The following events took place between Thursday, July 20, 7:00 PM and Friday, July 21, 12:00 AM.

There is so much going on at any point during the San Diego Con that I can’t possibly see everything I’d like to see. In fact, since Comic-Con posts its schedule on its website over a week before the con starts, before I go I work out my own schedule, deciding what I should see among the many possible choices.

For example, I was tempted to see the panel promoting Who Wants to Be a Superhero?, Stan Lee’s new reality show (which would debut the following week on the Sci-Fi Channel), but decided against it since it was on at the same time as the Warner Brothers Pictures panel featuring Superman Returns director Bryan Singer, whom I had never seen in person. Moreover, having no particular interest in reality shows, I doubted that I’d like this one.

I’m glad I went to see Singer, but after the Con was over, I ended up watching each episode of Who Wants to Be a Superhero?. The show was more fun than I’d expected, and as New York Times critic Virginia Heffernan observed in her August 3, 2006 review, it actually deals with serious ideas.

I am particular interested in the way that Stan Lee defined being a superhero on the show. One contestant, Iron Enforcer, seemed to have modeled himself on a certain strain of superhero from the 1990s: he wire an enormous gun on one hand, and was accused of using steroids to amplify his musculature (which he did not deny). Stan Lee repeatedly instructed one contestant, Iron Enforcer, that “Superheroes don’t kill people; they save people.” It is primarily because Iron Enforcer didn’t share that philosophy that Mr. Lee expelled him from the heroes’ ranks in Episode 2, and then, significantly, recruited him to become the show’s first supervillain, a role that Iron Enforcer (renamed Dark Enforcer) eagerly embraces.

And just how would Mr. Lee’s rule that superheroes do not kill apply to Wolverine? The Punisher? Cable? The Spectre? Even Wonder Woman following her recent murder of Maxwell Lord?

But wait, there’s more. In Episode 3 Mr. Lee tested the contestants’ determination to protect their secret identities. Most of them failed the test, and Mr. Lee expelled one of them, Monkey Woman, who revealed her real name to a stranger without even being asked. Mr. Lee informed the contestants that superheroes never reveal their secret identities, and, as examples, told them that Clark Kent and Peter Parker would never give away their other identities.

So, presumably Episode 3 was made before Mr. Lee found out that Spider-Man publicly revealed his secret identity in Marvel’s current Civil War series.

For that matter, by the end of Episode 3 Mr. Lee is telling the contestants that one of the main virtues of a superhero is “self-sacrifice,” and that a superhero would never turn against his fellow superheroes. And just how does Civil War, in which Iron Man and his allies side with the government against Captain America and his allies fit Stan’s standards?

It’s all very interesting, as I said. It’s also satisfying for me to see Stan Lee on his television show upholding standards for superheroes that the comics increasingly disdain.

Moreover, like so many other reality shows, Who Wants to Be a Superhero? strikes me as being a glorification of that signature feature of the contemporary American economy, downsizing. Like shows such as Survivor, Who Wants to Be a Superhero? begins by gathering contestants into a community; in this case, they live together in a secret headquarters called the Lair. In Episode 3 Stan Lee tests them by asking each of them who he or she thinks ought to be expelled next. Most of the contestants pass the test by refusing to turn against the others and offering themselves as the sacrificial lamb instead (hence Mr. Lee’s theme of self-sacrifice). When Mr. Lee expels Tyveculus, other contestants are upset, since they clearly liked and even admired him. You might think that among the virtues of superheroes are teamwork and a sense of duty and devotion to one’s community. But the show has no room for any of that: the community must be destroyed. The boss must whittle the group down until only one remains to be declared the victor.

This is not how, say, Professor Xavier runs the X-Men. It’s as if when Captain America took over leadership of Stan Lee’s new Avengers team of Hawkeye, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch back in the mid-1960s, he decided that after each adventure he’d fire one of them until only one was left. Avengers Disassemble!

THURSDAY 7:00 PM

With 21st century pop culture aggressively celebrating the end of community, it’s rewarding to see the opposite argument being made. So, following Mark Evanier’s interview of Jerry Robinson at Comic-Con, I walked over to Room 6B for “ASIFA Presents: Dream On Silly Dreamer.” (As a former English teacher I know the title should have a comma, but it doesn’t.)

Later I looked up ASIFA’s website and discovered that the acronym stands for Association International du Film d’Animation, or the International Animated Film Association. Please note that while there is an international association of animation professionals, and American comic strip artists have the National Cartoonists Society, there is no national organization for American comic book professionals, despite past efforts to establish one.

As for Dream On Silly Dreamer, this is a forty minute documentary which chronicles how the Walt Disney Company stopped doing hand-drawn (“2D”) animation, the artform that founder Walt Disney and his colleagues had taken to such heights, and laid off most of the company’s animation professionals in the process.

What struck me watching the Comic-Con screening of this documentary were the many, continual parallels between the events it records and the Boom and Bust in the American comic book industry in the 1990s.

Dream On Silly Dreamer begins on a note of quiet but nonetheless cutting irony, using that favorite device from the opening of classic Disney animated films, the on-screen storybook, from which characters come to animated life. More specifically, Dream On’s opening alludes to the traditional start of Disney’s animated Winnie the Pooh featurettes (an opening that has been dropped in more recent Pooh pictures), with the storybook set in a cozy room with playthings, and an unseen narrator with a mellifluous voice. In this case the animated character is a boy who represents a typical animation professional who loves Disney animated films as a child and dreams of working for the animation studio one day. This, of course, is no different from the many comics professionals whose imaginations were fired by the DC and Marvel comics they read growing up. And Dream On’s animated opening makes clear that disaster awaits its “silly dreamer.”

The film’s story starts in the mid-1980s, when corporate Disney banished animation from the very building in Burbank that Walt Disney himself had constructed for the animation staff. (One of the documentary’s interviewees, ink and paint artist Carmen Sanderson, started at Disney in the 1940s and hence knows whereof she speaks when discussing the days when Walt was alive. Despite her name, she’s no relation to me, as far as I know.) The animation department was shunted off to a trailer park in Glendale. Management was treating the creative artists poorly, but the animation pros remained dedicated to their work. Characteristically, these creative people had gotten into the business not to make big bucks, but out of their love for the artform. One interviewee asks in the film, “How many people can say that they’re paid to do what they love to do?”

In the service of their art, the Disney animation professionals worked incredibly long hours, as they recall in the film, not as complaints but with palpable nostalgia. And it would not have taken much for management to make them feel appreciated. Onscreen interviewees happily recall how, when the films they worked on early in Michael Eisner’s reign as head of Disney were successful, management would give them special caps and jackets as perks. (It’s like the way we used to get free Marvel and DC comics, or get invited to the companies’ annual Christmas parties.)

Starting with The Little Mermaid in 1989, Disney animation began a renaissance, producing a series of films that were both critically and commercially successful. With films such as Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast (1991), and Aladdin (1992), Disney Animation was turning out a string of triumphs not unlike Pixar’s ongoing parade of successes. The colossal, unexpected commercial success of The Lion King in 1994 demonstrated that animated features could earn as much as live action blockbusters. (Here I am reminded of how first issues of certain comics in the early 1990s would sell millions of copies.)

With this boom in Disney animation (which paralleled the boom going on simultaneously in comics), top animation professionals benefited financially. Disney animation pros would get extraordinarily big bonuses, enough to buy a new car. (This reminds me of two of my friends in comics, who used immense royalty checks to make a down payment on a house, knowing that this was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.) When Jeffrey Katzenberg, the executive who oversaw animation, was driven from Eisner’s Disney, he co-founded DreamWorks and set up a rival animation studio there. Now DreamWorks, as well as other studios seeking to make Lion King-level money by getting into animation, were competing for the services of top Disney animation pros. (Would DreamWorks Animation be the counterpart of Image Comics in the 1990s, then?)

The Eisner administration built a brand new building for the animation department in California, presumably as a reward and tribute for the department, but characteristically designed it without consulting the animators themselves as to what they needed. (I would be surprised if Marvel editorial had been consulted on the layout of their most recent facilities.) In the film one animation staffer describes the new building as “a postmodern gas chamber.”

Leading animators were offered enormous salaries, and started getting agents and lawyers. (Although in one of the film’s most telling anecdotes, an animator recalls asking to make in one year what Eisner made in an hour, and Disney wouldn’t pay him that much!) Naturally, newly enriched animators spent their money; as in the comics boom, no one seems to have acted as if this would all come to an end.

But so it did. Dream On does not delve into the question of whether or why Disney Animation may have lost some of the creative imagination that energized the now-classic films of its renaissance, or whether there were now so many animated features being produced by Disney, DreamWorks and other competitors that the market was becoming glutted. But Dream On does contend that now that animated films had proved they could make so much money, corporate Disney installed “creative executives” (who, the film suggests, were not so creative) to micromanage the process of making these movies. (I think of Marvel executive Bill Jemas’s taking such a strong hand in the creative process during his short-lived reign there.) Just as new Marvel executives had inflated expectations for comics sales, based on the boom, Disney executives expected their animated films to rival the grosses of The Lion King.

At the same time corporate Disney insisted on grinding out as much animation as possible. A particular source of complaint are Disney’s many mediocre direct-to-video sequels to its animated classics, which are regarded as “weakening the brand.” Sounds like all the 1990s spinoffs of successful books like X-Men and Spider-Man, doesn’t it?

While new Disney animated films fell short of corporate expectations, Disney’s new partner Pixar was achieving blockbuster successes with its computer animated features. As this column has noted in the past, corporate Disney decided that the fault was not in themselves but in the medium. Hence, as Dream On records, on March 25, 2002, Thomas Schumacher, who was then Disney’s president of Feature Animation, held a meeting at the Burbank animation building to inform the staff that most of them were being laid off. The animation department was being downsized to a single unit, which ended up doing only CGI animation. As the documentary states, Disney’s animation studios in Burbank, Paris, Tokyo, and Orlando were all closed: “1300 dreamers gone.”

Many of the reviews of Dream On Silly Dreamer that I’ve read run the same quotation from interviewee Jacki Sanchez, who was an in-betweener at Disney. It’s so good that I’m going to run it, too: she says she told Disney management about animation that “You have the London Philharmonic at your disposal and you want to turn it into a boy band.”

One interviewee in the film says, “I’ve never seen a place devastated as much as I have the last few weeks.” I have, having witnessed two of Marvel’s major downsizings in the 1990s, and having been the victim of the second. These were other examples of creative personnel taking the fall for the mismanagement by corporate executives.

One of the interviewees says in the film, “I will do everything in my power not to go to the real world.” This is familiar, too: it is a professional’s determination not to leave the creative artform he loves, and to find a way to continue participating in it. It’s what I feel about comics.

Towards the end of Dream On, there is a shot that alludes to the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), with “2D” animation equipment crated up for storage. It turns out that some animators ended up buying their own animation tables from Disney. The corporate mindset never conceives that its current decision–no more “2D” animation–might someday be reversed.

But in fact, with Pixar’s John Lasseter now in charge of Disney Animation, hand-drawn animation may be making a limited comeback. Following the screening of Dream On Silly Dreamer at Comic-Con, there was a panel to discuss, among other things, whether there is now a happy ending to the saga of “2D” animation at Disney. The moderator was Larry Loc, of ASIFA-Hollywood’s board of directors, and the panelists included Dream On’s writer/director Dan Lund, its producer Tony West, and a number of the film’s onscreen interviewees, including Jacki Sanchez, artist Kris Heller, animator John Tucker, and several others. (Unfortunately, from where I was sitting in this large room, I couldn’t see the cards with the panelists’ names, so I won’t be able to name some of the speakers I quote below.)

Loc began by asking the panelists what they were doing now. The answers reminded me yet again of what happened to the generation of comics professionals who experienced the Bust of the 1990s. Some panelists were back at Disney, either on staff or as a freelancer: one had only returned to Disney six weeks before. Tony West said he did work at a small animation studio in Orlando. Dan Lund was working on videogames for Microsoft but said he was still “looking for work.” One of the people now freelancing for Disney admitted to being “out of work more often” than working. One panelist was still at Disney, where he had been “trained in digital animation.” but hoped he could soon return to working on “2D” animation there. In contrast, the next panelist said the “studio wanted to train me in digital,” but he “realized I drew all my life” and retired instead.

What effect will Lasseter’s arrival have on Disney Animation? Panelists’ reactions ranged from cautious to enthusiastic optimism. One panelist said the mood at Disney Animation was “depressing” when he left, but that “the mood is a lot different now,” and there was “some hope” with Pixar people in charge. He said there was now talk of Disney doing a 2D animated film that would be “paperless but drawn.” (It was later explained that this meant drawn on a computer.)

The retired animator labeled CGI an “evolution of puppetry” and contended that drawn animation is a “different artform.” He thought that Lasseter wanted to do 2D animation and that the “studio will turn around.”

Yet another animator next guy said that “John [Lasseter] is bringing back a lot of traditional values” and “has real passion for animation,” adding that a “lot of that passion has been sorely missing for the last five years.” Referring to the documentary, this panelist commented that “people who animate on paper have a passion. When I animate I have a connection between my soul and that paper. It’s quite different between that mouse and that monitor. It’s real hard to feel connected then.” (I wonder if CGI animators feel differently about this.) This panelist seemed caught between optimism and caution, saying he “thinks we’ll get that passion back” but also “I hope it’s coming back.”

Casting caution aside, another panelist said he was “really excited about what I’m reading and hearing” and hoped that “Lasseter will be the “savior” of the animation industry. Jacki Sanchez said simply, “God bless John Lasseter.”

Intriguingly, the panel revealed that some footage from the 1980s that had been incorporated into the documentary had been shot by Lasseter, and that Lasseter had never admitted he had been fired from Disney until after he had taken over Disney Animation.

Loc declared that it was “a gutsy thing to do” to make Dream On. “It was quite a risk” for both the filmmakers and the interviewees who appeared in it, since, Loc said, they could have been “blackballed. . .forever.” Loc spoke about the great Disney animator Bill Tytla (animator of Chernobog the demon in Fantasia’s “Night on Bald Mountain” [1940], among other triumphs), who was blackballed for his role in the 1941 Disney strike and “spent the rest of his life trying to get back into Disney.” (But later during the panel discussion Sanchez commented before answering one question, “I’m already blackballed.”) Loc even said he thought that Dream On “had a small part” in bringing about Lasseter’s new role at Disney.

Loc opened up the discussion to questions from the audience. One audience member made the familiar argument that Pixar’s great success is not because audiences prefer “3D” to “2D” animation, but because Pixar is better at crafting stories than Disney has recently been. Jacki Sanchez responded that they “would repeat this over and over” but the argument “fell on deaf ears.” She asserted that “people were creatively shackled the last few years we were there,” and that the “creative executives” were “in charge.”

On the subject of Disney’s direct-to-video sequels to past animated films, Loc disparaged them as “electronic babysitters for the kids.” Sanchez added that “Disney loves” the videos since they’ve “already got the character designs” and the other concept work from the original films. “It’s like pure profit,” she said, “and they don’t really care. . .that they’re going to be bad.” (Now I find myself thinking of the way that Warners Animation recently recycled Bruce Timm’s character designs for the dreadful direct-to-video Superman: Brainiac Attacks.)

Towards the end of the panel Dan Lund was asked why he made Dream On Silly Dreamer. Lund’s answer was that “Disney doesn’t seem to value their own history the way we do.” (Do I have to mention this is yet another parallel to comics?) He began shooting the film even before the layoffs were announced in the Schumacher meeting, since he could see the end coming. Lund compared what he was doing to Steven Spielberg’s interviews with Holocaust survivors, to preserve their memories. Lund said that he wanted “to record memories of good times before people only thought about layoffs.”

Lund noted that the Disney layoffs occurred around the same time that Seinfeld and Friends came to an end, to great fanfare in the media. Lund said that he “saw no tribute to Disney animators” who were leaving, so he made the film “not to save animation or to embarrass Disney,” but “to remember how lucky we were.” Lund said, “We had a great ride.” He also said that “If we didn’t throw ourselves a party, nobody would.”

Lund and West are selling DVDs of Dream On Silly Dreamer, complete with added special features, and you can find out more at www.dreamonsillydreamer.com. Quick Stop editor Ken Plume wrote a perceptive review of their documentary at our old website, as you can see at http://filmforce.ign.com/articles/571/571987p1.html.

And I wonder when and if somebody will do a book or documentary about the rise and fall of the Baby Boom generation of comic book professionals.

THURSDAY 8:30 PM

Entering Room 20, Comic-Con’s second largest panel room, I came face to helmet with a gun-wielding Imperial Stormtrooper, who ordered me to keep moving down the aisle. Other Stormtroopers stood along the stage, keeping watch over the entering fans. The Stormtroopers really aren’t all that different from Comic-Con’s own security squad, the Elite red shirts.

The Stormtroopers onstage finally gave way to Steve Sansweet, head of Lucasfilm fan relations, and the annual “Star Wars Fan Film Awards” ceremony commenced. I had attended these awards back in 2003 (see “Comics in Context” #5) and had been surprised at how much fun I had. I had been somewhat concerned that short films inspired by Star Wars might prove too obsessive, too downright (dare I say it) geeky for my taste. I shouldn’t have worried: both in 2003 and this year, the best of the prize winners were genuinely inspired, inventive and funny comedies. In fact, the sharpness of the satire indicates that the filmmakers have enough perspective on the Star Wars mythos to keep from toppling into stereotypically fannish blind devotion to the material.

Among my favorites at this year’s awards was the winner for “Best Commercial Parody,” Blue Milk, directed by William Grammer (which you can see at http://filmforce.ign.com/articles/571/571987p1.html). In it Princess Leia, as a small child (complete with her awful headphones hairstyle from Episode 4), touts the planet Tatooine’s Bantha Blue Milk. Already a political firebrand (So that’s how she became a senator in her teens!), little Leia launches into a tirade against the Empire’s own brand of Blue Milk, until some Imperial Stormtroopers intervene. Sci-fi fascism can be funny.

Both the Audience Choice Award and the George Lucas Selects Award went to Pitching Lucas, directed by Shane Felux (http://www.atomfilms.com/af/content/pitching_lucas). The latter award was once again announced from on high by Lucas himself, appearing on an enormous videoscreen. (I have just noticed that Mr. Lucas’s initials are GL, in a coincidental link with a certain comic book series.)

No, Pitching Lucas is not about baseball in space. In it, Lucas (portrayed by a lookalike actor) meets with several men in business suits whom Dream On Silly Dreamer might characterize as creative executives. Each of these suits in turn “pitches” a proposal for a TV series based on the Star Wars mythos. As we see in brief clips of the proposed shows, each is a cheesy ripoff of a 1970s TV series: The Sith Million Dollar Man, DIPs (based on CHIPs), and George’s Angels. Lucas reacts by calmly subjecting each Hollywood hack to a form of death from his Star Wars movies.

Pitching Lucas is not only amusing and imaginative, but also has some serious themes. Obviously, it skewers the mediocre mindset of executive-think, and it pays humorous tribute to the real George Lucas’s refusal to compromise his creative vision. Moreover, as stated on this short’s website, “we get a glimpse into the director’s dark side.” Maybe Felix intended Pitching Lucas merely as a joke, but it serves as a reminder that not only the heroism and ideals but also the violence and villainy in the Star Wars movies are products of Lucas’s imagination. After all, he did choose to center the new trilogy on Darth Vader. In Pitching Lucas the title character effectively becomes Vader and even Jabba the Hut, complete with his retinue, including the first of the women I’d see at this year’s Comic-Con in Leia’s slave girl costume.

One of my favorite shorts in the 2003 Award ceremony was director Trey Stokes’ Pink Five, in which Stacey, a Valley Girl type, pilots one of the Rebel fighters during Episode 4’s conclusion, but is so self-obsessed that she is virtually oblivious to the warfare all around her. Pink Five won the George Lucas Selects award three years ago, and since then Stokes and actress Amy Earhart, who plays Stacey, have collaborated on three more Pink Five shorts, all of which were shown at this year’s award ceremony. In fact, Sansweet made clear that the finishing touches were put on the latest Pink Five short only hours before the ceremony began.

The successive Pink Five shorts take Stacey further through the original Star Wars trilogy, in which her exploits parallel and parody those of both Luke and Leia. Hence, in Pink Five Strikes Back (2004) Stacey gets her own training from Yoda on Dagobah, and in a concluding preview of the next short, appears in Leia’s now-iconic slave girl outfit (earning well-deserved wolf whistles from the Comic-Con audience). When Pink Five Strikes Back quotes Yoda and Obi-Wan’s celebrated exchange from The Empire Strikes Back that there is “one other” hope for the Rebellion besides Luke, it now seems they’re talking about Stacey!

Moreover, the Pink Five shorts take on a similar relationship to the real Star Wars movies as playwright Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead has to Hamlet. In both cases the audience sees a classic work through the perspective of one or more minor comedic characters. The Pink Five series shows us what might have happened “offstage” during Lucas’s films, just as Stoppard invents new scenes that purportedly take place during or between the scenes Shakespeare shows us in Hamlet. In each case the new perspective transforms epic drama into farce, and makes familiar characters look rather more foolish than they do in the original works. Luke, Leia and Han never appear onscreen in the Pink Five shorts, but Yoda, the ghost of Obi-Wan, the Emperor and even Darth Vader do, losing considerable gravitas but becoming funny in the process. One of the high points of comedy is the Emperor and Vader’s befuddled reaction when Stacey informs them that Leia is Luke’s sister.

So far Stokes and Earhart have taken two shorts to parody Return of the Jedi: Return of Pink Five, Vol. 1 (2005) and Return of Pink Five, Vol. 2, which debuted at this year’s ceremony. These are less consistently funny than the original short, in part because Stokes and Earhart have become much more ambitious. The shorts have become more elaborate visually, with persuasive recreations of costumes and sets, a convincing Yoda, and additional actors playing Obi-Wan and other familiar characters.

The later shorts also aim to construct more of a storyline and to give Stacey a less superficial characterization. Now Stacey claims to be Han Solo’s girlfriend, although it is unclear whether her relationship is merely a figment of her hyperactive imagination. Hence, Stacey is so peeved at Princess Leia (whom she dubs “Princess Hairstyle” at one point) that she is willing to get even by collaborating with the Empire (hence her meeting with Vader and Palpatine). However, it seems that Stacey has good instincts that lead her into aiding the Ewoks in their forest battle against Imperial forces. The best gags in the later shorts rise to the height of those in the first, including Stacey’s discovery of the vulnerability of all the Empire’s war machines that should have been obvious to all of us on first seeing the original trilogy.

For various reasons, including length and the use of professional actors, the Pink Five shorts are no longer part of the Star Wars Fan Film Awards competition. But Stokes and Earhart appeared onstage to present their latest short out of competition and to receive a special prize, brought out by a young woman wearing Stacey’s costume from the first Pink Five. (Earhart turns out to be genetically suited to playing a pilot: she is related to Amelia Earhart.)

Return of Pink Five Vol. 2 ends with the onscreen message that it is to be continued in Return of Pink Five Vol. 3, so there is still more to come. And you can find more about the whole Pink Five series at http://www.trudang.com/pinkfive/.

Dream On Silly Dreamer was about the corporate destruction of an artistic community, but I noticed that part of its Comic-Con audience was particularly enthusiastic, and i assume they were fellow animation professionals, who had come out to support the film. Corporate decisions can’t put an end to the bonds of friendship and shared views among individuals.

Similarly, the Star Wars Fan Film Awards impress me as being another celebration of community: an enthusiastic audience and talented filmmakers, who, in this case are actively being encouraged by Lucasfilm. This is what I like to see.

THURSDAY 11:00 PM

With the close of the Star Wars Fan Film Awards ceremony, I headed out of the Convention Center and easily found a taxi outside the San Diego Marriott next door.

FRIDAY 12:00 AM

I got back to my own hotel, the Coronado Island Marriott Resort in time to watch Martin Short’s appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman.

Awaiting me after a night’s sleep was my first venture this year into the San Diego Con’s humongous Hall H, as you shall see next week.

–Copyright 2006 Peter Sanderson

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