Comic-Con versus Expo: You Pays Your Money and You Takes Your Choice.

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If you had a mind to attend conventions concerning Disney matters this summer, you had a plethora of choices, the two largest of which were the Big Daddy San Diego Comic-Con (SDCC,) and the Little Sister D23 Expo. Both offered a number of panels, star showings, and generous helpings of merchandise, but which one should earn a place on your calendar for next year? Well, both, if you can swing it, but barring that, here are some comparisons I noted.

Crowd management: Let’s get the elephant out of the room: Both conventions involved a lot of people. A LOT of people. There is actually both good and bad to this–on the one hand, people are good when they’re holding your place in line so you can make a run to the restroom, or happily cosplaying…

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…but not so good when they’re knifing you in the eye with a pen (http://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/Comic-99180289.html) over a seat.

At the Expo, people were made to wait in pretty long lines–some people reported waiting something like two hours just to get inside the venue. Upstairs, for the panel discussions, there was usually an entire room filled with a line of people waiting to get into a room, another line of people waiting on standby to get in, and sometimes more people lined up in the hallway in hopes of something miraculously opening up after the standby line had closed. Usually you were looking at a two+ hour wait if you wanted to be reasonably sure of getting in.

This is a lot of people, certainly, but that’s just peanuts compared to SDCC. In the first place, all of the tickets for all of the days at SDCC sold out about half a year earlier, compared to the Expo’s one. In the second, SDCC presold parking, and most of the parking lots immediately around the San Diego Convention Center sold out pretty early, at prices over twice as much as the Anaheim Convention Center was charging. For the third, as I was walking over the first morning from the parking shuttle, a large grassy area outside the convention center was completely covered with tents providing shade for a huge line that filled the whole area. It turned out to be a line of people waiting for a presentation in the main ballroom that wasn’t going to take place for around four hours later.

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You can say the Expo lines were long, because they were, but only at SDCC have I ever waited in lines so long, they extended outside the building, to the point where I was no longer even on the same side of the block as the room I was trying to enter.

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The advantage SDCC had however, was that, as a much larger event, it had way more people working to register people and many more rooms of programming available as alternate programming.

Programming: For the Disney enthusiast, it was kind of slim pickings at the SDCC this year, as Disney more or less pulled a lot of its content to save for its own convention. Don Hahn was supposed to give a talk on creativity (the same talk he later gave at Expo,) but that was cancelled. Their main representation at the Con was on the main floor, in the booths.

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Most of what they displayed was from their TV and Marvel branches, with the heaviest pushes going for the Avengers franchise and their upcoming ABC series, Pan Am.

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While there weren’t a ton of Disney celebrities present, there were a few familiar faces present–such as former Chairman of Walt Disney Studios, Dick Cook…

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Disney Legend (and voice of Goofy,) Bill Farmer…

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And one I didn’t know, Chuck McCann, the original voice of Dreamfinder.

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Meanwhile, at the Expo, all the panels were of course, Disney-related…assuming you could get in to them. Some of the highlights for me included:

Muppets, Princesses and Regis at the Legend’s ceremony…

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The inestimable Alice Davis in the It’s a Small World panel,

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Dick Van Dyke and the Vantastix,

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Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson in The Wonderful Words of Disney…

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and 25 Years of Pixar, with Mark Andrews giving an amazing slow-motion demo of a grenade tossing action scene.

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What the Expo somewhat obviously lacked this year was significant booth presence of Marvel or the TV division (which last Expo had one room all to themselves continuously running TV pilots and doing giveaways.) Possibly they had decided they had run their media blitz earlier at Comic-Con, just as the Archives might have felt that much of their historical contents had already been done at Destination D. This may change for the next Expo, which rumor has scheduled for March, 2013, which would be at a longer interval from both Destination D and SDCC, and might allow for more duplication of content.

Cost: SDCC is typically more expensive on a baseline level–2012 badge prices are running around $150-175 for a four-day pass, and $40 for a single day. Expo, by comparison, was $85-$136 for all three days, depending on when you bought in and what your D23 status was, and $30-$47 for a single day.

Where the Expo prices took off, however, was in the additional status passes, Premiere and Sorcerer, which were $500 and $1,000 respectively. In retrospect, the additional status offerings were probably a smart move for Disney, considering the D23 audience is likely to have more disposable income than the younger SDCC audience, with less of an inclination/physical tolerance for waiting in line for hours. The question becomes: How large a percentage of the Expo population will end up having these priority passes next year? Lines this year were long with fewer obvious attempts at ameliorating them than last time, when they went to a fast-pass system by the end of the weekend–how much worse will it get next year, when arguably more people will buy into the higher tiers, having experienced life in the stand-by queue this year? At what point will they become a necessity to the Expo experience versus a nice (albeit pricey) perk? Only time will tell.

Additional costs have to include hotels as well, if you come from out of the area. While Expo seems a little new to have a huge influence on local hotel prices, beyond the ones like the Hilton Anaheim which is directly adjacent to the convention center, SDCC is a monster that consumes all the housing anywhere around it, at typically inflated rates.

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So what should a body choose? Well, if you have an interest in other areas of pop culture besides Disney, there’s little like SDCC for the sheer volume of activities and groups represented. If you’re only concerned with the different aspects of what’s current with the different branches of the Disney company, then Expo might be for you. Only in it for the history of the Disney company? Consider the Destination D events that alternate years with the Expo.

Of course, there are always other options, including Disney fan-based gatherings, such as the Disneyana Convention…but that’s for next time.

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Jeanine resides in Southern California, pursuing the sort of lifestyle that makes her the envy of every 11-year-old she meets. She has been to every Disney theme park in the world and while she finds Tokyo DisneySea the Fairest Of Them All, Disneyland is her Home Park... and there is no place like home.

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4 Replies to “Comic-Con versus Expo: You Pays Your Money and You Takes Your Choice.”

  1. I rather wish Disney would make D23 yearly, and the Disney content remained rather slim at SDCC. I love Disney, but I love comics too… and frankly, I wish Comic-Con would go back to being comics focused, instead of being viewed as the “also-ran” by most of the attendees.

    Jeanine: While I did think there was a significant amount of comic content at SDCC, it seemed pretty clear that the big hoards of fans were there for the tv/movie tie-ins. Periodically they would have whole casts of shows out in the booths signing autographs, and the entire area around there would become completely impassible.

    I certainly wouldn’t mind having D23 every year, but I guess the question would be whether they could muster up enough content for it–particularly after all the criticism they got for not announcing much in their Parks and Resorts talk this year.

  2. Nice article, why should I go to SDCC for Disney matters? You stated this in the opening of the article, but then talked about the “slim pickings”: non-Disney franchises and a few celeb sightings.

    Jeanine: Well, in the past, Disney has had a fairly impressive showing at SDCC, throwing big presentations and events for upcoming films like Tron, etc. This year was the first in my memory where they actually announced ahead of time that they were not going to have much of a presence there. It may be that this was because the Expo was going to follow so closely behind, in which case next year they should be back in SDCC again, or it could just be a new tack that the marketing department is taking. Unfortunately, because tickets for SDCC sell out so early, people will probably not know beforehand, so something of a gamble if Disney is your only interest. Thanks.

  3. Hi! Great article! Is there a website that lists different conventions as they approach?

    Jeanine: I don’t know of any website that specifically keeps an updated list of upcoming events–the official events are typically announced everywhere by Disney, and the smaller ones I usually hear about through announcements on Facebook or Twitter. SDCC information can be found at http://www.comic-con.org/ Thanks for reading!

  4. Bear in mind Disney sold only 50 Sorcerer tickets that were guaranteed seats at everything. 250 Premiere guaranteed seats only for Arena

    Jeanine: I thought it was interesting that a lot of people who originally bought Premiere tickets were offered, shortly before the Expo, the chance to upgrade to Sorcerer. I have no idea whether they were filling in the 50, or if they eventually ended up selling more than 50.