Reprinted from my LiveJournal entry:

I got to the convention center around 10 a.m.. I was dreading another huge line to pick up pre-ordered passes like there was last year. But there was only a short line this time, probably because it was a Friday and last year when I went, it was a Saturday. In any case, I got my pass with no trouble at all. Even their method for getting passes was far better organized this time...you went to someone who scanned in your confirmation code and that was it.

I tried to call two different people on my cell phone and couldn't reach either one. So I went downstairs to the main hall to go check out the Star Wars pavilion. The "paviilion" was actually the official Star Wars fan club and most of its licensees all grouped together. This year, the Kurt Adler Company, Anthony Grandio, LEGO (which had a huge area set up), Official Pix, Master Replicas, Doring Kindersley, Hasbro, LucasArts, Cingular, and Alienware were all bunched in together, with Scholastic, Gentle Giant, and Dark Horse a short distance away. Sideshow Collectibles was further away, while Acme Archives (Clone Wars cartoon cels) was across the room and it took me a while to find Topps' booth.

Even though the anime/manga fans had their own busy section, and even though there were lots of booths around, the Star Wars pavilion was the biggest and noisiest at the con, and probably the most crowded. The sign above the ShopStarWars booth read, "Star Wars Is Forever."

I poked around the pavilion in search of freebies. They're real stingy with giveaways now, since convention exclusives have become hot collectibles. But that didn't stop me from getting an "I'm A Vader Fan" fan at Sideshow (shaped like Vader's noggin of course), loads of flyers, some promo trading cards from the upcoming ROTS Widevision set, and from Hasbro, a Yoda and an Artoo Galactic Heroes figurine. As for the licensees, I can't wait for the Mpire plush buddies (so cute!), the Spudtrooper, and the Anakin Evolutions set from Hasbro. I must have the Boushh Leia mini-bust as well as the ROTS Anakin Bust Up and, if I can swing it, the Clone Wars Anakin maquette from Gentle Giant.

But there were things you can buy on the spot. Doring Kindersley was promoting its upcoming SW books but was also selling its current ones. I got the ROTS Ultimate Sticker book for $5.50, a show special. Not bad! Then I go by the Official Pix booth, which had piles of stills for only five bucks (the autograph table was located on the other side of the pavilion). Immediately I went for a rare shot of Luke and Leia from TESB, and spun some wheels for a while deciding which other one to get before settling on Evil!Anakin. I was laughing with some other fans about some stills of poor Padmé lying dead on the Polis Massa operating table. Yeah, that'll brighten up your room! For that matter, there were stills of Burning!Anakin as well. Some morbid souls work at Official Pix.

After that, I got into line to get my Holographic Leia pre-ordered figures as well as to pick up the new "Darth Vader Lives: Star Wars Is Forever" t-shirt. I'm actually old enough to remember the "Darth Vadar Lives" shirts so this was a fun throwback to the olden days. Of course it's impossible to have me stare at a bunch of merchandise and not see something else I wanted, so I nabbed an Anakin Mpire Christmas ornament as well. While in line, I chatted a minute with a very busy Mary Franklin, the official fan club president, who remembered me (amazingly) from GenCon in December.

I went over to Acme Archives to get the exclusive General Grievous character key cel, which a guy in my old collector's group wanted. Then I went over to Sideshow's booth. There I held a company rep captive while she listened to me prattle on in a very noisy convention hall about why more Portrait Edition-style dolls is a great idea. Oh well, I gave it a try.

I then trekked over to Artists Alley to see if anyone I knew had a booth there. While wandering around, I spotted a GORGEOUS portrait of Wedding Dress!Padmé at Jason Palmer's booth (his site is at http://www.jasonpalmer.net.) I asked the girl sitting there with Jason Palmer how much the prints were, expecting them to be like $100. She told me a print was twenty bucks and Palmer signed it for me. Sweet!

While trying to get my wallet out of my messenger bag to pay for my hot dog and soda, I got a nasty paper cut from the ROTS Ultimate Sticker book. Ouch! It bled a lot too. Fortunately, I wasn't seized upon by a band of vampire wannabes. After trying unsuccessfully again to call my contacts, I decided to blow by the SDSWS booth to drop off some stuff that was being collected for a soldier's care package. On the way there, I ran into miana_dude for the second time, trying to wrangle people into the Star Wars trivia tournament. There I was politely but firmly moved aside by a British granny who was trying to take pictures of her grandson with some 501st guys...apparently I failed to notice I was in the way. Oops.

After visiting the SDSWS booth, I went back downstairs and into the main hall. There's great people watching at this con, probably the best aside from a Celebration or DragonCon. There were all kinds of oddball costumes, not all of which were terribly flattering. Some of them were kind of funny, such as a very tall Mary Jane with a rather short Spiderman. I noticed that when they took pictures, she scrunched down. There were the usual goths and people with highly uncomfortable-looking piercings. I seemed to be one of three or four people there without a tattoo of some kind. There were the ladies in skimpy costumes, not counting the Slave Leias. I ran into the same guy who was dressed as ROTS Anakin last year, this time there with his girlfriend, who was dressed in Padmé's Mustafar costume. Of course I got a picture!

I ended up at a booth in the back selling lots of posters, t-shirts, and postcards. Imagine four or so SW fans trying to pick through the same crop of ROTS postcards! But I got six of them. At another booth, I glanced a t-shirt that parodied those Absolut vodka ads, this time with "Absolut Sith: Only A Sith Deals In Absolut." Heh heh, cute stuff.

After failing once again to find anyone I was trying to call, I decided to head for Hall H to get a good seat for the SW Spectacular, which was only two hours away. There were lots of people in SW costumes and t-shirts wandering around the con so I wanted to beat the rush. I planted myself in the 8th row on the right from the stage.

Hall H was VERY cold. I kept wishing I brought a jacket. But I suffered through it, first sitting through a barrage of trailers. This was an easily impressed crowd, because they were cheering for everything, even the lame trailers for what looked like lame movies. Okay, so some movies like Narnia got more cheers than others, but still. I saw the King Kong trailer and you can imagine what reaction it got. This is mostly because the words "Peter Jackson" are associated with it. By the looks of it, they went with re-doing the '33 version for kids who either haven't seen it or found its visual effects too crude to really enjoy. This is opposed to the '76 Jessica Lange version that tried to modernize the original. After the trailers, there was Sony's presentation on two of its upcoming movies, Zarustra (?) and the new Zorro sequel. The guy who directed Zarustra, a movie about two kids trapped in their house in space, came out to talk for a while. He talked about using older techniques for some of the visual effects and of course made the obligatory swipe at the prequels' use of CGI, that it wasn't emotionally engaging or something. I booed but miraculously, I wasn't kicked out. Of course, the dude praised Peter Jackson. No prob with using CGI there, right?

If I can go off on a tangent for a second here, I realize it's just one person expressing his opinion, but I have a gut feeling it's a common one in Hollywood. Lucas can never do anything right and when he uses CGI, it's always an example of what sucks in the world, but Jackson is treated like he's Jesus. It's ridiculous and it spelled out to me right then and there that ROTS has NO chance of winning any recognition for its visual effects or anything. None, zip, zero. ILM may as well have used sock puppets and pie tins because it won't make a lick of difference.

After Sony's presentation was Disney's panel. Its baby Narnia had its own panel scheduled for Sunday, so this was for everything else, including a preview of Pirates of the Caribbean 2, Pixar's Cars, the Toy Story 10th anniversary DVD, and the upcoming Sky High. Disney's panel was long and boring, except for Bruce Campbell's apperance during the Sky High chat. The man is hilarious! He's not even afraid of making fun of the dumber questions he was asked, like if if he based all of his characters on Ash from the Evil Dead movies. Definitely see him if he's ever at a convention in your town.

I have to tell you that in between presentations, Comic Con staff would remind you of the house rules, and one of them was to keep lightsabers off during the panels because they were distracting! It shows you how many of them there were at the con.

Before the SW Spectacular got rolling, a mix of SW music played over the loudspeakers. Fans in costumes started filing in and I turned around to see a VERY impressive General Grievous costume. I think this is the guy who took top prize at Celebration III. You should've seen everyone rushing forward to take pictures. Jedi "protesters" were carrying signs saying "Impeach Palpatine" and "Stop the Clone War" (they were from where else, the San Francisco Fan Force).

Steve Sansweet came out and declared it the "summer of Star Wars." ROTS had sold 3/4 of billion tickets worldwide! The first video was of various scenes from ROTS, showing how they looked in the animatics stage and in the final version.

Then there was a short video about Lucasfilm's new digs at the Letterman Digital Center in San Francisco before moving on to news from LucasArts. Battlefront II will be out this fall and it features...the 501st! We saw a short trailer from that game as well as one for an upcoming game called Empire At War that takes place before ANH. And there's an Indiana Jones game in development.

There was a short retrospective of SW animation from the SW Holiday Special's Boba Fett cartoon up to the Clone Wars before Sansweet introduced the new Lucasfilm Animation division, which is based in California and in Singapore. They will be producing the new Clone Wars series, which is set to debut in fall 2007. Sansweet described the show as "anime meets 3D." Sounds great! He also announced some of the folks working on the new show, including Henry Gilroy, who worked on some SW comics for Dark Horse. Lucasfilm Animation is hiring, so send in your resumes .

Next, Matthew "General Grievous" Wood came out to chat few minutes. He's a sound guy at Skywalker Sound and has been there 15 years, but he's also a part-time actor. Grievous's voice-over took five hours to record, the cough is Lucas's (he'd had a bad cough the day they recorded the voice track), and Wood also played Bib Fortuna in TPM as well as other background characters in AOTC. He did a live demo of Grievous's voice complete with coughing. He even sang "Nothing But Star Wars" and "When You Wish Upon A Star" in Grievous's voice!

Then there was news about the ROTS DVD. Sansweet did not announce a release date, which surprised me. However, we were shown one of the deleted scenes that will be on the DVD, the so-called Rebellion scene with the Senators plotting to challenge Palpatine. Smits was very good as was the actress who played Mon Mothma. It's a really good scene and it explains why Padmé asked Anakin to get Palpatine to stop the war. Sansweet mentioned the DVD will also have a new documentary.

Up next was the final ROTS webdoc, "The Journey," about the end of filming the movie and its release to assorted insanity around the world. Lots of laughs, tears, hugs, fans, and memories. It's my favorite of all the webdocs and it darn well better be on the DVD as well.

The presentation ended with a retrospective on the saga. When it became apparent there was going to be no big surprises or stars, people started to leave. Comic Con audiences have become spoiled in that way. But those who stuck around were treated to a Q&A session with Sansweet. Here are some of the highlights;

--6-movie box set is in the future, but not in the immediate future
--Lucas can still change stuff, and it's likely he will in a new box set
--there may be changes to a future edition of the SW encyclopedia
--the ball's is in Disney court as to whether there will be SW Weekends at Disneyland; Lucasfilm would support the idea
--Lucasfilm wants to get the animated series further along in the production process before starting on the live action series
--Young Indiana Jones will be on DVD when the time is right, probably around the time they ramp up stuff for a new IJ movie
--Lucasfilm will not become a big Disney-esque studio; Lucas wants to keep it small
--no plans for an IMAX release
--Rick McCallum has talked of re-releasing all 6 films but it's currently not on the table (so much for that rumor)
--the 3D editions of the films will have to wait until digital expands to more theaters
--canon is a hierarchy, with the movies at the top
--Shaak Ti will be in one of the deleted scenes
--Clone Wars Volume 2 will be on DVD by the end of the year
--prequel "radio" adaptations have been discussed but they're not on the radar now
--they'd love to do another Celebration!

Of course it wouldn't be Comic Con without the doofuses, weirdos, and idiots. One guy complained about there not being any pre-SpEd versions of the movies available on DVD, this girl went up and asked for Sansweet's opinion of the Jedi Knights of Orange County club, and another guy said that the prequel scripts were terrible, so Lucas should write an outline of Episodes 7-9 and have the fans vote on three directors to make them. Where was Bruce Campbell when you needed him?

So thus ended my day at the con. I missed Natalie's "V For Vendetta" presentation and she wasn't at the Spectacular, but I've since found out that she made a surprise visit to the SW pavilion. Apparently, fans were chosen at random from the ShopStarWars line and told to come back for a surprise. The surprise was they got to meet Natalie and take pictures with her. Nat also met up with ex-co-stars Daniel Logan and Ray "Darth Maul" Park. She went up a few points in my book. She could have just headed out of dodge after her panel, but she didn't forget her SW roots after all and even made some time for some fans.

And it was cool to see SW had such a big presence at the con, through the pavilion, the scores of fans in costume or SW t-shirts, and the many, many people wandering around with lightsabers. SW is forever indeed.