More Than Meets the Eye!

This past weekend was one I look forward to throughout the year....the weekend of the annual Transformers convention in Toronto, TFCon!!  I didn't take a lot of pictures but here's a few!

 Ok well I guess I only took pictures for a few minutes while waiting to get into the dealer room.  The above are the two movie cars, Bumblebee and Barricade.  After we were allowed to shop I proceeded to forget all about the camera.  Luckily there are pictures all over the internet for curious parties who know how to use Google.  

Highlights of the convention this year included panels with Paul Eiding, who voiced Perceptor in the original Transformers cartoon and movie, Simon Furman, G1 Comic book writer extraordinaire and my personal favourite, Mr. Gary Chalk!  He was the voice of Optimus Primal in the shows Beast Wars and Beast Machines.  He also did the voice of Prime for all those crappy Japanese overdub shows (of which he complains greatly, so please don't judge his talents by that performance.)    Let's not forget that he played a few characters on another show I love, ReBoot!!!  Of course he's done a billion things besides that, but those are the ones I know and love...

Here's some video someone took of him at the con...

Personally I never wait in line for an autograph from anyone.  However, I happened to just be walking around at the convention and spotted Gary out of the corner of my eye before anyone else had noticed him.  No line up at all yet so I chatted with him for a few moments and got him to sign a picture of Optimus Primal playing an acoustic guitar (Mr. Chalk is also a blues musician...busy guy!)

Well.  That's just Prime...

Just listening to this guy speak takes me back in a big bad way.  Totally worth the $20.00 admission fee.

Of course, I didn't just spend 20 bucks!  I bought a ton of toys...Pictures say it all...

Everything I bought!

Heroic Autobots (plus Spike and Sparkplug!)...

...Evil Decepticons (and Cobra Commander!)

 All in all it was a long but very fun day.  Can't wait for next year!  Oh the winner of coolest thing I bought award definitely goes to the little reflector toy made by third-party company Perfect Effect.  They are really tiny BUT super awesome.  Well worth the cash.

In other news....fellow geek and blogger, not to mention toy designing legend and all around good guy Mr. Ken Lilly needs your help!  He's started a temporary charity program to try and help some disadvantaged kids get some iPads.  There's a whole long back story to this which he tells FAR better than I, so please check out his new website at Mission iPossible. 

 If you can help financially and perhaps even more importantly by spreading awareness for his cause, it would really be great!  Ken's got a really excellent cause going here.  Read his story and you'll see what I mean.  Thanks!