Coverage: San Diego Con 2004

Updated July 22, 2004

San Diego 2004 Day 4 Writeup
Saturday being the busiest day, we didn't manage to hit all the panels we wanted. In some cases, once you leave a panel room, you'd have to line up to get in again. For Hall H (the main 6000-seat room), the line went out the door and around the convention center itself.

Jump to: Index, Part 1a, Part 1b, Writeup 2, Writeup 3, Part 3, Writeup 4, Part 4, Part 5

Sky Captain
The Sky Captain panel actually started off with Trey Parker and Matt Stone's presentation for their upcoming Team America puppet movie. Team America is a "world police" force, fighting terrorism. This sounds pretty serious until you realize it's all done with puppets, and it definitely has a South Park feel to it. The best quote from the two is probably when they said that they used to hate working with actors, who suck and have their own minds. But after two years of working with puppets, they felt actors weren't so bad, since they can do things like point in the right direction, pick things up with their hands, and walk.

The Sky Captain part of the panel had Jon Avnet (producer), Bai Ling (Mysterious Woman), Jude Law (Sky Captain), and Giovanni Ribisi (Dex). Several clips were shown. One is the current theater trailer. Another was mostly cut from the film, but was an impressive sequence showing the giant robots attacking New York, walking down 5th Avenue, while Polly Perkins (Gwyneth Paltrow's character) frantically took photos and almost got flattened. The last clip showed a squadron of planes diving out of the sky and then, after the propellers all slid from the front of the wing to the back, diving into the ocean and attacking a robot guarding the entrance to the villain's lair.

Lady Death Movie
AD Vision has been hyping their production of the Lady Death movie for a few years now, and this year finally had a viewable version. We caught the encore showing on Saturday night. The creator of the comic, Brian Pulido, was there to present it.

Pulido actually started things off by showing a short horror film he did, about a malevolent garden gnome on a killing spree. While the production values were fairly good, the story was pretty standard. Unfortunately, the same couldn't be said of the Lady Death film itself. The production values seemed pretty low on this. Animation was very jerky for the most part, and the dialogue seemed very clichéd. To be fair, I've never read the comic book, so I don't know how faithful an adaptation this was. In addition, Pulido mentioned that the film was really only 80% complete, so it's possible that the final cut will be much more polished. As it was, we left before the end of the movie, bored.