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My Very First Convention.
12/17/2024
My Very First Convention.
I hate people. Actually, let me pull that back a little, I only hate some people. Okay, lets retract that, I hate crowds. Of people. In around 2014, I suffered a bit of a mental breakdown. I had severe depression and anxiety that stopped me from leaving the house. And when I did leave the house to, say, do some shopping, I did so later at night when I knew the supermarket would be dead. I just couldn't do crowds, you see, mostly due to the area I lived in, the junkies and the drunkies causing havoc on my street left me with the dire need to stay under my covers and never leave the house. How this actually happened and how it led to me not wanting to be in busy supermarkets, I'm not entirely sure. I was told a possible explanation by a nice young therapist but even then I didn't really understand it. Nor do I remember. Anyway, in 2015, my mum took it upon herself to drag me out of the flat I was living in and I moved in with her. Circumstances have changed and now due to ill health, hers, not mine this time, I am oficially her carer and we're stuck with each other. I will never forget that initial saving, though, and that is exactly what she did. She saved me. What does this have to do with the title of the blog, I hear you ask? Well, I'll tell you. And get out of my room. As a fan of a lot of pop culture, especially from the 1980s, I have always wanted to go to a convention to meet people who made the things I like. As a low income person from a small town in Scottyland, I haven't always had the opporunity. I got to go to New York in 2003 to visit friends of my mum and I did see a film getting shot (Secret Window starring Johhny Depp) albeit briefly from across the road and visited the toy store from Big but that's about it. As the mental illness took control, I gave up hope of, well, anything, really but as I got better and more confident, hope arose again. In October 2022, for my blah-blah-blah'th birthday, my amazing sister and mother, paid for me to go to Scotland Comic-Con in Edinburgh to meet two people I admire greatly. One was James Marsters, he of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fame and Frank Welker, a voice actor I have worshipped since I was a child. Look up Welker's IMDB entry but it would take you two days to read it all, It's massive. Welker, now in his late 70s, started out with Hanna-Barbera in the 1960s, voicing Fred in Scooby Doo, a role he still does today but his resume extends way beyond that. Chances are, if there was a monster or even an ordinary animal in a movie in the 80s and 90s, Welker provided its voice or just its noise. Here are some examples- The monkey in Raiders of the Lost Ark, Stripe in Gremlins, the troll in Cat's Eye, the gopher in Caddyshack 2, the giant bat in Graveyard Shift, Bunny the dog in Husdon Hawk, the Easter Bunny and Station in Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, the Reindeer in The Santa Claus and the Anaconda in...Anaconda. The man is a genius, he has speaking roles too, mostly in TV like Jabberjaw from the show of the same name, Megatron from Transformers and he is the current voice of Scooby Doo, having taken over the role in 2002's What's New, Scooby Doo. Anyway, can you tell I'm a fan? I got a photo taken each with him and James Marsters, it was a good day. Another highlight was walking past James Tolkan and Claudia Wells from my favourite movie, Back to the Future and seeing Tim Capello perform I Still Belive from The Lost Boys live. Sadly, he had a shirt on. It was an amazing day and while I was pretty anxious at first at the sheer amount of people there, I had proven to myself, once and for all, that I could do it. I could face my fear. My fear of people, evil, horrible, nasty buggers that they are. Myself and Frank Welker, look how happy he was to meet me.
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