Yesterday I went along to experience my first ever UK film convention. Earlier this year, I visited Wondercon in the US which is the baby sister of the daddy of all movie conventions, Comic Con which is held annually in San Diego. Memorabilia is the smaller convention to the big MCM Expo which takes place in London in October and since I’d missed that, I thought id try and go along to this one at the NEC in Birmingham.
I didn’t really know what to expect but as we arrived, 501st Legion were organising all the costumed characters from numerous movies (primarily Star Wars) that were present at the show which served as a rather cool welcome! You can click the image above to enlarge, see the video below or check out the image gallery which I’ve placed at the bottom of the post.
My primary reason for going along to the event was to see and hopefully chat with Bruce Boxleitner about Tron: Legacy which comes out in December. The only problem was, he’d cancelled and I didn’t know! Rather frustrating but I didn’t let that spoil my trip along as there were a few other people I’d like to chat with including Kiran Shah (Lord of the Rings) Warwick Davis who you’ll know from Star Wars, Willow and more recently, the Harry Potter franchise as the character of Filius Flitwick. Although he didn’t talk about his Potter experience too much in his Q&A, he did talk a lot about his new TV series, Life’s Too Short which he’s making with Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. We also got to see a Memorabilia exclusive clip which showed what we might expect and it was excellent and I highly recommend you checking out the series on the BBC when it’s released on the BBC in the summer next year.
Other highlights from the event was watching the Robots from Robot Wars go at one another, watching the Q&A with Brett the Hitman Heart (which revived many memories of WWF from when I was at junior school!) and just chatting with the stall owners about how passionate they are about what they do.
If you love movies, then these conventions are well worth checking out!
