes.
“Comic-Con made it cool to buy this kind of stuff,” said Charles Hymes, who has been attending since he was a young boy growing up in San Diego. “You could get your Luke Skywalker action figure here in 1980.”
In her first few hours at Comic-Con, Wagner said she spent “a couple hundred” dollars on show-related merchandise. Her boyfriend, Chuck Warren — they met on the Adult Swim Web site — says, “I think someone finally got the word that there are a lot of us here and we have money to spend.”
See a slideshow of my pics from Comic-Con 2006
Watch Comic-Con
To see more from the 2006 Comic-Con in San Diego, tune to the G4 cable channel, which is airing “Comic-Con Live” from the convention through Tuesday. (It repeats several times.) G4 is on digital cable; it’s Channel 216 on Time Warner Cable/Kansas City. It also offers free video of its shows at iTunes and on g4tv.com.
‘Everwood’ forever
Sometimes the power of fandom can work in reverse, when studios give up on a project before its core audience is ready for it to end.
The CW network discovered that this spring when it declined to pick up the drama “Everwood.” Outraged fans have since bombarded the network with e-mails, letters and pine cones (the show is set in Colorado). They have started save-everwood.org and collected thousands of dollars toward raising a Ferris wheel in a Burbank parking lot -- echoing an elaborate show of affection one of the characters made in the final scene of the show’s final episode.
“We want the world to know that we love ‘Everwood,’ ” explained Michelle Sapp of save-everwood.org.
Barry Mitchell writes:
Katie should take her "Listening Tour" to San Diego and call it Couric-Con.
Posted by: Aaron | July 22, 2006 at 12:56 PM